U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks during a campaign event, at West Allis Central High School, in West Allis, Wisconsin, U.S., July 23, 2024: NAJ screen shot

By Glynn Wilson – 
Public Opinion Analyst –

Vice President Kamala Harris opens her campaign for president with a two-point lead over Republican Donald Trump after President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign and passed the torch to her, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted on Monday and Tuesday.

The national poll shows her leading Trump 44 percent to 42 percent, a difference that is within the 3-percentage-point margin of error. But Harris and Trump were tied at 44 percent in a July 15-16 poll, and Trump led by one percentage point in a July 1-2 poll, both within the same margin of error.

That compares with a marginal two-point deficit Biden faced against Trump in last week’s poll before his Sunday exit from the race.

The new poll came after the Republican National Convention where Trump on Thursday formally accepted the nomination and Biden’s announcement on Sunday he was leaving the race and endorsing Harris. Her campaign says she has secured the Democratic nomination. By the end of the first day, Harris had secured the backing of more than the 1,976 delegates needed to capture the nomination in the first round of voting.

The pledged support is not binding until the delegates cast their votes, which party officials said would take place between Aug. 1 and Aug. 7.

“When I announced my campaign for president, I said I intended to go out and earn this nomination,” Ms. Harris said in a statement. “Tonight, I am proud to have secured the broad support needed to become our party’s nominee.”

She added, “I look forward to formally accepting the nomination soon.”

On its first day, her campaign is setting fund raising records. She raised $81 million in the first 24 hours.

Candidates often expect a bump after formally accepting their party’s nomination at stage-managed, televised conventions such as the one that Trump had last week. But the poll showed no sign of that for Trump, according to Reuters.

“Bump or not, the most recent Reuters/Ipsos poll underscored the rationale for Biden dropping out of the race and for Harris replacing him on the ticket,” Reuters says.

When asked about mental sharpness, 56 percent of registered voters agreed with a statement that Harris, 59, was “mentally sharp and able to deal with challenges,” compared to 49 percent who said the same of Trump, at 78-years-old. Only 22 percent of voters assessed Biden that way.

Biden, 81, ended his reelection effort after a debate with Trump in which he often stammered and failed to aggressively challenge attacks by Trump that included falsehoods. Yet 80 percent of Democratic voters said they viewed Biden favorably anyway. A full 91 percent said the same of Harris.

Three quarters of Democratic voters said they agreed with a statement that the party and voters should get behind Harris now, with only a quarter saying multiple candidates should compete for the party’s nomination in an open convention in August.

When voters in the survey were shown a hypothetical ballot that included independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Harris led Trump 42 percent to 38 percent, an advantage outside the margin of error.

Kennedy, favored by 8 percent of voters in the poll, has yet to qualify for the ballot in many states ahead of the Nov. 5 election.

While nationwide surveys give important signals of American support for political candidates, a handful of competitive states typically tilt the balance in the U.S. Electoral College, which ultimately decides who wins a presidential election.

Harris campaigned in the critical battleground state of Wisconsin on Tuesday. She won support from major party figures and attention has since turned to who she will pick as her running mate.

Many respondents in the Reuters/Ipsos poll said they knew nothing about the Democrats seen as potential picks to join Harris’ ticket.

About one in four registered voters said they had never heard of U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a former Democratic presidential candidate who had the highest favorability rating (37%) of the potential Harris running mates in the poll.

One in three had not heard of California Governor Gavin Newsom, with about the same share saying they looked on him favorably. Half of registered voters in the poll had never heard of Arizona Senator Mark Kelly and two thirds knew nothing of Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear.

The more likely pick for Vice President is Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who has already announced he’s backing Kamala Harris in her bid for the presidency. He was not named as a choice in this first poll, but he is high on the list of choices because the state of Pennsylvania with 19 electoral college votes is considered critical.

The Reuters poll, which was conducted online, surveyed 1,241 U.S. adults nationwide, including 1,018 registered voters.

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Glynn Wilson is an expert on public opinion as an academic researcher and a journalist. He minored in Political Science with a major in Journalism and Communications at the University of Alabama in an undergraduate BA program back in the early 1980s, where he took every class offered related to this specialty. He also spent some time working with the Capstone Poll in those days, run by Political Science Professor Pat Cotter, and journalism professor Jim Stovall. He covered public opinion for newspapers and the UPI wire service after that for 10 years as part of the beat of covering public affairs and politics, including elections. He then went back to grad school at UA in the mid-1990s. One of his graduate research jobs was to oversee the public opinion lab in the College of Communications, also under the leadership of Stovall and Cotter, who conducted most of the political election polls in Alabama for a couple of decades. Wilson’s academic research specialty was in the area of media effects on public opinion. He later worked toward a Ph.D. in this research, but rather than continue teaching and jump through the final hoop of defending a dissertation at the University of Tennessee, he opted to go back into the news business working for The Dallas Morning News, The New York Times and other publications. He went independent on the web in 2005 in the early blogging era when newspapers were experiencing financial troubles, and has covered public opinion ever since as one of his many specialty beats.

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