Kamala Harris Leads in 18 National Polls Before DNC Convention

Kamala Harris is leading Donald Trump in 18 national polls ahead of the Democratic National Convention next week.
Since launching her campaign almost a month ago, the polls have looked positive for Harris, with all national poll aggregators now showing she is in the lead, including FiveThirtyEight, which shows she is leading Trump by 2.7 points on 46.3 percent to his 43.6 percent.
FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker, which compiles the results of nationwide polls and weights them based on reliability, shows Harris in the lead in 18 polls released in August.
Those include a poll conducted by Outward Intelligence between August 11 and 15, which shows that Harris is leading Trump by 6 points in a head-to-head matchup and when third party candidates are included. In another poll by Emerson College, conducted between August 12 and 14, Harris was 4 points ahead of Trump on 50 percent to his 46 percent in a head-to-head matchup.
Her lead represents a 10-point swing from a previous poll conducted by Emerson College between July 7 and 8, in which Trump led the VP by 6 points in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup, 49 percent to 43 percent.
Meanwhile, Harris was leading in three nationwide polls released on Thursday, including a poll of 1,000 likely voters by ActiVote, which showed she had opened up a lead of 4.8 percentage points on her opponent in a head-to-head matchup, with 52.4 percent of the vote to Trump’s 47.6 percent.
Harris also led Trump by 2 points when third party candidates were included in a poll of 1,407 registered voters conducted by The Economist and YouGov between August 11 and 13. Head-to-head, Harris was leading Trump by 4 points, on 49 percent to his 45 percent. In another survey conducted by the Pew Research Center between August 5 and 11, Harris was leading Trump by 1 point, representing a 5 point swing from the same poll a month ago.
In another 13 polls, including surveys conducted by Morning Consult, Big Village, the University of Massachusetts and more, Harris is leading by between 1 and 8 points.
A poll conducted by Marquette Law School between July 24 and August 1 gave the Vice President her biggest lead of 8 points. The poll showed that when third party candidates were included, she was leading among likely voters with 50 percent of the vote to Trump’s 42 percent. The surge by Harris has improved the Democrats’ position since May, when Trump was leading with 44 percent of the vote to Joe Biden’s 41 percent.
Her lead in the polls come ahead of the Democratic National Convention, which starts on Monday in Chicago. At the convention, Harris is expected to be confirmed as the party’s official nominee for President.
However, not all polls have been favorable to Harris. In three polls released in August, Trump was leading Harris by between 1 and 2 points among likely voters.
Those included a Fox News poll, conducted between August 9 and 12, in which Trump lead Harris by one point, on 50 percent to her 49 percent among 1,105 registered voters, as well as a J.L. Partners poll of 1,001 likely voters between August 7 and 11, which gave Trump a 2 point lead, on 43 percent to her 41 percent. Both polls had a margin of error of +/- 3 percent.
A poll conducted by CNBC and Public Opinion Strategies between July 31 and August 4 also put Trump in the lead by 2 points in a head-to-head matchup, with 48 percent to Harris’ 46 percent.
According to VoteHub, it was the first time Trump was leading Harris in a national poll since July 26.
Micah Roberts, a partner at Public Opinion Strategies who served as the Republican pollster on the survey, told CNBC that Harris still faces the challenge of being able to define herself independently from the Biden administration.
“She’s still carrying a lot of water for the administration,” he said. “She has to answer for that and define herself independently.”
“That’s a lot of baggage to carry when you’ve got a compressed time frame against a mature campaign on Trump’s side,” he continued.
“Kamala Harris can’t hide from her disastrous record of skyrocketing inflation, resulting in a 20 percent increase in prices since she took office,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told Newsweek in a statement. “Americans are struggling under the Biden-Harris economy, and now she wants to gaslight them into believing her bald-faced lies. She has no shame and ultimately she can’t hide from all the hurt she has caused every American because they feel it every single day.”
Despite Trump’s lead in the three polls, pollster Nate Silver still thinks Harris has a better chance than her opponent of winning the Electoral College in November.
His most recent forecast predicts that Harris will win 282 electoral votes to Trump’s 256, giving her a 56 percent chance of winning compared to Trump’s 44 percent.
However, some pollsters have predicted that Harris’ lead in the polls is not permanent, with Trump campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio predicting in a July memo that there would be a “short term” bump in polls for Harris in the coming weeks as her entrance into the race was expected to re-energize Democrats, referring to the anticipated boost as a “Harris Honeymoon.”
Neil Newhouse, the lead pollster for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, told Politico: “Presidential campaigns are a marathon, and this one has turned into a sprint, and that tends to favor the candidate who is new on the horizon.”
Mark Mellman, the lead pollster for then-Senator John Kerry, added that Harris’ lead is not “unreal” or “unnatural,” but it is “not necessarily permanent.”
“I can certainly imagine a situation where both candidates’ favorabilities decline a little bit,” he said.