The polls look good for Harris — and the Trump campaign just told on itself

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A series of new polls shows that Vice President Kamala Harris has either a slight lead in swing states or has closed the gap in others.

A USA Today/Suffolk University poll out on Thursday shows Harris with a five-point lead aganst Donald Trump, an eight-point turnaround from a June survey that showed President Joe Biden trailing. Specifically, she saw huge shifts to the point that she now has an impressive 23-point lead with people who earn $20,000 or less. Trump previously had a three-point lead in that demographic.

Of course, national surveys mean little, given the Electoral College. But Harris has shown vast improvement in numerous battleground states.

Polls from Fox News also show Harris has a one-point lead in Arizona; a two-point lead in Georgia and Nevada; and trails Trump by only one point in North Carolina. Earlier surveys when he was still top of the Democratic ticket had shown Joe Biden falling away in each of these states.

Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, are currently doing a swing through rural Georgia and she recently held her first major rally in Atlanta. She made a swing through Arizona and Nevada shortly after announcing Walz as her running mate. She made her first big speech about the economy and housing in North Carolina, where the state’s gubernatorial race might give her a lift. In other words, the Harris campaign has been focused on the swing states in a big way.

If Harris were to only win these four states, she would not need to win Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or Michigan — though the chances are that if she won these four, she would likely win at least one or more of the midwestern states.

Emerson College released a survey that is slightly less rosy than the others, but it does show Harris with a slight lead in Georgia, Michigan and Nevada, while she slightly trails in Arizona, North Carolina and Wisconsin, and is in a dead heat with Trump in Pennsylvania.

One sign that Trump’s campaign worries about these polls: Before the numbers dropped, they released a statement trashing Fox’s “atrocious polling.”

“President Trump continues to outperform polling from past cycles,” the campaign said. “President Trump is 10 points ahead of where he was in Arizona at this point in 2020, according to Fox. Likewise, he is running 8 points ahead of his 2020 polling in Nevada and 5 points ahead of his 2020 polling in North Carolina.”

This comes as Trump continues to face questions about his conduct during a visit to Arlington National Cemetery with the families of servicemembers killed in a terror attack during the US exit from Afghanistan. His running mate, JD Vance, tried to do damage control as the story built, accusing the media of “creating a story where I really don’t think there is one”. He went on to add that Harris “can go to hell.”

Republicans have hoped for a while that the “Harris honeymoon” is about to wear off. But it seems like her convention bump and positive reception, buoyed by fundraising and enthusiastic followers, is continuing for now into the next phase of her campaign.

If Harris’s ascent to the top of the ticket served as the first phase and her veepstakes served as a sort of “mini-primary” followed by a successful convention, the next 68 days might be characterized as phase four.

Tonight, Harris and Walz will hold a rally in Savannah, Georgia and CNN will air a joint interview with the two. This will be Harris’s first sitdown interview with a major news station since she became the Democratic nominee.

In the past, Harris has bombed sitdown interviews, most notably her 2021 NBC Nightly News interview with Lester Holt where she laughed off a question about why she had not visited the US-Mexico border. But like many other parts of her campaign, this sitdown gives her a chance to reset her relationship with news outlets.

Next week, Harris will do a blitz through Detroit and Pittsburgh — both cities with a heavy union presence — to capitalize off of her support from almost every major labor union.

The week after will come the biggest test of them all: her debate with Trump, followed by Walz’s debate with Vance. Trump’s will-he-or-won’t-he dance about if he will actually participate has made his followers simultaneously anxious and excited about the debate. Harris has responded to Trump’s attack lines by saying she would like him to “say it to my face,” only adding to the excitement.

Early voting will begin in September and October in the swing states, meaning that Harris will have to regularly target voters likely to turn in their ballots throughout those months. That’s a much more daunting task than aiming to get them to turn out on just one day, and requires continual momentum.

But as of right now, that momentum is on Harris’s side — and there are few signs Trump has figured out how to blunt it.