Now that the dust has started to settle, Vice President Kamala Harris’ so-called “honeymoon” in the polls shows no signs of stopping as a fresh batch of surveys and analysis show her in a nail-biter against former President Donald Trump.
Harris, 59, who has captured a slight national lead in the top polling aggregates, scored an 8-point edge over Trump, 78, in a Marquette Law School poll, and saw three states shift in her direction from the Cook Political Report’s election handicapper.
The vice president came out on top 50% to 42% in the Marquette poll when third-party contenders were added to the mix.
Head-to-head, Harris also led 52% to 48% in the national matchup, per the poll. For context, Trump and President Biden were dead even at 50% apiece in the school’s May poll.
That recent Marquette poll was taken between July 24 and Aug. 1 with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points among a sample of 879 registered voters. In other words, it was conducted about three days after Biden’s exit.
On Thursday, The Cook Political Report’s election handicapper moved three states from “Lean Republican” to toss-up: Arizona, Georgia and Nevada.
It had shifted those states in Trump’s direction weeks earlier after Biden’s shocking debate performance against Trump rattled Democrats across the country and catalyzed anemic polling for the incumbent.
Based on its estimates, Trump is favored to win 235 Electoral College votes, while Harris is projected to nab 226 electoral votes, leaving 77 still a tossup. To win, candidates need 270.
Presently, Harris is leading Trump in the RealClearPolitics aggregate of national polling by 0.5 percentage points in a one-on-one contest. When third-party hopefuls are added to the mix, that lead grows to 0.8 points, per RCP.
She claimed that lead earlier this week. Famed election forecaster Nate Silver has also appraised Harris as having an advantage.
When Biden was in the race, generally speaking, Trump’s edge grew larger when third-party aspirants were factored in.
In addition to RCP, FiveThirtyEight’s polling aggregate has Harris with a 2.1 percentage point edge in a three-way showdown.
Ironically, earlier in the week during her debut of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate at a rally at Temple University in Philadelphia, Harris billed the newly formed Democratic ticket as the underdog.
“We are the underdogs in this race,” she told a packed arena during her stump speech.
Not all of the recent polls show Harris in the lead, though the general trend is that the race has been tightening considerably.
A CNBC survey found Trump with a 2-point advantage over Harris. The CNBC All-America Economic Survey sampled 1,001 Americans between July 31 to Aug. 4 with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
Perhaps most strikingly, it found that by a nearly two-to-one margin, Americans felt they’d be in better financial straits under Trump than Harris.
Then a Rasmussen Reports poll found Trump with a 5-point lead in both the one-on-one and third-party matchups. Rasmussen’s polling is generally viewed as a conservative-leaning source.
Shortly after Biden dropped out and Harris jolted to the top of the ticket, Trump Campaign Pollster Tony Fabrizio put out a memo predicting that the VP would enjoy a sugar high of sorts.
“There is no question that Harris will get her bump earlier than the Democrats’ Convention. And that bump is likely to start showing itself over the next few days and will last a while until the race settles back down,” he wrote in the memo.
“The Democrats and the MSM [mainstream media] will try and tout these polls as proof that the race has changed. But the fundamentals of the race stay the same,” he added.
Beyond polling, the Harris-Walz campaign has bragged about its robust fundraising haul, including the $310 million it claims to have raked in during the month of July and the $36 million pull it touted in the 24-hour stretch after unveiling Walz as the veep.
Trump and his allies have noted how Harris enjoyed a rapid surge in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary but later fizzled out and withdrew before Iowa.
“She never received a vote, don’t forget,” Trump chided during his press conference at Mar-a-Lago Thursday. “She never made it to Iowa, the first state.”
Trump held the press conference as a means of needling Harris for sparingly fielding on-the-record questions from reporters since her ascension. Later in the day, Harris took questions from pool reporters and indicated she plans to do a sit-down “before the end of the month.”
