by Marco Cerino, Philadelphia Tribune Staff Writer
With Labor Day over and the race for the White House in full swing, attention turns to the two presidential candidates and the ever-important polling numbers.
With seven weeks between now and Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris has seen her slight lead over former President Donald Trump grow nationwide and in Pennsylvania.
New York Times polling shows Harris has a 49-46 lead over the Republican nominee among nationwide voters. A USA Today/Suffolk poll shows her lead at 48-43. While the Times’ polling shows the candidates are still tied at 48 in Pennsylvania, independent outlet RealClearPolling shows Harris is up 0.5% in their polling averages, erasing a lead that was over four percent for Trump before President Joe Biden quit the race on July 21. This change flipped Pennsylvania blue on their electorate map, which would give Harris the 270 she needs to become the first female president.
The campaign of Harris and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has been active, visiting multiple states over the holiday weekend. Harris spent part of Labor Day in Pittsburgh and is scheduled to hold another event there on Thursday. Democrats have also invested substantially in their grassroots operations, opening their 50th field office across the Keystone State in Ephrata, Lancaster County.
“Our campaign is reaching out to voters in every part of Pennsylvania, from Allegheny County to the Philadelphia collars to deep-red counties like Jefferson and York to highlight the choice in this election between Vice President Harris’ positive vision for the future and Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda to drag us into the past,” said Harris for Pennsylvania Communications Director Jack Doyle in a release Sunday.
USA Today polling shows that Harris is performing better among voters when it comes to key issues in the election. While Trump still is viewed as better for handling the economy and immigration, the vice president has cut a 14-point deficit when Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee in June to six on the former and a 13-point deficit to three on the latter. Harris has shrunk Trump’s advantage on national security and dealing with China from 10 points to four. She has also stretched 10-point leads on health care and race relations to 14 and 19 points, respectively.
Despite the gain in momentum and campaigning as the incumbent party, Democrats remain cautious in their expectations. While the party has raised $540 million since Harris replaced Biden atop the ticket, seen thousands more volunteers offer their help for the campaign, and taken the lead in generic Congressional polling, campaign officials are still referring to the Harris-Walz ticket as “underdogs.”
“However, make no mistake: we head into the final stretch of this race as the clear underdogs,” Harris-Walz Campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in an email sent Sunday. “Donald Trump has a motivated base of support, with more support and higher favorability than he has had at any point since 2020. In just a few short days, Vice President Harris will face Trump on the debate stage, where we expect him to be a formidable opponent. In 2020, the election came down to about 40,000 votes across the battleground states. This November, we anticipate margins to be similarly razor-thin.”
The traditional post-convention bounce that helped candidates decades ago appears to be another standard to fall in the changing world of presidential campaigning.
According to data from the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Harris received a zero percent favorability increase following the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Trump received just one percent after the Republicans gathered in Milwaukee in July. These numbers are identical to the results in 2020.
By contrast, the last incumbent Vice President to run for the highest office, Al Gore, received an eight percent bump in 2000, as did his opponent, Texas Gov. George W. Bush.
Both campaigns will be in Philadelphia on Tuesday, Sept. 10 for the lone scheduled presidential debate. That will air from the National Constitution Center at 9 p.m. and will be hosted by ABC News. No additional events have been scheduled for this visit by either side as of the time this article goes to print.
