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The latest polls in Pennsylvania look bleak for Kamala Harris


The latest polls in Pennsylvania look bleak for Kamala Harris

Multiple polls from the battleground state of Pennsylvania show Kamala Harris trailing her opponent Donald Trump less than a week before the election.

Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral votes, is crucial to victory in November. The state has voted for the overall winner in 48 of the last 59 elections.

Polls show a tight race between Harris and Trump, but give the former president a slight lead of one to three points.

For example, the most recent Fox News poll, conducted between October 24 and October 28, showed Trump with a one-point lead over Harris in a head-to-head matchup of likely voters.

Harris
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison, Wisconsin, October 30, 2024. Multiple polls from the battleground state of Pennsylvania show Harris trailing Donald Trump…


Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Harris and Trump were tied at 48 percent each among likely voters in the expanded ballot. In September, Trump had a 1-point lead over Harris in the expanded vote.

However, among registered voters, Harris is ahead by two points in both the expanded ballot and the head-to-head comparison. All registered and likely voter results are within the margin of error.

Another poll conducted during the same period by Monmouth University showed Trump with a one-point lead among likely voters, 47 percent, to Harris' 46 percent — a lead within the margin of error. In the most recent Quinnipiac University poll, also conducted between October 24 and 28, Trump was ahead by 2 points in a two-way contest and by 1 point in the expanded vote. The survey had a margin of error of +/- 2.1 percentage points.

The latest AtlasIntel poll, conducted between Oct. 25 and Oct. 29, shows slightly better results for Trump, with him leading by three points in a head-to-head matchup and a two-point lead in the expanded vote. However, his lead was still within the poll's margin of error of ±3 points. Newsweek has reached out to the Harris and Trump campaigns for comment.

Although Trump's lead is slim, the latest polls are bad news for the Harris campaign, which is trailing the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania, according to several pollsters.

Harris was previously leading in the Keystone State after becoming the Democratic nominee for president, but in the last two weeks, Trump has taken the lead, giving him a 0.4-point lead and showing, according to FiveThirtyEight's poll tracker , that he is expected to win the state.

Pollster Nate Silver's tracker also shows Trump leading by 0.6 points in Pennsylvania, while RealClearPolitics shows him leading by 0.8 points.

But despite Trump's narrow lead, there is still hope for Harris in the state after comedian Tony Hinchcliffe sparked a firestorm of criticism and dominated headlines at Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday.

At the rally, Hinchcliffe joked that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of trash.” While Trump campaign adviser Danielle Alvarez made it clear that Hinchcliffe's controversial comments “do not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” the joke was poorly received. The backlash could hit Trump particularly hard in Pennsylvania – the swing state with the highest proportion of Puerto Ricans, where they make up 3.7 percent of the population. In 2020, Biden narrowly won the state by 1.2 points after Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016.

On the same day as Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden, the vice president was in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Harris used her visit to release a video about her plan for Puerto Rico, which Puerto Rican music icon Bad Bunny shared on his Instagram account.

Early voting data from Pennsylvania shows that more Democrats than Republicans voted in the state, with registered Democrats making up 57 percent of early voters compared to 32 percent for Republicans, according to the University of Florida's Early Vote Tracker. But it's unclear what this means for the election, as early voting data only shows whether voters are registered with a party, not who they are voting for.

Trump's strength in Pennsylvania lies in the state's white working-class population, a demographic that makes up nearly 75 percent of the state and typically leans Republican. This could be a crucial advantage as the election approaches

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