Harris had stronger debate, polls find, but the race remains deadlocked

Vice President Kamala Harris overwhelmingly impressed voters in her debate with former President Donald Trump, a new set of polls from The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College found, but she has failed so far to seize a decisive advantage in the presidential campaign.

The race is deadlocked nationally. Yet in the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania, Harris has a lead of 4 percentage points — a slight edge that is unchanged since early August. She has reassembled much of the core Democratic coalition in the state, winning the support of Black voters, younger voters and women there.

The vice president received far stronger reviews of her debate performance last week than did Trump, with 67% of U.S. likely voters saying she did well compared with 40% for him. A majority of voters in every racial group, age bracket and education level — even white voters without a college degree, who are typically the former president’s most loyal demographic — gave her a positive review.

But even that was not enough to jostle a race that appears destined to become a battle of inches this fall, after a summer of tumult and upheaval.

Nationally, Trump and Harris are knotted at 47%. In Pennsylvania, Harris leads, 50% to 46%. The surveys were conducted almost entirely before the second apparent assassination attempt against Trump on Sunday.

The first 2024 general election debate, between Trump and President Joe Biden in June, upended the race, with Democrats so thoroughly losing faith in Biden’s ability at age 81 to campaign and serve a second term that the party switched candidates.

The new polls show how quickly Democrats consolidated behind Harris and eliminated what had once appeared to be a daunting enthusiasm gap.

But Harris still has some critical vulnerabilities heading into the fall, most notably that far more voters see her as too liberal than view Trump as too conservative.

The share of voters who said they still wanted to learn more about Harris was nearly identical, both before and after the debate, suggesting that she might have missed an opportunity to address doubts or provide more details to the public.

“I wanted to see how she would answer questions at the debate, but I feel like she didn’t really answer any of the questions; she kind of just deflected,” said Tyler Slabaugh, 24, who works in medical sales and lives in Grand Haven, Michigan. He didn’t vote in 2020 but plans to support Trump this year. “I didn’t really get a good understanding of, like, what her plan was,” he said of Harris.

Concerns about the state of the economy remain widespread. In Pennsylvania, 77% of likely voters said the economy was poor or fair, with only 22% calling it excellent or good. That negative view held true even in key Democratic regions, including Philadelphia and its surrounding suburbs.

Trump has his own challenges, including among the college-educated white voters who populate such suburbs. His support among that group has sunk to 36% both nationally and in Pennsylvania. In 2020, he won 42% of this group, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of verified 2020 voters.

“He continues to just fly off the rails and ramble, which, again, is not something that I look for in the leader of the free world,” said Paul Irwin-Dudek, 47, a nonprofit executive in Nutley, New Jersey, who is supporting Harris. “She was able to command the room,” he said of the debate.

The fact that Harris was stronger in Pennsylvania than she was nationally is surprising. It has been among the most contested states since 2016 and has generally trended more Republican than the nation has overall.

But in 2024, Democrats — first with Biden and now Harris — have showed relative strength with white voters, and the Pennsylvania electorate is whiter than the nation overall.

Harris was winning 46% of white voters in Pennsylvania in the new set of polls. In 2020, Biden won 43% of white voters nationally; Hillary Clinton received just 39% support from the group in 2016.

The new polls are in line with other surveys, which show Harris’ favorability rating rising in the state. Only 42% of voters had rated her favorably in Pennsylvania in early July; now that figure stands at 51% — a remarkable improvement. Pennsylvanians have been bombarded by heavy advertising both for and against Harris since her entrance into the race on July 21.

Views of Trump have also brightened, with 47% seeing him favorably nationally. That is higher than earlier this year, even when he was leading Biden.

A similar share — 48% — have a favorable view of Harris nationally.

The debate was viewed live by more than 67 million Americans, making it the year’s most watched broadcast outside of the Super Bowl. Harris fared strongest among the 80% of voters who said they had either watched that night or seen clips afterward, winning among those voters. Trump was winning a majority of the far smaller share who had either only heard about the debate, or had not heard anything about it at all.

The two candidates laid out widely divergent visions. But the durability of the divide in America on policy was clear in the poll.

The share of voters who favor Trump on the economy (54%) and immigration (54%) was within a percentage point of where it had stood before the debate.

“I really don’t feel like she did anything with the border when she was a vice president, I felt like it was a laughing joke,” said Mitchell Wallace, 33, a wastewater technician in Englewood, Florida. He is an independent who voted for Trump in 2020 and plans to do so again, calling him the “lesser of two evils.”

