On Monday, CNN senior data correspondent Harry Enten shared that former President Donald Trump is currently polling stronger in swing states compared to his performance in the 2020 election.
A new poll from The New York Times/Siena College reveals Trump leading Vice President Kamala Harris by 5 points in Arizona and by 4 and 3 points in Georgia and North Carolina, respectively:
Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina are on the roster of seven battleground states where the focus of both the Trump and Harris campaigns has been since Labor Day. Ms. Harris has shown relative strength in several key states across the Midwest and, most critically to her hopes of becoming president, Pennsylvania.
But Arizona, which Mr. Biden won by just over 10,400 votes in 2020, now presents a challenge for the Harris campaign. Mr. Trump is ahead, 50 percent to 45 percent, the poll found. A Times/Siena poll there in August found Ms. Harris leading by five percentage points. Latino voters, in particular, appear to have moved away from Ms. Harris, though a significant number — 10 percent — said they were now undecided. And Mr. Trump is benefiting from ticket splitting there: While Ms. Harris is trailing, the poll shows that the Democratic candidate for Senate is ahead.
In North Carolina, which Mr. Trump won by under 75,000 votes in 2020, the former president has a slim lead over Ms. Harris, drawing 49 percent of the vote compared with 47 percent for Ms. Harris. (The poll was mostly conducted before reports that Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor there, had made disturbing posts in a pornography forum, which some Republicans fear could hurt Mr. Trump in the state.) And in Georgia, a state that Mr. Biden won by just under 11,800 votes in 2020, Mr. Trump continues to have a slight lead over Ms. Harris, 49 percent to 45 percent. The margin of error in each state is between four and five percentage points.
The polls found that voters in this part of the country were worried about their own future and the future of the nation, suggesting that Mr. Trump’s dark campaign rhetoric — “Our country is being lost, we’re a failing nation,” he said in the debate — could be resonating with some voters. A plurality said the nation’s problems were so bad that it was in danger of failing. Republicans were much more likely to hold that unsettled view of the future than Democrats, 72 percent to 16 percent.
Enten highlighted Harris’ narrow 2-point lead in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, noting the significant divide between the Sun Belt and Great Lake states.
“You’ve got a lot of red on this screen, this is pretty good news for Donald Trump,” Enten explained. “When you look at the three key battleground states, two of which Joe Biden carried four years ago, Trump is ahead by an average of 4 points – significantly better than his 2020 performance.”
Enten attributed Trump’s stronger polling in Sun Belt states to the increasing diversity of his coalition, with support from non-white voters rising from 16% in 2020 to 20% in 2024.
“If you know anything about the Sun Belt battleground states, it’s that they are more diverse than the Great Lake battleground states,” Enten said. “In the Southwest, they’re more Hispanic, and in the Southeast, states like North Carolina and Georgia have a higher African American population.”
Enten also showed an electoral map based on current polling, indicating that if the numbers in the Great Lakes states hold true, Harris would narrowly win with 276 electoral votes to Trump’s 262.
The most recent RealClearPolitics polling average indicates that Harris is leading Trump nationally by 2.2%. In the key battleground states, Trump is leading Harris by 0.1 points. At this same point in 2016, polls showed Hillary Clinton ahead by 3%. In 2020, Joe Biden led Trump by 7.1%.
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