Harris Puts Four Sun Belt States Back in Play, Times/Siena Polls Find

Vice President Kamala Harris has stormed into contention in the fast-growing and diverse states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, not long after Donald Trump had seemed on the verge of running away with those states when President Joe Biden was still the Democratic nominee.

The new polls from The New York Times and Siena College show how quickly Harris has reshaped the terrain of 2024 and thrust the Sun Belt back to the center of the battleground-state map.

Harris is now leading Trump among likely voters in Arizona, 50% to 45%, and has even edged ahead of Trump in North Carolina — a state Trump won four years ago — while narrowing his lead significantly in Georgia and Nevada.

Trump and Harris are tied at 48% across an average of the four Sun Belt states in surveys conducted Aug. 8 to 15.

That marks a significant improvement for Democrats compared with May, when Trump led Biden 50% to 41% across Arizona, Georgia and Nevada in the previous set of Times/Siena Sun Belt polls, which did not include North Carolina.

The new polls provide more evidence that Harris is successfully consolidating parts of the Democratic base that had been waffling over supporting Biden for months, particularly younger, nonwhite and female voters.

A week ago, Times/Siena polling showed that Harris had pulled ahead of Trump by a narrow margin in the three northern battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Those states are generally considered the linchpin of any Democratic path to the White House. The Sun Belt represents an essential set of states for Trump while offering a potential second route for Harris to the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win.

In the new surveys, Trump is ahead in Georgia 50% to 46%, and, in Nevada, he has 48% compared with 47% for Harris. She has 49% of likely voters to Trump’s 47% in North Carolina, the only one of the seven core battleground states that he carried in 2020.

The polls show some risk for Harris as she rallies Democrats to her cause, including that more registered voters view her as too liberal (43%) than those who say Trump is too conservative (33%). For now, she is edging ahead of him among critical independent voters.

The new results come after as tumultuous a two-month period as there has ever been in modern American politics. Democrats swapped Harris for Biden after his poor debate performance, and, in between, Trump survived an assassination attempt and made a dramatic return at his party’s convention.

Both parties view the current period as a potential inflection point and are pouring tens of millions of dollars into advertising in the swing states to shape voter perceptions as Democrats prepare to gather this coming week for their party convention in Chicago.

The polls show that Democratic voters are newly excited about the 2024 race now that Harris is the nominee, with 85% of her voters saying they are at least somewhat enthusiastic about voting this fall, roughly matching voters’ level of enthusiasm for Trump. And large majorities of Democratic and Republican registered voters are now satisfied with their choice of candidates. That is a marked change from May, when Republicans were much more satisfied than Democrats.

Alina Szmant, 78, a Democrat and a retired scientist in Wilmington, North Carolina, was excited about the possibility of voting for the first woman president.

“Kamala is extremely well prepared to be an excellent president,” she said. As for Biden? She would have voted for him mostly because of her disgust for Trump. “He was not my first choice,” she said of Biden. “He wasn’t even my second or third or fourth choice.”

The race is increasingly polarized along racial lines.

Harris, who would be the first Black woman to serve as president, had the support of 84% of Black voters in the polls, which is higher than Biden’s support before his exit. Her backing among Latino voters was at 54%. She also opened up a significant gender gap, taking a 14-percentage point lead over Trump among women in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada; that group had been evenly split between Biden and Trump in those three states in May.

Overall, Harris leads nonwhite voters in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada by 29 percentage points; Biden had led those voters in the same states by 17 percentage points in May.

Trump, in turn, is maximizing his support among white voters without a college degree, winning 66% support from them across the four Sun Belt states.

One of the bigger questions for Harris is how long what the Trump team has called her “honeymoon” period will last. She has sparked memes, become a social-media phenomenon and drawn larger crowds on her first trip across the swing states this month than Biden ever drew.

One indicator of her online traction came from largely younger voters who said they used TikTok. Harris held a 13-point advantage among TikTok users in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, compared with Biden’s 3-point edge among the same group in those states in May.

Voters overall gave Harris a 48% favorable rating, the same as her unfavorable rating. No previous Times/Siena survey in these states tested her favorability, but an even rating is a huge leap. In one national survey in February, voters viewed her more unfavorably by a 19-percentage point margin.

Trump scored an identical 48% favorable rating, largely unchanged since May.

