Kamala Harris Ahead With Most Accurate Pollster for First Time Since July

Vice President Kamala Harris is ahead of her opponent, former President Donald Trump, for the first time since July, according to the nation’s most accurate pollsters.
The latest New York Times and Siena College poll, conducted between September 29 and October 6, shows that Harris is ahead of Trump by 3 points among likely voters, on 47 percent to his 44 percent. The poll surveyed 3,385 likely voters and had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 points.
Newsweek has contacted the Trump and Harris campaigns via email for comment.
This is the first time Harris has led Trump in the Times/Siena poll since July, when President Biden dropped out of the race and Democrats rallied behind Harris as his replacement.
In July, the New York Times and Siena College became the first major pollsters to show Trump in the lead after a successful string of polls for the vice president following the launch of her campaign, putting Trump ahead of Harris by 2 points among registered voters and 1 point among likely voters.
Meanwhile, when third-party candidates were included, Harris led Trump by 1 point among likely voters, while they were even among registered voters.
In the two subsequent national polls conducted by the New York Times and Siena College, both in September, Trump led Harris by between 1 and 2 points among registered voters, while they were tied among likely voters in one poll and Trump led by between 1 and 2 points in the other.
The New York Times and Siena College are rated as the most accurate pollsters by FiveThirtyEight.
The most recent results, which come as the contest moves into its final month, may be a cause for concern for the Trump campaign, which still trails the Harris campaign nationally and in 4 swing states.
FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker shows that Harris is 2.6 points ahead of Trump nationally, while she leads the former President by between 1 and 2 points in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Nevada. Trump is leading Harris by similarly small margins in North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia.
Harris needs 44 electoral votes from the toss-up states this year to win, while Trump would need 51. If Harris were to win Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nebraska’s 2nd district, she would have enough votes to secure victory.
FiveThirtyEight’s forecast shows she is set to win Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which would get her over the line.
However, tight margins in the battleground states reveal that they are still anybody’s to win in what could be one of the closest elections in modern history.
“Slim margins in the swing states make this cycle’s presidential race the closest in decades—the outcome could be closer than in any election in nearly 150 years,” FiveThirtyEight wrote on its website last month.
But experts have warned that voters should not give too much heed to the polls, which have often been inaccurate in recent elections.
In 2020, the American Association for Public Opinion Research called it the biggest polling miss in 40 years when polls showed that Biden’s lead over Trump in the final two weeks of the campaign was twice as large as it was when the votes were counted.
Meanwhile, in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was facing Trump, FiveThirtyEight’s model gave Clinton a 71 percent chance of victory to Trump’s 28 percent. Clinton ultimately won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College.
But while polls have historically underestimated Trump’s levels of support, experts believe that the polls will not be as inaccurate this year because they have gotten better at capturing likely Trump supporters who were undercounted in the past. Thus, Harris’ lead in the polls could accurately reflect voters across the country.
“Many pollsters today are using past vote [history] to correct for the Trump undercount,” Cliff Young, the president of Ipsos polling, previously told Newsweek.