Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff wave as they board Air Force 2 at Delaware Air National Guard base in New Castle, Delaware, on July 22, 2024. (Erin Schaff/Pool/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Vice President Kamala Harris does better than President Joe Biden in a matchup with former President Donald Trump, a nationwide poll released Tuesday shows.
The poll, conducted by Florida Atlantic University, doesn’t show a major difference, but Harris vs. Trump is closer than Biden vs. Trump.
FAU found:
• 49% for Trump, the Republican nominee, to 44% for Harris, the de facto Democratic nominee, among likely voters.
• 49% for Trump to 41% for Biden, who ended his presidential candidacy on Sunday after weeks of pressure to drop out from fellow Democrats.
“It looks like, at least initially, that the race would tighten with her at the top of the ticket. But it’s probably worth pointing out this is prior to the official announcement he was dropping out. It may actually be closer as Democrats coalesce around Vice President Harris as the candidate,” said Kevin Wagner, a Florida Atlantic University political scientist.
Democrats have been doing that. She’s been endorsed by a wide swath of Democratic elected officials and activists representing all the voting blocs the party relies on for election victories and among people who were longtime Biden supporters and those who had preferred other candidates in 2020.
The poll was conducted starting on Friday, the day after the conclusion of the Republican National Convention.
Surveying stopped on Sunday afternoon, immediately after the news that Biden was ending his campaign. Wagner — who also is co-director of FAU’s PolCom Lab, a collaboration of the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies and Department of Political Science, which conducted the poll — said questioning was stopped because “big news can bias a sample.”
Democratic prospects
The poll results suggest that Harris may have room to increase her support since she’ll gain attention as the party’s standard-bearer moving forward.
And the numbers strongly suggest that Biden made the right decision in dropping out.
The 49% for Trump to 41% for Biden among likely voters was an improvement for Trump and decline for Biden. That’s an eight-point advantage for Trump.
FAU’s previous nationwide poll, released July 3, found a closer race, 46% of likely voters for Trump and 44% for Biden. That was a two-point advantage for Trump.
That poll was conducted after Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate with Trump, which generated the movement among many Democrats for Biden to end his candidacy.
In FAU’s April nationwide poll Biden was at 47% and 46% for Trump among likely voters. That was a one-point advantage for Trump.
Going from plus 1 to minus 2 to minus 8 is not a good trajectory for a candidate. “That’s the direction that I think was going to be hard for President Biden … and gives some sense about why they might have decided to call it quits.”
Trump ceiling?
The poll suggests that 49% of the vote, his share in both the Harris and Biden matchups, may be a ceiling for Trump.
Normally, the conclusion of a party convention is a high point for a presidential candidate, “which would be right about now,” Wagner said.
And the polling was taking place after all the attention on the July 13 assassination attempt on the former president’s life, which generated more visibility, sympathy and support for Trump.
Still, Wagner said it’s impossible to “definitively say” that Trump is at his ceiling.
Fine print
The poll of 797 U.S. registered voters was conducted July 19 to July 21 by Mainstreet Research for Florida Atlantic University’s PolCom Lab, which is a collaboration of the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies and Department of Political Science.
The survey used an online panel and automated phone calls to reach other voters. It has a margin of error equivalent to plus or minus 4 percentage points for the full survey of Democrats, Republicans and independents.
However, the margin of error for smaller groups, such as Republicans or Democrats, men and women, or younger and older voters, would be higher because the sample sizes are smaller.
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