With just over three weeks to go until Election Day, a trio of new national polls in the White House race suggest former President Donald Trump is erasing gains made by Vice President Kamala Harris the last couple of months after replacing President Biden atop the Democrats’ 2024 ticket.
The surveys indicate a margin of error race between the two major party presidential nominees, with Trump enjoying some momentum in the final stretch.
Harris edged Trump 50%-48% among likely voters questioned in an ABC News/Ipsos poll, down from a six-point lead for the vice president last month.
According to an NBC News poll of registered voters nationwide, the vice president and former president were deadlocked at 48%. That is a major switch from a month ago, when Harris enjoyed a five-point advantage.
Additionally, a CBS News/YouGov survey of likely voters indicated Harris with a three-point edge over Trump, slightly down from a four-point advantage a month ago.
After President Biden’s disastrous late June debate performance against Trump, the former president started to open up a single-digit lead over the White House incumbent.
However, Biden’s departure from the presidential election and the Democrats’ quick consolidation around the vice president upended the dynamics of the race.
Harris, boosted by a wave of energy and excitement, experienced a surge in fundraising and in her favorable ratings, which pushed her past Trump in presidential polling. The trend continued through the Democrats’ late August convention and the first and likely only debate between the two standard-bearers, in early September.
However, as summer transitioned into autumn, Harris’ favorable ratings appear to have waned, Republicans are coming home to Trump, and an already large gender gap over support for the two nominees has widened further.
‘The Harris campaign seems to have stalled, as her image has slipped and the perception of her as being ‘a second Biden Administration’ persists,’ longtime Republican pollster Neil Newhouse told Fox News.
Newhouse, a veteran of numerous GOP presidential campaigns, argued that Harris is ‘on the verge of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.’
While national polling is useful in depicting the state of the race, the presidential election is not based on the popular national vote and instead is a battle for the states and their electoral votes.
The latest polling in the seven key battlegrounds whose razor-thin margins decided Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump and will likely determine who wins the 2024 election also points to a margin of error race.
A leading non-partisan pollster said the jury’s still out on whether Trump’s gaining momentum.
‘We need more data points before we can depict poll movements as momentum,’ Suffolk University Political Research Center Director David Paleologos told Fox News.
Paleologos, who conducts USA Today/Suffolk University polling, said ‘it could be momentum, or it could be the natural closing of the gap in a very polarized country.’