NEWSWEEK
Several polls from the key battleground state of Pennsylvania show Kamala Harris trailing her opponent Donald Trump with less than a week to go until the election.
Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral votes, is pivotal in securing victory in November. The state has voted for the overall winner in 48 out of the last 59 elections.
Polls show a tight race between Harris and Trump but give a slight edge to the former president of between one and three points.
For example, the latest Fox News poll, conducted between October 24 and 28, showed Trump had a 1-point edge over Harris in a head-to-head matchup among likely voters.
Harris and Trump were tied among likely voters in the expanded ballot with 48 percent each. In September, Trump had a 1-point edge over Harris on the expanded ballot.
Among registered voters, however, Harris is up 2 points in both the expanded ballot and two-way head-to-head. All the results among registered and likely voters are within the margin of error.
Another poll, conducted by Monmouth University in the same period, showed Trump 1 point ahead among likely voters, on 47 percent to Harris 46 percent—a lead within the margin of error. In Quinnipiac University’s latest poll, also conducted between October 24 and 28, Trump was ahead by 2 points in a two-way race and 1 point on the expanded ballot. The poll had a margin of error of +/- 2.1 percentage points.
The latest poll by AtlasIntel, conducted between October 25 and 29, shows marginally better results for Trump, putting him 3 points ahead in a head-to-head matchup and 2 points ahead on the expanded ballot. However, his lead was still within the survey’s margin of error of ±3 points. Newsweek has contacted the Harris and Trump campaigns for comment.
Although Trump’s lead is small, the latest polls are bad news for the Harris campaign, which is trailing the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania, according to several polling trackers.
Harris was previously leading in the Keystone State after becoming the Democratic nominee for president, but in the last two weeks Trump has taken the lead, according to FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker, which puts him 0.4 points ahead and shows he is projected to win the state.
Pollster Nate Silver‘s tracker also shows Trump ahead by a margin of 0.6 points in Pennsylvania, while RealClearPolitics shows him 0.8 points ahead.
But despite Trump’s marginal lead, there is still hope for Harris in the state following remarks by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden on Sunday that sparked a firestorm of criticism and dominated news headlines.
At the rally, Hinchcliffe joked that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.” While Trump campaign adviser Danielle Alvarez clarified that Hinchcliffe’s controversial remarks “do not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” the joke went down badly. The backlash could hit Trump especially hard in Pennsylvania—the swing state with the highest percentage of Puerto Ricans, where they comprise 3.7 percent of the population. In 2020, Biden narrowly won the state by 1.2 points after Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016.
On the same day as Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, the vice president was in Allentown in Pennsylvania. Harris used her visit to release a video on her plan for Puerto Rico, which Puerto Rican music icon Bad Bunny shared on his Instagram account.
Early voting data from Pennsylvania shows that more Democrats than Republicans have voted in the state, with registered Democrats making up 57 percent of early voters, compared with 32 percent for Republicans, according to the University of Florida’s early vote tracker. However, it is unclear what this means for the election since the early vote data reveals only whether voters are registered with a party, not who they are voting for.
Trump’s strength in Pennsylvania lies with the state’s white, working-class population, a demographic that makes up nearly 75 percent of the state and typically leans Republican. This could provide a critical advantage as the election approaches
