Major Shifts Beneath the Surface in

a New Trump-Harris Poll

Nate Cohn
Fri, 26 July 2024 


Vice President Kamala Harris, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, during her first campaign rally in Milwaukee, on Tuesday, July 23, 2024. (Kenny Holston/The New York Times)

After all the political tumult of the last month, Thursday’s latest New York Times/Siena College poll is full of findings unlike any we’ve seen this cycle, with one exception: who leads the presidential race.

The poll found Donald Trump ahead of Kamala Harris by 1 percentage point, 48% to 47%, among likely voters. Other than the name of the Democratic candidate, “Trump +1” is a result that could have been from any other Times/Siena poll before President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate.

But on question after question, there are major shifts from previous Times-Siena polls, which were all taken before Harris essentially locked up her party’s nomination for president, before the Republican convention, and before the attempted assassination of Trump. Even the 1-point Harris deficit represents a significant improvement for Democrats from Biden’s 6-point deficit in our last Times/Siena poll.

These events make it hard to know what to make of the results of recent polls, including this one. The survey is a useful marker of where the race stands now, but there’s no reason to be confident that this is where the race will stand once the dust settles.

While the overall result between Harris and Trump may look familiar, the poll is full of signs that there’s a lot of dust still in the political air.

— Trump hits a high in popularity. Overall, 48% of registered voters say they have a favorable view of him, up from 42% in our last poll (taken after the debate but before the convention and assassination attempt). It’s his highest favorable number in a Times/Siena poll, which previously always found his favorable ratings between 39% and 45%.

— Harris is surging. In fact, her ratings have increased even more than Trump’s. Overall, 46% of registered voters have a favorable view of her, up from 36% when we last asked about her in February. Only 49% have an unfavorable view, down from 54% in our last measure. As important, her favorable rating is higher than Biden’s. In fact, it’s higher than his standing in any Times/Siena poll since September 2022, which so happens to be the last time Biden led a Times/Siena national poll of registered voters.

— The national political environment is a little brighter. The share of voters who say the country is on the “right track” is up to 27% — hardly a bright and smiley public, but still the highest since the midterm elections in 2022. Biden’s approval and favorable ratings are up as well. The ranks of the double haters have dwindled: With both Harris and Trump riding high, the number of voters who dislike both candidates has plunged to 8%, down from 20% in Times/Siena polls so far this year.

With all of these underlying changes in the attitudes about the candidates, there’s no reason to assume that this familiar Trump +1 result means that the race has simply returned to where it stood before the debate. For now, these developments have mostly canceled out, but whether that will still be true in a few weeks is much harder to say.

By the book, Trump’s gains over the last month resemble a classic “convention bounce,” perhaps with added goodwill from his survival of the assassination attempt. Historically, bounces usually fade, but not necessarily in their entirety.

What has happened to Harris over the last week doesn’t follow any book at all. She’ll presumably keep riding the momentum of her new candidacy for a while, but after that, anything is possible. Only time will tell how the public will react to her as they hear her — and the attacks against her — in the days and weeks ahead.

Below, a few outtakes from our poll.

Yes, Voters Seem Fine With the Democratic Makeover

I don’t think the Times/Siena poll has ever found 87% of voters who agreed on anything, but that’s the share who say they approve of Biden’s decision to stand aside in the presidential race. Only 9% disapprove.

Democrats, meanwhile, are ready for Kamala. Nearly four-fifths say the party should nominate her for president, compared with 14% who say they should nominate someone else. A slightly larger 27% say the party should encourage a competitive nominating process, but 70% say the party should unite behind Harris and quickly make her the nominee.

A More Typical Demographic Divide

If you’re a longtime reader of The New York Times, you know we’ve been tracking Biden’s weakness among young, Black, Hispanic and low-turnout voters for nearly a year now.

It will take some time — maybe more than a month, given the potential volatility ahead — before we have a good sense of the demographic contours of this new race. But in this poll at least, the Harris-Trump matchup brings a different and more typical demographic divide.

In the poll, Harris fares better among young (18 to 29) and Hispanic voters than Biden did in any survey this year. She fares better among nonvoters than Biden did in all but one Times/Siena poll over the same period. Conversely, she fares worse among white working-class voters and voters older than 65 than Biden did in all but one prior Times/Siena poll.

Of course, this is just one survey; the results of individual subgroups from one poll are noisy and subject to a hefty margin of error. But there’s good reason to think that these demographic shifts are part of something real. The findings are consistent with those of previous Times/Siena polls. And more generally, they’re in keeping with the expected relative strengths of a Black woman (who also has Indian ancestry) from California in her 50s compared with a white man from Scranton, Pennsylvania, in his 80s.

Will Kennedy help Harris?

Harris actually pulled even with Trump when all the minor-party candidates were included along with the independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Harris was at 44% and Trump at 43% (Harris’ lead rounds to zero using the exact figures, 43.5% to 43.2%), with Kennedy at 5%. That’s Kennedy’s lowest tally since we began naming him in our polls.

Trump led in the two-way race — but not the multicandidate race — because he won Kennedy’s sliver of support by more than a 2-to-1 ratio. It’s a small sample, but it is Trump’s largest advantage among Kennedy supporters in our polling to this point.

It’s just one poll, but there’s something to the idea that Kennedy’s presence in the race might more clearly help Harris. Throughout the race, Kennedy’s candidacy has tended to appeal more to the right than the left. In this poll, for instance, Kennedy’s favorable rating is positive among Republicans but negative among Democrats. Even so, he had been drawing relatively evenly from Biden and Trump, as Kennedy managed to win a considerable number of the disproportionately young voters disaffected with Biden.

Harris, however, does not necessarily have the same vulnerability. If she’s sufficiently appealing to young, disaffected voters who ordinarily lean Democratic, Kennedy might not siphon away as much of her support — and start to draw disproportionately from Trump.

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