Tightening poll figures have triggered nervousness and anxiety in Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, with Donald Trump making gains in the states where it matters most as the election race enters its climactic final phase.
Amid a dramatic news cycle that has seen the US hit by two destructive hurricanes and rising fears of all-out war in the Middle East, the Guardian’s 10-day polling average tracker showed the vice-president and Democratic nominee with a two-point nationwide lead, 48% to 46%, over her Republican opponent as of 10 October – tellingly, down from a 4% advantage she registered a fortnight ago.
More plainly worrying for the Democrats is the picture it paints in what are generally regarded as the seven key battleground states that will determine who ends up in the White House: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.
All seven show minuscule differences between the candidates that are within the margin of error. Crucially, Harris leads in just three – fractional leads in Nevada and Michigan, and a slim one-point advantage in Pennsylvania.
Trump has wafer-thin leads in the five remaining swing states.
If that were to be replicated when voters go to the polls on 5 November, it would get Trump past the 270 electoral college votes threshold needed for victory and propel him back to the Oval Office.
The crumb of comfort for Harris is that, with multiple surveys telling contradictory tales when the details are scrutinised, that particular outcome probably won’t happen.
Indeed, a simulation using polling, economic and demographic data from FiveThirtyEight still had Harris winning the election 55 times out of 100, as of Thursday lunchtime. And a Wall Street Journal survey on Friday also painted a brighter outlook by showing Harris maintaining slight leads in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia – enough to give her a narrow electoral college win if borne out on polling day.
Yet the margins are perplexing for Democratic strategists, given that the vice-president’s campaign recently disclosed that it had raised $1bn within 80 days of Harris replacing Joe Biden as the party’s nominee in July. The amount greatly surpasses that raised by Trump’s campaign.
By late August, Trump’s campaign had brought in a relatively modest $309m, although it has the advantage of financial support from entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Super Pac, which is offering cash incentives to people in swing states to register Trump-friendly voters.
Whatever the cash advantages, Harris seems to have lost some momentum in the “blue wall” Rust belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania since her 10 September debate performance against Trump in Philadelphia, when she was generally seen as coming out on top.
That was illustrated by a Quinnipiac University poll last Wednesday that recorded the five-point lead she held in Michigan in the week following the debate being transformed into a three-point advantage for Trump, 50% to 47%; in Wisconsin, a one-point post-debate advantage turned into a 2% lead for Trump. And in Pennsylvania, a six-point Harris lead was halved to 3%.
One issue casting a shadow over Harris’s prospects is the intensifying conflict in the Middle East, with Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese Shia group, threatening to further erode support among the large ethnic Arab voting bloc in Michigan that was already angry over the White House’s backing of the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza.
Quinnipiac’s survey shows Trump with significant leads on the issue in both Michigan and Wisconsin.
Trump has apparently become so confident of victory that he has begun moving beyond the battlegrounds to stage rallies in Democratic strongholds such as New York, California, Illinois and New York, despite polls indicating he has little chance of winning there. The move seems calculated to project an air of impending triumph.
With just 24 days left before polling day, time is running out for Harris to correct her poll stutters, Democratic strategists fear. The timetable has been further curtailed by the twin storms, Hurricanes Helene and Milton, that have buffeted the south-east of the US in the past two weeks, diverting Harris from the campaign trail and presenting Trump with an opportunity to spout lies and falsehoods about her and Biden’s supposed failure to mount a recovery effort.
“I’m very, very concerned and very scared,” James Carville, the acknowledged mastermind of Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign and author of its signature slogan – “It’s the economy, stupid,” – told MSNBC last week.
Warning of limited time for Harris to communicate a more aggressive message to voters, Carville continued: “Today is gone. You’re going to lose four to the hurricane … and everything kind of shuts down the Saturday before the election. So you’re really probably under 20 days that you have to really get a message out.”
Calling for a targeted attack on Trump’s plan to impose import tariffs – which economists have warned will stoke inflation – he added: “They need to be sharp. They need to be aggressive. They need to stop answering questions and start asking questions.”
But amid the gathering gloom, glimmers of light remain for Harris. Though survey after survey give Trump clear leads on issues of greatest importance to voters – namely, the economy, inflation and rising costs, and immigration – a majority of voters feel the country is headed in the wrong direction.
And just as Harris has been unable to convert her financial reserves into clear poll leads, Trump is exhibiting a similar failing despite having the edge on some headline issues.
The reason, the Wall Street Journal suggested, may be that his lead on economic issues is more nuanced than at first sight. For instance, Harris has a 6% advantage on bread-and-butter questions indicating that she “cares about people like you”. Likewise, while a majority said Trump has the right experience to be president, 48% said he was “too extreme”, compared with 34% who said the same about Harris, according to the paper’s poll.
Harris may have failed to land an electoral knockout, but her opponent – for all his bombast and resilience – has vulnerabilities and weaknesses that make a victory on points within reach.
