The presidential contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump kicked into high gear post-Labor Day as the two candidates and their running mates have crisscrossed the nation in hopes of galvanizing enough votes to secure a White House victory.
Yet the election remains close as most polls show Harris and Trump nearly tied roughly 60 days before Nov. 5.
A Real Clear Politics average of the seven battleground states shows Harris narrowly leading Trump, 47.7% to 47.5%, while a Wall Street Journal poll released last week showed Harris leading Trump by only 1 percentage point, 48% to 47%, in a head-to-head matchup.
Election analyst Nate Silver recently claimed Trump’s chances of winning the November election are at his highest levels. “The forecast is still in toss-up range, but Trump’s chances of winning are his highest since July 30,” Silver wrote on his Substack, the Silver Bulletin.
However, historian Allan Lichtman, who correctly predicted the last nine out of 10 presidential winners, predicted Harris would win the election.
Ahead of the first presidential debate, and perhaps the only one that will happen, between the two candidates next week in Philadelphia, the Washington Examiner reranked the battleground states according to which would be the hardest for the vice president to win.
1. Pennsylvania
The last time the scorecard was published, which was just after Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) joined the Democratic ticket as Harris’s running mate, Pennsylvania was ranked as the third-hardest state for her to win.
But the race has vastly changed since then. The Keystone State is the top state of the 2024 cycle — whichever candidate wins Pennsylvania is nearly likely to win the election.
Yet Harris and Trump are tied in the state, according to several polls. A CNN poll released on Wednesday shows the candidates neck and neck at 47%. They are also tied in the state at 47.2%, according to a Real Clear Politics poll composite.
Some of Trump’s foes are coming to Harris’s aid in hopes of boosting turnout. Republican Voters Against Trump announced an $11.5 million ad blitz on Tuesday, with $4.5 million going toward advertising in Pennsylvania.
Between Labor Day and Election Day, $70.8 million has been reserved in advertising in support of Democrats and $70.6 million in support of the GOP, according to AdImpact. But the Harris campaign has stressed it is the underdog in the final stretch of this cycle.
“Make no mistake: We head into the final stretch of this race as the clear underdogs,” campaign Chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote. “Donald Trump has a motivated base of support, with more support and higher favorability than he has had at any point since 2020.”
The Trump campaign appears to agree with senior advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, writing in a memo released Tuesday that “if the election were held today, Donald Trump would be reelected.”
Trump warned Pennsylvanians that they “cannot even take a chance” on Harris during a town hall with Fox News’s Sean Hannity filmed in Harrisburg on Wednesday. “If she won, you’re not going to have any fracking in Pennsylvania,” he claimed in response to Harris’s flip-flopping on the issue. “It’s your biggest business, and you get a big majority of your income from fracking.”
2. North Carolina
The Tar Heel State remains one of the hardest battleground states for Harris to win, given its red-leaning history.
The last Democrat to win the state in a presidential election was former President Barack Obama in 2008. Not even President Joe Biden could flip the state in 2020. He won every battleground state except for North Carolina.
A Bloomberg-Morning Consult poll released last week showed Harris leading Trump by 2 points, 49% to 47%. But Trump is not abandoning the state. If he wins North Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, it would give him the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the election.
The former president chose the Tar Heel State as the site where he announced support for the government to pay for in vitro fertilization in a second administration. It’s a move meant to blunt Harris’s attacks against him regarding reproductive rights.
In another instance of anti-Trump Republicans supporting Harris’s campaign, former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney announced her endorsement of the vice president at Duke University on Wednesday.
“And as a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this, and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris,” she said.
3. Arizona
After Harris replaced Biden as the presidential nominee, there have been some reports that the Sun Belt battleground states are now in place for the Democrats.
But polling shows that in Arizona, Trump still has the edge over Harris. In CNN’s poll, Trump is leading Harris by 5 points, 49% to 44%, and in the Real Clear Politics average, he narrowly leads her by 1 point, 48% to 47%.
