Mon Jul 29

Trump marginally ahead of Harris in US national polls, but Harris improves from Biden’s polls

Written by: Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne

The United States election will be held on November 5. It’s been a week since President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential contest and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris. No other Democrat is contesting the Democratic nomination ^[1], so Harris will be the nominee.

FiveThirtyEight ^[2] does not yet have an aggregate of polls for Harris against Republican nominee Donald Trump. Individual national polls usually have Trump ahead by one or two points. Trump led Biden by 3.2 points nationally in the final FiveThirtyEight aggregate.

Harris does better in polls where third party candidates are included. In a Siena poll for The New York Times, Trump led Harris by one head to head, but Harris led by one with other candidates. In a poll for The Wall Street Journal, Trump led by two head to head, but Harris by one with others.

Polls conducted during Biden’s candidacy didn’t show this difference. Natural Democrats have probably returned to Harris after saying they would vote third party out of frustration with Biden.

In a national Ipsos poll ^[3] for US ABC News that was conducted Friday and Saturday, Harris’ net favourability surged to +1 from -11 last week, before Biden’s announcement. Trump’s net favourability dropped five points to -16 after peaking following the Republican convention last week. The net favourability of Trump’s vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, slumped nine points in a week to -15.

Trump is now 78 and Harris will be 60 by the election. Biden will be almost 82. The age difference between the candidates now advantages Harris.

US presidential elections are not decided by the national popular vote, but instead use the Electoral Vote (EV) system. There are a total of 538 EVs, and each state receives a number of EVs based mostly on population. With two minor exceptions, states award their EVs winner takes all. It takes 270 EVs to win the presidency.

The six closest Biden-won states in 2020 were Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. These are considered the key states in this election. It’s likely that Trump has about a two-point edge in the key states relative to the national popular vote, so Harris will need to win nationally by about two points to win.

At the 2020 election ^[4], Biden won nationally by 4.5%, but only won the decisive state (Wisconsin) by 0.6%, so the Electoral Vote system favoured Trump by 3.9 points relative to the national vote.

I think the August 19–22 Democratic convention ^[5] will be very important for Harris. Major party presidential candidates are normally well known to voters much earlier in the year as they need to win primaries to clinch their party’s nomination. The primaries occur early in an election year.

While Harris has been vice president since January 2021, she has been in Biden’s shadow. The US vice president has no power of their own except to break a tie in the Senate. The Democratic convention will give Harris a chance to differ herself from Biden, and be personally appealing to voters.

Overall, the polls suggest that Trump is still favoured to win, but Harris has improved on the polling during Biden’s candidacy, and could further improve with a successful Democratic convention.

Biden has called for Supreme Court reforms ^[6] to impose term limits on judges and establish an enforceable code of ethics. A constitutional amendment would probably be required to enact these reforms, which requires a two-thirds majority in both chambers of Congress and a three-quarters majority of the state legislatures.

As long as Republicans are opposed, such a constitutional amendment would be impossible to obtain. The Supreme Court, which has a 6–3 right majority, has a 56.0% disapprove, 36.0% approve rating in FiveThirtyEight’s tracker ^[7], so this is probably a good issue for Democrats.

There was a blowout in disapproval after the decision overturning Roe vs Wade in June 2022, but perceptions of the court had improved by April 2023, with more approving than disapproving. A second blowout in disapproval came in May 2023, and disapproval has kept rising.

In June the personal savings rate ^[8] (the percentage of personal income that is saved) dropped 0.1 point to 3.4%, the lowest since December 2022. After surging during COVID owing to government stimulus, the savings rate has been between 2.7% and 5.2% since June 2022.