US Election Polls: Who’s Leading – Harris or Trump?

American voters will go to the polls on November 5 to elect their next president.

The election was initially a rematch of 2020, but was upended in July when President Joe Biden ended his campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.

The big question today is: will the result result in a second term for Donald Trump or the election of the first female president of the United States?

As Election Day approaches, we’ll track the polls and see what effect the campaign will have on the race for the White House.

In the months leading up to Mr. Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race, polls consistently showed him trailing former President Trump. Although hypothetical at the time, several polls suggested that Ms. Harris would not do much better.

But the race tightened after she entered the campaign and she took a slight lead over her rival in the national poll average, a lead she has maintained since. The latest national polling averages for both candidates are shown below, rounded to the nearest whole number.

In the poll tracking table below, the trend lines show how these averages have changed since Harris entered the race and the dots indicate the difference between the results of different polls.

While these national polls are a useful guide to gauging a candidate’s popularity across the country, they are not necessarily an accurate way to predict the outcome of the election.

This is because the United States uses an electoral college system, in which each state is assigned a number of votes approximately corresponding to the size of its population. A total of 538 Electoral College votes are at stake, so a candidate needs 270 votes to win.

The United States has 50 states, but since most of them almost always vote for the same party, there are actually only a handful where both candidates have a chance of winning. These are the places where the election will be won or lost and are known as “battleground states”.

Right now, the polls are very close in all seven key states, making it difficult to know who is actually leading the race. There are fewer state polls than national polls, so we have less data to work with and each poll has a margin of error that means the numbers may be higher or lower.

As things stand, the latest polls suggest that less than a percentage point separates the two candidates in several states. This is particularly the case for Pennsylvania, a key state since it has the greatest number of electoral votes and it is therefore easier for the winner to reach the 270 votes necessary.

Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were all Democratic strongholds before Trump turned them red in his run for president in 2016. Mr. Biden won them back in 2020 and if Ms. Harris can do the same this year, she will be on her way to winning the election.

In a sign of how the race has evolved since Ms. Harris became the Democratic nominee, on the day Joe Biden left the race, he was ahead of Trump by nearly five percentage points on average in these seven key states.

The numbers we used in the charts above are averages created by the poll analysis website 538, part of the American news channel ABC News. To create them, 538 collects data from individual polls conducted nationally and in key states by a large number of polling organizations.

As part of its quality control, 538 only includes surveys conducted by companies that meet certain criteria, such as transparency on the number of respondents, when the survey was conducted, and how it was conducted ( phone calls, text messages, online, etc.).

Right now, polls indicate that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are within a few percentage points of each other, both nationally and in key states — and when the race is this close, it’s very difficult to predict the winners.

Polls underestimated support for Trump in 2016 and 2020. Pollsters will attempt to remedy this problem in a number of ways, including making their results reflect the makeup of the voting population.

These adjustments are difficult to make, and pollsters still have to make educated guesses about other factors, like who will actually turn out to vote on November 5.

Written and produced by Mike Hills and Libby Rogers. Graphic design by Joy Roxas.