The shares of voters who trust Harris more on abortion (also 54%) and preserving democracy (50%) were unchanged after the debate, too.

Black voters were the most enthusiastic about Harris’ debate performance, with 87% saying she had done well — a higher percentage than the share of Black voters who said they were voting for her.

Among crucial independent voters, Trump’s debate was received poorly, with only 8% nationally and 4% in Pennsylvania saying he did very well. In the state, 65% of independent voters said Harris did well, compared with 30% who said the same of Trump.

“She knows what the struggles of me and people like myself go through,” said Alexis Cobbs, 54, a dialysis technician and a Democrat living in Philadelphia. “Unlike Donald Trump, who’s never actually had to truly work-work a day in his life.”

Trump and his allies have railed against the two ABC News moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, but a majority of voters thought they were fair, though 79% of Republicans disagreed.

One of Harris’ key tasks in the debate was to introduce herself to the sizable share of the electorate who felt they needed to learn more about her. About half of debate watchers, including nearly half of independent voters, said they had learned a lot, or some, about Harris during the debate.

But there has been little movement, with 25% of voters still saying they feel they need to learn more about her, down just a few percentage points.

The debate may have solidified some voters’ concerns that Trump is just a typical Washington politician. The share of voters who said he represents “more of the same” ticked up slightly.

Still, more voters consistently see Trump as the change candidate. But it is not clear that they like the kind of change he promises to usher in.

A narrow 51% majority said he would “bring about the right kind of change” compared with 49% for Harris — a virtual tie that amounts to a political victory for the incumbent party at a moment of such widespread dissatisfaction.

Trump got higher marks than Harris for saying what he believes, and being respected by foreign leaders.

Harris widened the gap with Trump on intelligence. In August, Pennsylvania voters were 10 percentage points more likely to say “intelligent” described Harris “well” as compared with Trump. After the debate, that gap is now 18 percentage points.

The polls underscore a sharp contrast in the ways voters view the two candidates. Trump took the title as the more “extreme” candidate, 74% versus 46%.

Yet being extreme was not viewed negatively by many voters. In fact, Trump won the group of voters who said “extreme” described him “somewhat well” by more than 50 percentage points.

The overall results looked much the same when third-party candidates were included in the survey, with Trump and Harris tied at 46% nationally, and Harris leading by 4 percentage points in Pennsylvania.

Harris has made gains in that state with college-educated voters, increasingly a Democratic stronghold. In particular, she has improved her standing among college-educated nonwhite voters, a small but crucial sliver of the state.

Her support among Black voters in Pennsylvania has ticked up steadily since she joined the race. And in Philadelphia, her support among Black voters is at nearly 90%, matching some of the strength that Biden showed with the group in 2020.

Pennsylvania is also home to one of this year’s most hotly contested Senate races. Sen. Bob Casey, the incumbent Democrat, continues to hold a sizable lead over his Republican challenger, David McCormick. McCormick has closed the gap slightly since August, from being down 14 percentage points to 9.

McCormick is still running behind Trump in the state, though the number of ticket splitters — voters who were planning to support Casey and Trump — has been cut in half, from 4% to 2%.

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Here are the key things to know about these polls:

— Interviewers spoke with 2,437 likely voters from Sept. 11-16.

— Times/Siena polls are conducted by telephone, using live interviewers, in both English and Spanish. Overall, about 96% of respondents were contacted on a cellphone for these polls.

— Voters are selected for the survey from a list of registered voters. The list contains information on the demographic characteristics of every registered voter, allowing interviewers to make sure they reach the right number of voters of each party, race and region. For this poll, interviewers placed more than 240,000 calls to nearly 118,000 voters.

— To further ensure that the results reflect the entire voting population, not just those willing to take a poll, interviewers give more weight to respondents from demographic groups that are underrepresented among survey respondents, such as people without a college degree.

— The national poll’s margin of sampling error among likely voters is plus or minus 3 percentage points. The Pennsylvania poll’s margin of error among likely voters is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points. In theory, this means that the results should reflect the views of the overall population most of the time, though many other challenges create additional sources of error. When computing the difference between two values — such as a candidate’s lead in a race — the margin of error is twice as large.

The New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena College poll of Pennsylvania was funded by a grant from The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. The poll was designed and conducted independently from the institute.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2024 The New York Times Company