Vice President Harris has taken a 1-point lead over former President Trump in a survey conducted after she accepted her party’s presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention (DNC).
The survey, released late Thursday by The Wall Street Journal, found Harris earns 48 percent support from respondents in a two-way contest while Trump trails closely behind with 47 percent.
When third-party candidates were added to the mix, Harris still takes the lead with 47 percent to Trump’s 45 percent, the survey found.
Both matchups fall within the survey’s margin of error of 2.5 percentage points, but it’s the first time a Democratic candidate – Harris or President Biden – has taken the lead over Trump since April, the Journal noted.
Pollsters also found that voters now view Harris more favorably than Trump. Voters rank them equally in how the candidates will stand up for American workers and will bring change to the country.
Additionally, the survey found that Harris is cutting away at the lead Trump once held over Biden on the economy.
And Democrats who once worried about Harris being an unknown candidate compared to Biden may not be so concerned anymore. About 84 percent of respondents said they know enough about Harris’s career and policy positions to have an opinion about her.
Forty-nine percent of respondents view her favorably and the same number view her unfavorably. It’s a big shift since the Journal’s July survey, when unfavorable views of Harris outweighed favorable ones by 23 percentage points, the news outlet said.
The Journal suggested that Harris’s role in the Biden administration now may be separated from her role as leading the Democratic Party on the ballot. She is viewed much more positively as the leading candidate for the party but still receives a 42 percent approval rating for her job as vice president.
“Voters are assessing her job approval as Biden’s vice president, but they are assessing her as her own candidate for president,” Michael Bocian, a Democratic pollster who worked on the survey said. “She has emerged successfully as a candidate."
Other polling is showing Harris cutting into Trump’s lead, either pulling ahead of the former president or standing neck and neck with him nationally.
According to The Hill/Decision Desk HQ, Harris has a 3.9 percent lead over Trump, 49 to 45.1 percent.
The Wall Street Journal survey was conducted Aug. 24 – 28 among 1,500 voters and has a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.
