Vice President Kamala Harris has a three-point lead over former President Donald Trump in the battleground state of Pennsylvania according to a survey conducted by two pollsters—one with a record of working with the Trump campaign.
The poll of 1,398 likely Pennsylvania voters was carried out as a joint project by Democrat-linked pollster Impact Research and Fabrizio Ward, a polling company used by Trump’s team, on behalf of non-profit AARP, which advocates for America’s age 50 and over. It found Harris led Trump with 50 percent of the vote against 47 percent, though the Republican had an eight-point lead with voters age 50 and older. The survey was conducted between September 17 and 24.
Pennsylvania is widely seen as a crucial state that will help determine the 2024 presidential election winner, with 19 Electoral College votes up for grabs. The Keystone State was won in 2016 by Trump, who beat Hillary Clinton by about 0.7 points, then in 2020 by Biden by 1.2 points. Overall, the 2024 presidential contest remains on a knife’s edge, with a recent forecast from renowned pollster Nate Silver giving Harris a 57.3 percent chance of victory, against 42.5 percent for Trump.
RONDA CHURCHILL/AFP/CHANDAN KHANNA/GETTY
The AARP survey found a major gender divide in preferred presidential candidate, with Trump enjoying a 17-point lead over Harris with men age 50 and over, while they were tied with women in the same age group. Among voters age 50 and above, 91 percent said they are “extremely motivated” to vote in November, a six-point increase on the last AARP-commissioned poll that was released in May.
Newsweek contacted representatives of the Harris and Trump campaigns for comment via email on Tuesday outside of regular office hours.
An average of a dozen recent Pennsylvania polls, which were conducted between September 11 and 29, by election website RealClearPolitics, gave Trump a 0.2 percent lead with 48.1 percent of the vote to Harris’ 47.9 percent. This was the first RealClearPolitics polling average to give Trump the lead since September 16.
The RealClearPolitics polling average included a survey from Rasmussen Reports, a conservative-linked pollster that polling website 538 stopped using in its surveys earlier this year after concluding it no longer met the required standard.
A poll of 1,090 likely Pennsylvania voters conducted between September 26 and 29 by Republican-linked pollster Trafalgar Group, found Trump ahead with 47.5 percent of the vote to 45.3 percent for Harris.
The most recent 538 analysis of recent national polls, published on September 30, gave Harris a 2.8 percent lead over Trump with 48.5 percent of the vote to his 45.7 percent. However, because of the Electoral College system Trump could lose the popular vote in November and still win the election, as he did in 2016 against Clinton.
