America's Talking - Poll: Harris Holds Slight National Lead Over Trump

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris holds a slight edge over former President Donald Trump in national polling less than one month from election day. The Center Square Voters' Voice poll, conducted with Noble Predictive Insights and released Wednesday, shows Harris leads Trump 49% to 47%, a tight race that's within the poll's +/-2.1% margin of error. The poll is one of only six national tracking polls in the United States. The race likely will be determined by a handful of swing states where other polling shows a near tie. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, Chief Content Officer at Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. We are recording this on Friday, October 11th. We are just three and a half weeks away from the November 5th general election, and this race remains incredibly tight. The latest, the Center Square Voters' voice poll just dropped two days ago, which shows Vice President Kamala Harris with the narrowest of leads over the last. of President, former President Donald Trump. The poll is among the most comprehensive in the country,

surveying more than 2,500 registered voters, and is one of just six national tracking polls. Joining me to discuss this and other developments in the presidential race is Casey Harper, Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief for the Center Square. Casey, how do things stand just about 25 days from the election? Yeah, Dan, you're absolutely right. This race is very, very tight. That's, I mean, that's the way to put it.

When you look at the polling across these swing states, I mean, even just compared to what I was reviewing last week, Dan, the polls have shifted more so in Trump's favor, which is, you know, last, you know, last week I'm reviewing. I'm looking at, you know, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, of course, you know, seven or eight swing states. And Harris was leading, but she's leading by less than a point in most of these states. And now we're seeing that Trump is leading by less than a point in many of these states. Now, of course, our Center Square voters' voice poll came out this week and really shed some light on what's going on here.

And so there's a few demographic trends that I think we should talk about. But first, just the big picture numbers, Trump and Harris are basically tied. You know, Harris is leading Trump by two points nationally, which may seem like a lot. But just keep in mind, Dan, that Democrats have won the popular vote multiple times in recent history and still lost the election. And so the popular national vote has to be taken with a grain of salt, even with Harris winning by two points. I've seen some analysis that says she actually needs to win the popular vote by three or four points, which would be an indicator that she is winning enough in the certain swing states. Let me just throw a few statistics at you or a few takeaways from this poll. Dan that I think are very interesting. And I also spoke with our pollster from Noble

Predictive Insights and gave me some insight into this. But he said that Trump is making inroads with Black Americans and Hispanic Americans, which is really interesting. It's in particularly true and really surprising, I think, that he's making such inroads with Black Americans. Now, in 2020, Trump's inroads with Hispanic Americans was a big story because, or rather 2016 because Trump was seen, you know, attacked for his immigration policies, called racist for his comments on the border, all of that. But Trump did very well with Hispanics. And he really still does do well with Hispanics compared to past Republicans. Of course, he doesn't do better than Harris, but he does better than other Republicans do. Now this, here we are, 24. And Trump is somehow

chipping away at Harris's lead with black Americans. And we can go into why that is, but it's just fascinating that we have a, you know, a black woman candidate who, somehow has not been able to recapture the normal amount of black American support, let alone get up to the, you know, the Obama era, which is kind of the golden era of democratic electoral politics. Now, Casey, so correct me if I'm wrong, Kamala Harris still leads among black American voters. Yes. It's just that the gap that has traditionally been there with black Americans significantly favoring Democrats over Republicans.

That's just narrowing. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, she has, depending on which part of it you look at, she might have 79% or 76% support. But, you know, we saw polls. Biden actually had a lot of black American support. I mean, I've seen polls where, you know, Democrats, you know, mid-80s or 90%. I mean, I think Obama hit 90% support. And now you might think, well, as long as they get more than half, they're fine.

But that's not really how it works because Democrats have built these coalitions. And that's really since Obama has been the strategy to take every minority group and get an overwhelming majority in it. And then kind of take those coalitions and ride them into the White House. And they worked for them. But they really need major support among black Americans. to make this work, especially because there are some, you know, large cities in swing states where the black vote is crucial. Philadelphia, for instance. I mean, Pennsylvania is, you know, one of the main swing states where there was a debate there. It could decide the whole election.

It was very important in the last election. But Philadelphia has, you know, a huge black vote that could easily swing that state, even if it's slow turnout. And that's the case in many of these swing states is there's a high black population in a big city that can swing an entire state. Sticking with the demographics, Casey, you wrote also about the Arab American, the Muslim American vote and how that's trending a little bit more towards Trump as well. Yeah, that was really interesting as well because, you know, of course the October 7 terror attacks were Hamas, which is designated a terrorist group by the State Department. They attacked Israel, killed hundreds and hundreds of civilians over a thousand, and it kicked

off this war that's still going on today. He's kind of drawn in Iran and their proxy groups and all that. But it really put President Joe Biden, of course, the former Democratic nominee in a tough spot because he wanted to back Israel, as he always has and has most Americans do. but there is a significant segment of the Democratic Party that is very anti-Israel, very, very sympathetic to Palestine at the very least, and many of them are anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic. And so, of course, that's not the majority of the party, but it's a big enough minority to have real, create real problems for Biden who face regular protest on this issue. Harris has done better at handling it since she took over. But the polling shows, Dan, that Harris and the Democratic Party as a whole has not regained either both Arab-American support and Muslim-Americans, which of course those are separate populations, of course.

But both of them are following a similar trend, although Muslim Americans are seemingly, according to the poll, to looked at, defecting more to third-party candidates like Green Party candidate Jill Stein. And that's really important because there's a large, you know, Arab American and Muslim American populations in Minnesota and Michigan in particular, which are two major swing states, right? So Harris has seen defections there. And her taking over for our Biden didn't really fix the whole problem. Of course, you know, she still has similar to the Black Road. She still has majority support. But she does not have as much support as Biden did in 2020, which in those swing states of Minnesota and Michigan in particular could really haunt her. In a few seconds we have left, I'm not going to ask you to predict the outcome of the presidential race, but November 5th is election day.

Obviously, early voting has started throughout the country. But do you think we'll know the results of this race on Tuesday, the evening of Tuesday, November 5th, or is this going to go on for a lot? I don't think we will. No, I don't think we will. The way that it's all set up now, the COVID era allowed a lot of really convoluting. voting practices and the popularity of mail and ballots and all kinds of things that have made our elections more complicated and made it more complicated to count votes. So we'll have a good idea of the trends, but I think at the very least you'll have to wake up Tuesday morning to know for

really what's going on. And it could take even longer, depending on how close to race is. But of course, Dan, I don't predict it. But last week, it was leaning Harris. And I think this week is leaning Trump. Who knows where it'll be next week. We only have a. a few more of these weeks before that lien could make all the difference. Thank you for joining us today. Listeners can keep up with all things presidential election at the center square.com.