Vice President Harris and Democratic vice presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz appear at a campaign event in Philadelphia: NAJ screen shot

By Glynn Wilson –

As the Democrats begin arriving in Chicago for a national convention like no other, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, are arriving by way of a bus tour through Pennsylvania, a critical swing state with the potential to decide the presidential election in November.

They greeted supporters in Pittsburgh at the start of a bus trip making several stops across western parts of the State of Independence, buoyed by new public opinion polls showing Harris leading by a healthy margin in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina, as well as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

The Polls: Harris-Walz Pickup the Lead Over Trump in Three Major Battleground States

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,” according to coverage in the New York Times.

Harris is now leading Republican challenger Donald Trump among likely voters in Arizona, 50 percent to 45 percent, 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 percent 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,” the Times says, when Trump led President Joe Biden 50 percent to 41 percent across Arizona, Georgia and Nevada in the previous set of polls, which did not include North Carolina.

A dead heat in these four states is not great news for Trump, and it represents a huge shift from earlier in the cycle, Nate Cohn writes.

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.

In addition, a new national Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll shows Harris holding a narrow lead over former president Trump in the presidential election, a notable improvement for Democrats in a contest that a little more than a month ago showed President Joe Biden and Trump in a dead heat. Harris now leads Trump 49 percent to 45 percent nationally among registered voters in a head-to-head matchup. When third-party candidates are included in the survey, Harris is at 47 percent and Trump at 44 percent, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at 5 percent. In early July, Trump stood at 43 percent, Biden at 42 percent and Kennedy at 9 percent.

Source: Aug. 9-13, 2024, Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll of 1,975 registered voters with an error margin of +/- 2.5 percentage points and July 5-9, 2024, Post-ABC-Ipsos poll of 2,041 registered voters with an error margin of +/- 2 points: NAJ screen shot

Notice This

The margin of error in these polls is only 2%. That means Harris now has a solid 2 point lead nationally outside the margin of error, and with rounding, she is hitting the 50 percent milestone. The last time a Democrat hit 50 percent in a national poll was during the Democratic primaries in 2016, when Bernie Sanders hit the 50 percent mark.

Last week, the polling showed that Harris had pulled ahead of Trump as well 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 percent to 46 percent, and, in Nevada, he has 48 percent compared to 47 percent for Harris. She has 49 percent of likely voters to Trump’s 47 percent 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 percent) than those who say Trump is too conservative (33 percent). For now, she is edging ahead of him among critical independent voters.

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