WASHINGTON — A series of unprecedented upheavals over the past two months have not changed the contours of the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
As the two candidates prepare to meet in their first — and perhaps only — debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday, polls released Sunday of likely voters in Pennsylvania and nationally found Ms. Harris running neck-and-neck with the former president. Trump had led President Joe Biden but his advantages were almost always within the margins of error.
The New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters had Trump ahead of Ms. Harris by one percentage point, 48% to 47%, well within the survey’s margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.
And a CBS News/You Gov poll of likely voters in Pennsylvania — the nation’s most populous battleground state and the site of the debate — found the race tied at 50% with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. The candidates also were tied in the Keystone State in a CNN poll released last week.
“Pennsylvania is always going to be close,” U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And we have to do everything that we possibly can to make sure and have the conversations with — all across Pennsylvania in all kinds of rooms that may be hopelessly red kinds of counties, but it’s going to be won on the margins.”
Both Ms. Harris and Trump have been frequent visitors all over the Keystone State, including the vice president’s stop in Pittsburgh on Labor Day for a rally with Mr. Biden and a return to the city Thursday to spend the weekend preparing for the debate. Ms. Harris took a break from debate prep Saturday to make a surprise campaign stop at Penzeys Spices in the Strip District.
Ms. Harris is scheduled to return to Pennsylvania on Friday as part of a swing through battleground states with her, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, and their spouses, the campaign announced Sunday.
The campaign also debuted a new ad in Pennsylvania and the other battleground states in which Ms. Harris promises to lower the cost of prescription drugs, cut taxes for the middle class, fight price gouging and build 3 million new homes.
The commercial is party of a $58.8 million ad blitz by Ms. Harris’ campaign that began shortly after Mr. Biden dropped out of the race in July. That’s about $20 million more than her GOP opponent has spent here, according to AdImpact, a firm that tracks political advertising.
Overall, the campaigns and their supporters are closing in on $400 million in ad spending in Pennsylvania, with just under two months still to go, according to the firm.
“Together, we will build an economy where everyone can compete and have a real chance to succeed,” she says in the latest ad. “Now is the time to chart a new way forward.”
These new polls followed a two-month political whirlwind that America never had experienced before:
• Mr. Biden’s dismal debate performance in June exacerbated voters’ concerns over his ability to win and serve a second term in the White House.
• Trump survived an attempted assassination in Butler the following month, and delegates saw the hand of God as they enthusiastically nominated him for third time at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where GOP officials such as former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, who spent the primary season going after the former president, fell in line behind him.
• Mr. Biden, acceding to an increasingly vocal number of Democrats, abandoned his re-election campaign and endorsed Ms. Harris as his successor.
• Democrats quickly fell in line behind the vice president, and their convention displayed the kind of joy and enthusiasm missing from the Biden campaign.
The Times/Siena poll is the most recent survey to show Ms. Harris making up the deficit that Mr. Biden had in head-to-head competition against Trump. In July, Trump led Mr. Biden by three percentage points in that survey, albeit within the margin of error.
And the latest RealClearPolitics polling average put Ms. Harris ahead by 1.4 percentage points nationally, while Trump led Mr. Biden by 4.5 percentage points.
Ms. Harris already has closed the enthusiasm gap. In the Times/Siena poll 72% of Democrats and 69% of Republicans said they were enthusiastic about voting this November.
The ABC News debate Tuesday could have a major impact on the race, as Ms. Harris remains unknown to many Americans. In the Times/Siena poll, 28% of likely voters said they needed more information about Ms. Harris while only 9% said the same about Trump.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on CNN that Ms. Harris’ ability to highlight her agenda during the debate with Trump is “an extremely challenging task in the face of all of the distraction, whatever outrageous things he does and says, because they will require a response. And yet you can’t allow him to change the subject from the difference between his very unpopular set of policies and record and her vision for Americans’ future.”
U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Okla., said both candidates will offer contrasting records of performance.
“I think most Americans are going to look at this race and compare the records they have,” Mr. Cotton said on CNN. “It’s a very unusual race when you have a president who served in office, who brought good times to America, and you have Kamala Harris, a San Francisco liberal, who has brought to America exactly what you see in San Francisco as well.”
But Mr. Fetterman said on Sunday that he didn’t think the debate would make that much of a difference because the contrast between the candidates is well known already.
“People all have to ask themselves, what kinds of the next four years do we want?” he said. “Do we want that kind of chaos and that kinds of — absolute kinds of reckless and bizarre behavior from Trump? Or do we want four more years of getting us through a pandemic and standing with our allies, like Ukraine or Israel, through all of that? And by any metric, our economy is the world’s, absolute world’s envy on that.”
Added Mr. Fetterman: “At the end of the day, I don’t believe this debate’s going to be definitive because it’s going to come down to this choice, and it’s going to be close.”
First Published: September 8, 2024, 6:03 p.m.
Updated: September 9, 2024, 2:38 a.m.
