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Vice President Kamala Harris leads former President Donald Trump in three pivotal swing states—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan—according to polling averages from the 2024 Silver Bulletin presidential election forecast on Friday.
President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race on July 21 following weeks of interparty fighting among Democrats on whether he should pass the torch to the next generation after his debate fiasco against Trump in late June in Atlanta. Biden also endorsed Harris the day he withdrew from the race and she is now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
Before Biden dropped out of the race, Harris' polling showed that she was several points behind Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, in multiple polls, but she still did better than other top Democrats who were also polled. After Biden's endorsement of Harris, the vice president's campaign took off. She raised $310 million in July and her campaign's TikTok account currently has 2.9 million followers.
The vice president's success on the campaign trail seems to have made an impact on potential voters since her national polling average went up by 4.4 points in the past month. Harris is currently beating Trump 45 to 43.9 percent in the national polls, according to the Silver Bulletin presidential model.
Looking at certain swing states, which typically decide the election, Harris is up in Pennsylvania; although only by less than a point (45.3 to 44.8 percent); Wisconsin by 1.2 points (46 to 44.8 percent) and Michigan by 2.4 points (45.2 to 42.8 percent).
Meanwhile, Trump leads the vice president in the battleground states of Georgia (46.3 to 44.8 percent), North Carolina (46.7 to 44.7 percent), Arizona (46.3 to 43.8 percent) and Nevada (43.9 to 42.6 percent).
Despite Harris' recent success in some pivotal states and nationwide, this is still a very close race and it's looking like a tossup between the two.
Newsweek reached out to Harris' campaign for comment on Saturday morning, but it declined to comment. Newsweek also reached out to Trump's campaign via email for comment on Saturday morning.
The Silver Bulletin is named after Nate Silver, who is considered to be one of the leading polling analysts in the United States. Silver founded ABC News' poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight, but he is no longer affiliated with ABC News or FiveThirtyEight. Eli McKown-Dawson, an incoming post-grad student at The London School of Economics studying social statistics and survey methods, works with Silver as an assistant elections analyst.
The polling averages in Silver's presidential model adjust for which type of voters are surveyed, whether independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is present, and house effects, which are systematic tendencies for polling firms to favor one party's candidate over another. Additionally, more reliable polls are weighed more heavily in the Silver Bulletin polling averages.
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Rachel Dobkin is a Newsweek reporter based in New York. Her focus is reporting on politics. Rachel joined Newsweek in ... Read more