WASHINGTON: A new poll confirmed on Sunday that Kamala Harris, who is set to announce her vice presidential nominee soon, is tied with Donald Trump, upending a presidential election that the Republican candidate is increasingly confident he will win.
As the November 5 election approaches, Harris has eroded a growing lead that Trump had built before President Joe Biden dropped out of his re-election bid.
According to a CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday, Harris leads Trump nationally by 1 percentage point, compared with Biden's previous 5-point lead.
In the swing states that decide the Electoral College races in the US election, Harris and Trump, who stunned the world with his 2016 presidential victory but lost to Biden in 2020, are on the same level.
Those numbers are good news for a Democratic candidate who only joined the race last month, with Biden raising concerns about his mental acuity and ability to serve a second term at the age of 81.
But Harris, Biden's vice president and the first black and South Asian woman to hold the post, is stepping up her game to make her voice heard to voters before Trump does.
A key moment in that process came when Harris announced her historic choice of running mate for America's first female president.
“This is her first major decision as an executive, so that tells you a lot about her thought process,” Amy Walter, a polling expert for the Cook Political Report newsletter, told CBS News.
The CBS poll, which echoes a number of other polls that suggest Harris has a quick win, shows voters continue to support Trump on key issues like the economy.
Just 25 percent said they expected things to improve financially if Harris wins, compared with 45 percent who said the same about Trump.
However, when it comes to trusting a candidate’s temperament, polls show voters prefer the former California attorney general over Trump, a convicted felon who has made a career of publicly insulting his opponents, including while serving as president.
The poll found that mental health issues that once plagued Biden are now a burden for Trump, 78, with just 51 percent of respondents saying he is mentally fit to be president, compared with 64 percent for Harris.
Democrats believe that if you “make it a referendum on Trump, rather than a referendum on the current state of the economy, we have a real chance of winning,” Cook said.
Trump has been doing better politically in the last month after surviving an assassination attempt at a rally and using the Republican National Convention to highlight his toughness against the physically weak Biden.
But with Biden’s dramatic exit and Harris’s quick start, he’s struggling to recalibrate.
At a rally in the key state of Georgia on Saturday, Trump called Harris a “Marxist” and a “leftist radical,” claiming she would cause an “economic crisis.” On Wednesday, he stunned many when he told a group of black reporters that Harris was “changing black people” for political reasons.
While Biden has often attacked Trump as a threat to democracy due to his unprecedented refusal to concede defeat in 2020, Harris’ team has taken a sharper, meme-friendly approach, creating images that call Trump and his vice-presidential pick, J.D. Vance, “weird.”
Harris' campaign said on Saturday that Trump was “afraid” to debate her after he declined to participate in a debate on ABC as scheduled and said he would be open to debate her on Fox News, a network that has supported him for years.
Who would you choose as your teammate?
Any road to the White House involves several key states, and Harris will kick off her five-day campaign Tuesday in the biggest state, Pennsylvania, as she builds momentum for her Nov. 5 showdown with Republican Donald Trump.
Harris is expected to pick a white man to balance the ballot, and she's likely to be a moderate Democrat, who could help counteract Republican attacks on Harris as too left-wing.
The three people seen as the final front-runners — Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly — are all traveling to Washington on Sunday to visit Harris, The Washington Post reported.
“We now face two choices for our nation, one is the future and the other is the past… This campaign is about people coming together, driven by love for our country, to fight for the best of who we are,” she posted on X.
After winning enough delegate votes to secure the Democratic nomination, the nation’s first Black and South Asian female vice president will head to the national convention in Chicago in two weeks, where she will have full control of her party.
In less than two weeks of campaigning, the 59-year-old former prosecutor has smashed fundraising records, drawn huge crowds and dominated social media, eclipsing the poll numbers Trump set before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
Next on the agenda is selecting a vice president, with her nominee expected to be announced Tuesday evening during her pre-campaign runoff with an unnamed nominee in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania's largest city.
The Keystone State is the most expensive real estate in the fiercely contested battle over the Electoral College system.
It is part of the “blue wall” that will take Biden to the White House in 2020, along with Michigan and Wisconsin, two states where Harris is scheduled to draw crowds on Wednesday.
Pennsylvania is held by Shapiro, a 51-year-old Democrat who is considered the front-runner for vice president.
Later this week, Harris will tour the Sun Belt and the Southern states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina as she looks to bolster Democratic gains in the black and Hispanic vote.
Just last month, Trump remained in command, opening significant leads in state polls after Biden’s somewhat disappointing debate, with the Republican mogul leaving the country in doubt about his own vice presidential pick.
Trump's bid to win the US presidency was upended on July 21 when 81-year-old Biden, facing growing concerns about his age and lagging poll results, dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris.
Vice President Trump, who is 20 years her junior at 78, has had a quick start, raising $310 million in July, more than double what Trump had raised.
While Biden has made a strong plea to return civility and preserve democracy, Harris has focused on the future, making the “freedom” voters have fought for so hard a measure of her campaign.
She and her allies have also been more aggressive than Biden's side, mocking Trump for breaking his promise to host a debate on Sept. 10 and calling the inmate an old cheat and “weird guy.”
While she has pushed back on some of the left-wing stances she took during her failed 2020 primary campaign, Harris has not given extensive interviews since entering the race, and those in the race will be eagerly awaiting more details about her plans for the country.
Meanwhile, Trump and his Republican Party have struggled to adapt to a new foe or rehash their attacks on Harris, first signaling that she has dangerously liberal views on immigration and crime before implying that she was lying about being black.
