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Harris gains ground on Trump with support from Hispanics and women: Reuters/Ipsos poll”

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday, Democrat Kamala Harris leads Republican Donald Trump 45 percent to 41 percent. The poll indicates that the vice president is igniting voter enthusiasm and agitating the race ahead of the Nov. 5 election.

In a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in late July, Harris led the former president by one point; however, this 4-percentage-point advantage among registered voters was greater. With a margin of error of two percentage points and a survey conducted over the course of eight days that concluded on Wednesday, it appeared that Harris was gaining traction with Hispanic and female voters.

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Harris outperformed Trump among female and Hispanic voters, respectively, by 49 percent to 36 percent, or 13 percentage points. In four surveys released in July by Reuters/Ipsos, Harris led by nine points among women and six points among Hispanics.

Trump maintained his lead over men and white voters by the same margins as in July, but his lead over voters without a college degree shrank to 7 points from 14 points in the most recent poll.

The results show how the US presidential contest has changed during the course of the summer. On July 21, President Joe Biden, 81, announced the collapse of his stumbling campaign following a dismal debate performance against Trump that prompted numerous calls from fellow Democrats to drop their support for him.

Since then, Harris has surpassed Trump in national surveys as well as those conducted in crucial swing states. The Electoral College results, which are determined state by state, determine the winner, with a few battleground states probably making a decisive difference. National surveys, such as those conducted by Reuters and Ipsos, provide significant signals about the opinions of the electorate.

Within the seven states that saw the closest 2020 election—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Michigan, and Nevada—Trump led Harris 45 percent to 43 percent of registered voters participating in the survey.

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A separate Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll published later on Thursday showed that Harris was either leading or tied with Trump in each of those states.

That poll showed Harris led Trump by 2 percentage points among registered voters across the seven states and was ahead by 1 point – a statistical tie – among likely voters. The margin of error was 1 percentage point across the seven states.

“It’s obvious that running against Harris is more challenging for Trump given the shift in these numbers, but it’s certainly not insurmountable,” Matt Wolking, a Republican campaign strategist who worked on Trump’s 2020 campaign, said in response to the Reuters/Ipsos poll results.

He said Trump needs to stay as focused as possible in his campaign “so he’s not scaring” away voters who were leaning his way because they didn’t like Biden.

Since formally accepting the Democratic nomination last week, Harris has embarked on a tour of battleground states including Georgia, where Biden had been hemorrhaging support before he ended his campaign.

Rising enthusiasm

Some 73 percent of Democratic registered voters in the Reuters/Ipsos poll said they were more excited about voting in November after Harris entered the race. And while a March Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 61 percent respondents who intended to vote for Biden were doing so mainly to stop Trump, 52 percent of Harris voters in the August poll were voting to support her as a candidate rather than primarily to oppose Trump.

“We see it in this poll that people are more motivated about the future than the past,” said Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, a liberal group that aims to grow the numbers of women of color in elected office. “They see Kamala Harris as the future, and Republicans see this election as just about Trump. Voters are more likely to be engaged when given the option of ‘more than’ beating Trump.”

But Trump voters also voiced enthusiasm about their candidate, with 64 percent saying their choice was more motivated by backing Trump than opposing Harris.

At 45 percent to 36 percent, voters chose Trump as their preferred candidate for managing the US economy, a larger margin than Trump’s victory in a separate Reuters/Ipsos poll this week.

In contrast, Harris’s lead over other candidates on abortion policy was 47 percent to 31 percent. Democrats find this issue particularly important since the conservative US Supreme Court invalidated the national right to an abortion in 2022. During his presidency from 2017 to 2021, Trump nominated three conservative justices to the court. Seventy percent of Democrats and about 41% of voters overall expressed concern that the next president would enact a nationwide ban on abortion.

The latest poll’s survey period partially overlapped with the Aug. 19-22 Democratic National Convention in Chicago where Harris formally accepted her party’s nomination, and it remains to be seen whether the same level of enthusiasm for Harris will continue.

The poll was conducted nationally and gathered responses from 4,253 US adults, including 3,562 registered voters.

Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suspended his campaign on Aug. 23 while the poll was still being conducted, had the support of 6 percent of voters in the survey.

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