Vice President Kamala Harris is narrowly leading former President Donald Trump in a national presidential poll released Tuesday, one of the first conducted since President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection and endorsed his vice president.
According to the Reuters/Ipsos poll, Harris holds a two-point lead over Trump, garnering 44 percent of the vote to Trump’s 42 percent. This poll was conducted in the two days following Biden’s Sunday announcement that he would not run for a second term. Last week, the two candidates were tied at 44 percent in the same poll.
Harris, 59, is the overwhelming frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, receiving a surge in endorsements, donations, and pledged delegates. However, another survey released Tuesday shows Harris narrowly trailing Trump. Both results fall within the polls’ margins of error.
The new surveys come after the Republican National Convention, where Trump formally accepted the party’s presidential nomination, and Biden’s withdrawal from the race. Harris’s standing in the polls, boosted by the enthusiasm among Democratic voters about the race’s shakeup, suggests she may have neutralized the typical post-convention bounce for nominees.
In a PBS News/NPR/Marist poll conducted Monday, Trump leads Harris by a slim margin of 46 percent to 45 percent among registered US voters, with nine percent undecided. When third-party candidates or independents are included, Trump and Harris are tied at 42 percent, with other candidates trailing far behind.
The PBS News survey also found that 87 percent of Americans believe Biden’s decision to drop out was the right move, a sentiment shared across partisan and generational lines. A plurality of respondents (41 percent) said Biden’s decision improves Democrats’ chances of winning in November, while 24 percent felt it decreased their odds, and 34 percent said it made no difference.
These polls follow the dramatic aftermath of an assassination attempt on Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13. Despite this, Trump maintains a very narrow average lead of 1.6 percentage points over Harris, according to RealClearPolitics’ aggregation of polls.
