Harris leads in key swing states

While Harris is on a campaign tour in the southwestern United States, she has built up a lead of 4 percentage points in both Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, according to the New York Times and Siena College poll.

In all three states, 50 percent of respondents say they support Harris, while 46 percent say they would vote for Trump, according to the poll, which was conducted from August 5 to 9.

More than 600 people were asked in each of the three states, and the margin of error is between 4.2 and 4.8 percentage points.

Better than Biden

Harris is clearly doing better than President Joe Biden before he resigned. Throughout the last year, the polls in the three states have shown that Trump and Biden were more or less equal, or that Trump was leading.

The New York Times writes that the numbers are a clear upturn for the Democrats, but the survey also shows weaknesses for Harris. A majority say they have more confidence in Trump when it comes to the economy and immigration, topics that are important in this year’s election campaign.

But a large majority of 24 percentage points trust Harris more on the issue of abortion.

Continuing the round trip

Harris and her vice presidential candidate Tim Walz continued their swing-state tour on Friday with a packed rally in Phoenix, Arizona.

She began the tour with campaign rallies in the three swing states of the Midwest – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where she was received by enthusiastic crowds. Subsequent visits to North Carolina and Georgia had to be canceled due to Hurricane Debby.

In Arizona, which shares a border with Mexico, she mostly stuck to the script, but she also sharpened her criticism of Trump’s immigration policy

– Donald Trump does not want to fix this problem. Be aware of that. He talks big, but he doesn’t act, she said, pointing to Trump earlier this year halting a major immigration reform that Democrats and Republicans agreed on after long negotiations in Congress.

Talking about abortion

“We know our immigration system is broken, and we know what it takes to fix it — comprehensive reform that includes strict border security and a path to citizenship,” she said.

In a state that is among the states that have introduced strict restrictions on abortion, Harris also talked about what could be a winning cause, especially for women.

– In 20 states there is now a Trump ban on abortion. Many of them are like the one in Arizona, without exception even for rape and incest, she said.

First in a week

While Harris gathered more than 15,000 excited listeners in Phoenix, Trump held his first campaign rally in a week in the Republican-dominated state of Montana.

Trump, who survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania last month, expressed irritation at being asked why he has kept such a low profile over the past week.

At a press conference at his property in Florida on Thursday, he defended himself by saying that he was likely to win anyway, and that he would also let the Democrats hold their national convention.

According to the polls, Trump was likely to win the election before Joe Biden resigned on July 21, but Harris has been riding a wave of excitement that has brought her to the top, after she took over from Biden and then named Minnesota Governor Walz as her running mate.

Irritable

Harris’s upswing seems to have gotten on Trump’s nerves. At the Florida news conference, he dismissed Harris’ lead in the polls and complained about the media’s coverage of the large crowds at her campaign rallies and her lack of press conferences.

Harris, for his part, went on from Arizona to another election meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada,

Arizona and Nevada were considered swing states after Biden won them both in 2020, but in recent times the assessment was that Trump was likely to win both. Now, however, the Cook Political Report has reclassified them from safe Republican to swing states again.