Kamala Harris rises in polls against Trump

US Vice President Kamala Harris now leads Republican rival Donald Trump by 5 percentage points, a new NBC News poll, released on Sunday, has shown. The opinion poll indicated that voters’ views of Harris have improved since she became the Democratic candidate for president.

Among the 1,000 registered voters polled, 48% held a favorable opinion of Harris-a big swing from 32 percent in July. That’s the largest increase in favorability ratings for a politician since President George W. Bush experienced a bump following the September 11, 2001 attacks.

On the other hand, 40 percent of those polled said something positive about Trump, up 2 percentage points from July. The survey, conducted September 13-17, has a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

A second CBS News poll of likely voters in the country also implies that Harris leads Trump 52% to 48%, with ±2 percent margin of error. Other recent national polls including those by Reuters/Ipsos point to a contest where the November 5th election will be close.

National polls tell a lot about the general mood of voters, but take the process only so far as the state-by-state numbers in the Electoral College will decide it. And, importantly, it is the key battleground states that will determine the contest.

Trump, 78, is a third-time White House aspirant after he lost his race in 2020 to Joe Biden whom he claims he lost to due to rampant voter fraud. Harris, 59, is a former US senator and a former prosecutor and would be the first woman ever to hold the presidency in the United States.

“She’s been able to shift the race from a referendum on Joe Biden to one on Donald Trump,” said Amy Walter, publisher and editor in chief of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, in her appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

She bounces back: Harris gains 2 percentage points in a CBS News poll of 3,129 registered voters from September 18-20, bouncing back from an even 50-50 split in August, in part due to her performance in the September 10 debate and improving economic news.