Vice President Kamala Harris has stormed into the race in the fast-growing and diverse states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, shortly after Donald Trump appeared to be on the verge of securing those states when President Joe Biden was still the Democratic nominee.
New polls from The New York Times and Siena College show how Harris has rapidly reshaped the terrain for 2024, putting the Sun Belt – the so-called Sun Belt, the entities located south of the 37th or 38th parallels – back at the center of the map of decisive states.
Harris now leads Trump among likely voters in Arizona, 50% to 45%, and has even managed to overtake Trump in North Carolina, a state Trump won four years ago, while she has significantly narrowed her lead in Georgia and Nevada.
Trump and Harris are tied at 48% on average in the four Sun Belt states in polls conducted Aug. 8-15.
That marks a significant improvement for Democrats compared with May, when Trump led Biden 50% to 41% in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada in the previous set of Times/Siena polls in the Sun Belt, which did not include North Carolina.
The new polls provide further evidence that Harris is successfully consolidating parts of the Democratic base that had been hesitant to support Biden for months, especially among younger, nonwhite and female voters.
Last week, a Times/Siena poll showed Harris narrowly outpacing Trump in the three key Northern swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Those states are generally considered the linchpin of any Democratic path to the White House. The Sun Belt represents a critical set of states for Trump, while offering a potential alternative route for Harris to the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win.
In the new polls, Trump is ahead in Georgia 50% to 46%, and in Nevada, he has 48% to Harris’s 47%. She has 49% of likely voters in North Carolina, compared to Trump’s 47%, making it the only one of the seven key swing states that Trump won in 2020.
Polls show some risk for Harris as she mobilizes Democrats to her cause, including that more registered voters view her as too liberal (43%) compared with those who say Trump is too conservative (33%). For now, she is slightly ahead of him among crucial independent voters.
Polls show that Democratic voters are newly enthusiastic about the 2024 race now that Harris is the nominee, with 85% of her voters saying they are at least somewhat excited about voting this fall, roughly matching the level of voter enthusiasm for Trump. And large majorities of registered Democratic and Republican voters are now satisfied with their choice of candidates. This marks a significant shift from May, when Republicans were much more satisfied than Democrats.
Alina Szmant, 78, a Democrat and retired scientist in Wilmington, North Carolina, was excited about the prospect of voting for the first female president.
“Kamala is extremely well-prepared to be an excellent president,” she said. And Biden? She would have voted for him primarily because of her dislike of Trump. “He was not my first choice,” she said of Biden. “He wasn’t even my second, third or fourth choice.”
The race is increasingly polarized along racial lines.
Harris, who would be the first African American woman to serve as president, has the support of 84% of African American voters in polls, which is higher than the support Biden had before he left. Her support among Latino voters was 54%. She also opened up a significant gender gap, with a 14 percentage point lead over Trump among women in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada; that group was evenly split between Biden and Trump in those three states in May.
Overall, Harris leads among nonwhite voters in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada by 29 percentage points; Biden led those voters in the same states by 17 percentage points in May.
Trump, in turn, is maximizing his support among white voters without a college degree, garnering 66% support among them in the four Sun Belt states.
One of the big questions for Harris is how long what Trump’s team has called her “honeymoon” period will last. She has spawned memes, become a social media phenomenon and drawn larger crowds on her first swing through key states last week than Biden ever did.
One indicator of her online traction came from mostly young voters who said they used TikTok. Harris had a 13-point lead among TikTok users in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, compared with Biden’s 3-point lead among the same group in those states in May.
Voters overall gave Harris a 48% favorable rating, the same as her unfavorable rating. No previous Times/Siena poll in these states tested her favorability, but a balanced rating is a big jump. In a national poll in February, voters viewed her more unfavorably by a 19 percentage point margin.
Trump had an identical 48% favorable rating, unchanged from May.
Trump still holds the political advantage on two issues: the economy and immigration, which voters ranked as the most important issues facing the nation. But Harris and Trump are nearly tied on the key question of which candidate would better handle the issue voters consider most important.
One reason is that while Trump remains favored on the economy over Harris in Sun Belt states, his lead on that issue is smaller than it was over Biden in May. At the same time, Harris has widened the Democratic lead over Trump on the abortion issue.
On immigration, Trump is more trusted by 53% of voters, compared with 43% for Harris. Still, for an issue that has been a defining part of Trump’s image since 2015, that advantage represents a relatively small one.
The state of the race in the four Sun Belt states did not change when third-party candidates were included. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won just 4 percent of likely voters, the most of any third-party candidate in the polls, but it is half the level of support he received in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia just three months ago.
The optimistic outlook for Democrats also applies to races further down the ballot, where Senate races were doing better for the party than they did in May.
In Arizona, Ruben Gallego, the Democratic congressman, leads Kari Lake, the pro-Trump Republican and former television host, 51% to 42% among likely voters in the state Senate race. In Nevada, Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen is ahead of her Republican challenger Sam Brown, 49% to 40%. And in North Carolina, the state’s Democratic attorney general, Josh Stein, leads Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a Republican, 49% to 39% in the gubernatorial race.
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