Harris Reclaims Narrow Polling Edge After Debate Ahead of US Election

By Staff, Agencies

Kamala Harris has regained a significant lead over Donald Trump in the polls after this week's debate, which a clear majority of voters believe she won, according to various surveys.

The latest Guardian polling trends tracker shows the US vice-president regaining a small lead over the Republican nominee since Tuesday’s encounter in Philadelphia, a shift from surveys at the start of the week when the pair were essentially tied.

The movement is supported by individual polls, some of which show Harris with a bigger lead than the 0.9% advantage displayed in the Guardian tracker.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll, the first to be conducted since the debate, had Harris ahead by five points, 47 to 42%, a 1-point rise on the lead recorded in the week after last month’s Democratic national convention.

A separate Morning Consult survey published on Thursday showed a similar lead, 50 to 45%, up from the three- to four-point advantage Harris was registering before the debate. Tellingly, the poll reflected a loss of support for Trump, perhaps supporting some pollsters’ argument that his erratic performance in Tuesday’s encounter – which was watched by 67.1 million viewers – damaged his credibility.

Two other polls by YouGov and Leger give Harris a four- and three-point lead respectively. Generally, the post-debate polls present a rosier outlook for the vice-president than surveys beforehand, which suggested that the surge in popularity she experienced after replacing Joe Biden as the Democrats’ nominee had stalled, allowing Trump to draw close to even in national polls, and even edge ahead in one New York Times/Siena survey.

All available indicators suggest that the turnaround has been triggered by the events of the debate, where Harris was broadly seen as cutting a calm, controlled figure while getting under the skin of Trump – who repeatedly veered off policy message to go on wild tangents about immigrants and crowd sizes at his rallies.

While so far declining Harris’s challenge of a second debate, the former president nevertheless claims that he won the exchange.

In a segment on CNN, Harry Enten, the network’s polling specialist, illustrated a trend towards Republican registration among voters under 30 in battleground states that are key to winning the White House.

“Kamala Harris will absolutely welcome in the support of Taylor Swift if she can move young voters at all,” Enten said. “The bottom line is [Harris] is not doing as well among young voters as you might expect the Democrat to necessarily be doing, based upon history.”