Washington: US Vice President Kamala Harris leads Republican rival Donald Trump by 5 percentage points in an NBC News poll released on Sunday that found that respondents have come to see her more favourably since she emerged as the Democratic candidate for president.
Asked about their views of Harris since she became the nominee, 48% of 1,000 registered voters surveyed said it was positive compared to 32% in July - the largest jump among politician ratings polled by NBC since former Prez George Bush’s favorability rose after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks.
Asked about Trump, 40% of those polled said they viewed him positively compared to 38% in July, the news network said. The poll, conducted on Sept 13-17, has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
A separate CBS News poll also found Harris leading Trump, by 4 percentage points, 52% to 48%, among likely voters, with a margin of error rate of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
The findings are broadly in line with other recent national polls, including those by Reuters/Ipsos, that show a close contest heading into the Nov 5 election. While national surveys offer important signals on the views of the electorate, the state-by-state results of the Electoral College determine the winner, with a handful of battleground states likely to be decisive. In CBS’ poll of 3,129 registered voters surveyed Sept 18-20, Harris edged up 2 percentage points after a 50-50 split in Aug.
With a growing roster of polls showing Kamala edging ahead, the Trump campaign is building redundancies into its election denialism, proffering a range of excuses from “fake polls,” to Iranian interference to help Democrats, to illegal immigrants being enrolled to vote.
Trump also made an audacious effort to stir New Yorkers into voting for him with a raucous rally in Long Island, claiming, as he did in California, that the state was ripe for picking because Democrats had diminished the state. Both California and New York last voted Republican during the Reagan era and are now considered reliably Democratic (by around +20) to an extent neither party campaigns there. Candidates only go there for fund-raising or to campaign for Congressional candidates, which is what Trump was doing, although he used the occasion to talk up an improbable victory, telling New Yorkers to “get off your ass and vote for me.”
