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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House
Donald Trump has all but erased Kamala Harris’s slender advantage in the swing states that will decide who wins the White House next month, according to new polling just two weeks before the vote.
A Washington Post-Schar School survey of more than 5,000 registered voters out on Monday found the two candidates in a virtual tie in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the battlegrounds that will determine who wins on November 5.
The poll also showed that Republican Trump and Democrat Harris level nationally, on 47 per cent, when registered voters were asked who they would definitely or probably support. Most surveys in recent weeks have given Harris a marginal lead nationally.
The results echo the Financial Times poll tracker — a weighted aggregator of dozens of US surveys — which shows the two candidates neck-and-neck in the swing states and nationally. In four crucial battlegrounds, the polling margin stands at less than half a percentage point — within the margin of error.
The deadlocked polling sets the stage for a photo finish to one of most turbulent White House races in modern history.
Trump had built a meaningful polling lead over President Joe Biden earlier in the year and after an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July. But Harris quickly closed that gap after she replaced Biden on the Democratic party ticket and had built a marginal lead in most swing states in the past month.
Trump appears to have regained momentum in recent weeks, however, as voters shrug off his criminal convictions and brash demeanour and embrace his brand of economic populism.
Prominent polls-based prediction models, including FiveThirtyEight, The Economist and Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin all show the outcome of the election to be close to a 50-50 proposition.
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Trump’s numbers have inched higher in recent weeks, bringing him level or ahead of Harris, according to the FT tracker, as the former president battles the current vice-president in his bid for another four years in the White House.
Harris continues to enjoy a significant fundraising advantage over Trump, with her campaign raising a record $1bn in the three months to the end of September. But the former president’s bid for a second term is now being supported financially and on the ground in states such as Pennsylvania by Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and owner of social media platform X.
Trump and Harris are expected to criss-cross the country between now and election day in a frantic race to fire up their bases and win over the sliver of a deeply divided US electorate that has not yet decided who to support — or whether to vote at all.
The Washington Post poll on Monday found that about a quarter of registered voters described themselves as “uncommitted” to either candidate.
Trump is scheduled to hold two campaign events in North Carolina on Monday — a state he won in 2016 and 2020 but that the Harris campaign has targeted as an opportunity to pick up this year. Harris will do a one-day whistle-stop tour through the so-called Blue Wall battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
She will campaign in all three states with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, in her latest bid to win over independent voters and anti-Trump Republicans.