The Bloomberg-Morning Consult poll shows the two candidates are tied in Arizona at 48%.
As part of the “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” bus tour, Harris surrogate Hadley Duvall traveled to Arizona and Nevada this week, telling her story of navigating restrictive abortion laws. The campaign also has the backing of the late Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain’s son, Jimmy McCain, who announced this week he had registered as a Democrat and is voting for Harris.
4. Georgia
In August, Georgia was one of the three battlegrounds that the Cook Political Report had changed from “lean Republican” to “toss-up.” The other two states were Arizona and Nevada.
The next week, polling from the New York Times and Siena College showed Trump leading Harris 50% to 46%. Given the importance of the Peach State to Trump’s path to victory, the former president has appeared to mend his rift with the popular two-term Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) in hopes of blocking Harris’s momentum.
Harris and Walz visited Savannah, Georgia, last week as part of a two-day tour in the southeast part of the state, marking the first time a presidential candidate had visited the city since the 1990s. Her supporters told the Washington Examiner they were unbothered by her flip-flops on Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and the fracking ban.
The vice president again reprised the claim she was the “underdog” in the race. “Don’t pay attention to polls. We are underdogs,” she warned the crowd.
Harris is hoping to keep Georgia blue after Biden won the state in 2020, breaking Republican dominance at the presidential level for the first time since 1992.
5. Nevada
In the Silver State, polling shows Harris has a slight lead over Trump. The CNN poll shows Harris at 48% to Trump’s 47%, while Real Clear Politics shows Harris leading Trump by less than 1 point, 48% to 47.4%.
However, the Bloomberg poll shows Harris with a 4-point advantage, 49% to 45%, and a Fox News poll from last week showed Harris with a 2-point lead, 50% to 48%.
Playing to the vice president’s advantage is that Nevada will have an abortion amendment on the ballot, which has galvanized Democratic voters over the past two years. The Fox News survey showed three-quarters of voters, including 54% of Republicans, will vote “yes” to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution.
Harris’s campaign has boasted it has 14 offices and more than 100 full-time employees in Nevada, in contrast to the Trump campaign, which “has five offices and about 24 staff,” according to the O’Malley Dillon memo.
6. Michigan
Despite rocky tensions with Michigan’s sizable Arab-American and Muslim population, which have agitated for a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas, Harris appears to have a consistent lead over Trump in the state.
Bloomberg shows Harris with a 3-point lead over the former president, 49% to 46%, while the CNN poll shows Harris with a 5-point advantage, 48% to 43%. Her lead shrinks to just 1.1% in the Real Clear Politics average, 48% to 46.9%.
The vice president faced pro-Palestinian protesters who disrupted her campaign stops in Detroit, though the pressure doesn’t appear to be hurting her polls too sharply. Harris spent part of her Labor Day travel in the Motor City, given its strong and decades-stretching union support.
Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin mark the three blue-wall states that, if Harris wins, would almost likely ensure she wins the election.
7. Wisconsin
Wisconsin marks the second blue-wall state that shows Harris with a comfortable lead over Trump.
CNN shows her beating Trump by 6 points, 50% to 44%, in the Badger State, while Bloomberg has her with an 8-point advantage, 52% to 44%. Once again, her lead shrinks according to Real Clear Politics, which has her with an average lead over Trump of just 1.4 points, 48.2% to Trump’s 46.8%.
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Harris’s running mate, Walz, was in Wisconsin on Labor Day, and he gave a pro-union speech and touted his teachers union membership to attendees. “She was part of the most pro-union administration in American history,” Walz bragged. “From sticking up for workers to voting for fair legislation to walking picket lines, she was there with workers every step of the way.”
Despite this lead, the Cook Political Report rates the state as a toss-up, and Trump will visit the state on Saturday in another sign of the work he is doing to block Harris from winning the blue wall.
