NEWSWEEK
Several recent polls show Vice President Kamala Harris is losing ground in Pennsylvania, a state Democrats view as essential to winning in November.
A new poll by InsiderAdvantage found former President Donald Trump, her Republican opponent, to be two points ahead of the vice president in the state, 49 percent to 47 percent. The poll surveyed 800 likely voters between October 7 to 8.
“Donald Trump appears to be gaining momentum in Pennsylvania with his numbers among independent, senior, and African American voters increasing or holding steady,” InsiderAdvantage said.
“It appears that Harris’s support from African American males is actually deteriorating a bit. This race continues to remain very close with turnout and enthusiasm remaining important.”
Similarly, a new Emerson College/The Hill poll found Trump’s support at 49 percent compared to Harris’ at 48 percent. A University of Austin poll showed Trump ahead 48.4 percent to Harris’s 47.4 percent in Pennsylvania.
A recent internal Trump campaign poll by Fabrizio/McLaughlin found Trump ahead in Pennsylvania by one point, 49 percent to 48 percent, in a survey of 800 likely voters taken between October 6 and 9.
While Trump narrowly leads in several recent polls, the margins are generally within the poll’s margins of error, typically around +/- 3 or 3.5 percent.
Newsweek reached out to the Harris and Trump campaigns for comment via email.
The surveys show it is shaping up to be an extremely tight race. Trump has increased his lead in Pennsylvania in recent weeks.
While at least five polls since the start of October show him ahead of Harris, according to polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight, only six pollsters gave him a lead in all of September.
Despite the apparent Trump gains, calculations by polling expert Nate Silver only puts the shift as +0.3 to Republican in the past week.
At this time, in both the 2016 and 2020 election cycles, the Democratic candidates were ahead of Trump with small but consistent leads.
Trump narrowly beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by 0.72 percent in 2016, and President Joe Biden overtook Trump by an equally narrow margin of 1.17 percent in 2020.
While Trump and Harris are both vying to get ahead in several key swing states, Pennsylvania, with its 19 electoral votes, is considered the most important.
According to Silver’s calculations, the candidate who wins Pennsylvania has more than a 90 percent chance of winning the election.
His calculations suggest that the state has a 35 percent chance of tipping the election—more than double the chances of the next most crucial state.
