Donald Trump v Kamala Harris: who’s ahead in the polls? (2024)

Key dates

Aug 19th, Democratic National Convention

As at the Republican convention a month earlier, the Democrats will formally nominate their presidential candidate in Chicago.

Sep 10th, second presidential debate

The two main candidates are set to go head to head a week after Labour Day on ABC News (traditionally when Americans begin to pay attention to the election). Mr Biden’s catastrophic performance in the first debate sowed the seeds for the end of his candidacy. Ms Harris will surely provide livelier opposition to Mr Trump, who has suggested that a further two debates be held on other networks, on Fox News and NBC.

Nov 5th, election day

Polls open on a Tuesday in early November, though early voting and mail-in ballot initiatives will mean many Americans will have already voted. Counting ballots will go on for weeks in some states.

The candidates

Kamala Harris

Vice-president

At 59, Ms Harris is more than two decades younger than Joe Biden, whom she replaced as the Democratic nominee. Her mother was an endocrinologist born in India; her father is an economist born in Jamaica. In California she won elections as a prosecutor by leaning to the right on criminal-justice issues, while also appealing to Democrats, and was elected as the state’s attorney-general in 2010. Since she came to Washington, first as a senator in 2017, Ms Harris has been most effective at debates and hearings, where her skills as a litigator are on display.

She is a creature of institutional politics, not a visionary or an ideologue, and has struggled to define herself on a national stage. Her presidential run in 2020 crashed badly. As vice-president she is tied to the Biden administration’s record, which is unpopular despite the major legislation it passed to onshore chip manufacturing and invest in green energy. If she is to beat Mr Trump she will need to answer his attack lines on immigration directly and lay out a more ambitious domestic policy agenda than Mr Biden was able to communicate.

Donald Trump

Former president

Mr Trump’s extraordinary campaign follows his no less remarkable term as America’s 45th president, which concluded shortly after his supporters staged a violent attack on the Capitol. His alleged role in instigating the attack and a broader effort to overturn results of the 2020 election resulted in two criminal indictments, in federal court and Georgia state court. A judge he appointed dismissed a further felony indictment against him, though prosecutors are appealing. The 78-year-old denies all wrongdoing. Mr Trump is a billionaire who made (and lost) much of his money in real estate, before he became a reality-TV star. This time his campaign pairs familiar culture-war issues (building a border wall, “left-wing gender insanity”) with fresh grievances (against the lawyers prosecuting his cases and the judges overseeing them).

On July 13th a gunman shot Mr Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, grazing the former president’s ear but otherwise leaving him unharmed (a bystander was killed). Afterwards Mr Trump briefly seemed a changed candidate, trying to present himself as a unifier in a speech at the Republican convention in Milwaukee. But he went back to his past ways quickly, throwing insults at his political opponents.

Methodology

To build our poll tracker, we adapted the work of political scientists Simon Jackman and Luke Mansillo, of the University of Sydney, and Jack Bailey, of the University of Manchester. Their approach treats each poll as an imperfect estimate of some “true” support for each candidate. A statistical model is used to estimate the “true” voting intention, given recent polls. The model takes into account differences in methodology between polls and the partisan tilt of individual polling firms’ output.

For the purposes of estimating characteristics such as pollster-level biases, our tracker incorporates surveys that included Donald Trump and Joe Biden up until July 21st, when Mr Biden withdrew from the election. However, it bases its estimate of the race between Mr Trump and Kamala Harris solely on polls conducted after that date. The discontinuity visible on July 21st reflects the change in the Democratic nominee.

In cases where a pollster releases multiple results on the same day, we prefer polls which exclude third parties. Third-party support tends to decline as the election approaches, partly because they may not appear on the ballot in many states. We also prefer surveys of “likely voters”, rather than “registered voters” or all adults. This is to capture election-day dynamics and the importance of turnout in American elections.