If that were to be replicated when voters go to the polls on 5 November, it would get Trump past the 270 electoral college votes threshold needed for victory and propel him back to the Oval Office.
The crumb of comfort for Harris is that, with multiple surveys telling contradictory tales when the details are scrutinised, that particular outcome probably won’t happen.
Indeed, a simulation using polling, economic and demographic data from FiveThirtyEight still had Harris winning the election 55 times out of 100, as of Thursday lunchtime. And a Wall Street Journal survey on Friday also painted a brighter outlook by showing Harris maintaining slight leads in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia – enough to give her a narrow electoral college win if borne out on polling day.
Yet the margins are perplexing for Democratic strategists, given that the vice-president’s campaign recently disclosed that it had raised $1bn within 80 days of Harris replacing Joe Biden as the party’s nominee in July. The amount greatly surpasses that raised by Trump’s campaign.
By late August, Trump’s campaign had brought in a relatively modest $309m, although it has the advantage of financial support from entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Super Pac, which is offering cash incentives to people in swing states to register Trump-friendly voters.
Whatever the cash advantages, Harris seems to have lost some momentum in the “blue wall” Rust belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania since her 10 September debate performance against Trump in Philadelphia, when she was generally seen as coming out on top.
That was illustrated by a Quinnipiac University poll last Wednesday that recorded the five-point lead she held in Michigan in the week following the debate being transformed into a three-point advantage for Trump, 50% to 47%; in Wisconsin, a one-point post-debate advantage turned into a 2% lead for Trump. And in Pennsylvania, a six-point Harris lead was halved to 3%.
One issue casting a shadow over Harris’s prospects is the intensifying conflict in the Middle East, with Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese Shia group, threatening to further erode support among the large ethnic Arab voting bloc in Michigan that was already angry over the White House’s backing of the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza.
Quinnipiac’s survey shows Trump with significant leads on the issue in both Michigan and Wisconsin.
Trump has apparently become so confident of victory that he has begun moving beyond the battlegrounds to stage rallies in Democratic strongholds such as California, Illinois and New York, despite polls indicating he has little chance of winning there. The move seems calculated to project an air of impending triumph.
With just 24 days left before polling day, time is running out for Harris to correct her poll stutters, Democratic strategists fear. The timetable has been further curtailed by the twin storms, Hurricanes Helene and Milton, that have buffeted the south-east of the US in the past two weeks, diverting Harris from the campaign trail and presenting Trump with an opportunity to spout lies and falsehoods about her and Biden’s supposed failure to mount a recovery effort.
“I’m very, very concerned and very scared,” James Carville, the acknowledged mastermind of Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign and author of its signature slogan – “It’s the economy, stupid,” – told MSNBC last week.