The relative good will from the electorate for both candidates is a significant change from earlier in the year, when many frustrated voters described a Trump-Biden rematch with a mixture of disgust and indifference.

“I was pretty nervous before,” said Freyja Brandel-Tanis, a 28-year-old urban planner in Atlanta who described herself as a “leftist.” But since Harris’ ascent, she said, “I think that the enthusiasm is definitely there.”

Still, there are already some warning signs of Harris’ potential vulnerabilities.

More voters said she flip-flops on issues that matter than said the same about Trump. The divide is particularly pronounced among Hispanic voters, who were 12 percentage points more likely to say Harris changes her positions on important issues than to say the same about Trump.

Trump continues to hold the political advantage on two issues — the economy and immigration — that voters ranked as among the most important facing the nation. But Harris and Trump are close to tied on the key question of which candidate would better handle whatever issue voters see as the most important to them.

One reason is that while Trump is still favored on the economy over Harris across the Sun Belt states, his advantage is smaller on that topic than it was over Biden in May. At the same time, Harris has widened the Democratic edge over Trump on abortion.

On the issue of immigration, Trump is more trusted by 53% of voters, compared with 43% for Harris. Still, for an issue that has been a defining part of Trump’s image since 2015, that advantage represents a relatively small edge.

The state of the race in the four Sun Belt states was unchanged when third-party candidates were included. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won just 4% of likely voters, the largest of any third-party candidate in the polls, but it is half the level of support he received in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia just three months ago.

As the Harris and Trump campaigns rush to define each other in the remade race, voters see a choice between strength and compassion.

Voters were about equally likely to see each candidate as qualified and change-makers, but significantly more voters viewed Trump as a strong leader. Harris is seen by more voters than Biden was as an agent of change, but, overall, voters still see Trump as the candidate who will shake things up.

When voters were asked who “cares about people like me,” Harris had a slight edge over Trump: 52% compared with 48%. Although about half of Hispanic voters said Trump cares about people like them, even more said the same about Harris.

Sergio Villavicencio, a 40-year-old Marine veteran who lives in Buckeye, Arizona, said he voted for Trump in 2016 and then switched to Biden in 2020. He is planning to support Harris now, partly because, he said, Harris seems more concerned about his issues.

“If that person’s supposed to be representing all of us, and he’s picking and choosing who he’s representing — billionaires and Elon Musk and all these kinds of corporations — like, he’s not speaking for the people,” Villavicencio said of Trump. “He’s not talking to the people. He doesn’t give a damn about the people.”

The brightening of the landscape for Democrats also applies lower down the ballot, where Senate races were polling stronger for the party than in May.

In Arizona, Ruben Gallego, the Democratic congressman, leads Kari Lake, the firebrand pro-Trump Republican and former television anchor, 51% percent to 42%, among likely voters in the state’s open Senate race. In Nevada, Sen. Jacky Rosen, a Democrat, is ahead of her Republican challenger Sam Brown 49% to 40%. And in North Carolina, the state’s Democratic attorney general, Josh Stein, leads Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a Republican, 49% to 39%, in the year’s marquee governor’s race.

How the poll was conducted

Here are the key things to know about these Times/Siena polls:

— Interviewers spoke with 677 registered voters in Arizona from Aug. 8 to 15; 661 registered voters in Georgia and 655 registered voters in North Carolina from Aug. 9 to 14; and 677 registered voters in Nevada from Aug. 12 to 15.

— Times/Siena polls are conducted by telephone, using live interviewers, in both English and Spanish. More than 95% of respondents were contacted on a cellphone for these polls.

— Voters are selected for Times/Siena surveys from a list of registered voters. The list contains information on the demographic characteristics of every registered voter, allowing us to make sure we reach the right number of voters of each party, race and region. For these polls, interviewers placed more than 276,000 calls to nearly 183,000 voters.

— To further ensure that the results reflect the entire voting population, not just those willing to take a poll, we give more weight to respondents from demographic groups that are underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree.

— The margin of sampling error among registered voters is plus or minus 2.1 percentage points across the four states, plus or minus 4.1 percentage points in Arizona and Georgia, and plus or minus 4.2 percentage points in Nevada and North Carolina. In theory, this means that the results should reflect the views of the overall population most of the time, though many other challenges create additional sources of error. When computing the difference between two values — such as a candidate’s lead in a race — the margin of error is twice as large.

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