Vice-president Kamala Harris has drawn level with former president Donald Trump in the polls barely a week into her presidential campaign, according to an FT analysis of the latest data.
President Joe Biden withdrew from the race on July 21, after a disastrous performance in his debate against Trump weeks earlier, and immediately endorsed Harris. Since then, she has all but wiped out her party’s national polling deficit against her rival, according to a Financial Times average of polls.
While Biden trailed Trump by 3 percentage points on the day he dropped out of the presidential race, Harris and the former president are now neck and neck nationally.
Ultimately, US elections are decided by the Electoral College, and therefore in a small subset of winner-take-all “battleground” states — including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In all six key battlegrounds, Harris’s recent polling represents a 1- to 3-point improvement over Biden’s before he dropped out a little over a week ago. Biden was trailing by two or more points in all six states at the time he dropped out, while Harris is now tied 50-50 with Trump in Michigan and Wisconsin and within a point of a tie in Nevada, Pennsylvania and Arizona. All are now statistical dead heats.
Harris has also made gains across nearly every demographic group since Biden’s withdrawal, according to like-for-like comparisons of surveys from numerous pollsters. In particular, her support has increased among Black, Latino, young and female voters, and independents. It has declined marginally with only one group — voters over the age of 50.
Predictive traders closely tracking the race have noted these shifts. Harris has eclipsed Biden’s pre-debate price on two prediction markets, Polymarket and PredictIt, though they still see her as a slight underdog to Trump, whose own price spiked after he was shot in an attempted assassination on July 13.
With less than 100 days until the election, Harris has injected notable enthusiasm into a previously demoralised Democratic party.
Harris’s entry has also revived the enthusiasm of Democratic voters in a race where turnout will be paramount. Of those who voted for Biden in 2020, 73 per cent say they are “excited” to vote for Harris, versus only 37 per cent who said they were excited to vote for Biden again, according to an FT analysis of polls. Moreover, the share of 2020 Biden voters who planned not to vote dropped to 3 per cent from 10 per cent.
Along with the renewed enthusiasm has come a fundraising bounty. Harris’s campaign on Sunday announced it had raised $200mn in less than a week, two-thirds of it from first-time donors.
Additional research by Oliver Hawkins and Jonathan Vincent