With Joe Biden out of the race, President Trump will be facing a new candidate in 2024. Biden endorsed Kamala Harris shortly after announcing his withdrawal.
Democrats who are hoping Kamala Harris has what it takes to defeat President Trump may be disappointed. According to four recent polls, Trump leads Harris in three of them, showing she is not polling much better than Biden.
NBC News reported:
With President Joe Biden exiting the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris now becomes the overwhelming front-runner to be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.
Harris’ biggest challenge lies further ahead, though: She has been polling the same as Biden — or just slightly better — against Republican nominee Donald Trump, according to multiple surveys taken before Biden withdrew from the 2024 contest.
…
And Biden was running behind Trump in many national and battleground-state polls — which precipitated the president’s withdrawal.
In NBC News’ latest national poll, conducted more than a week after Biden’s dismal debate performance but before the assassination attempt on Trump, both the president and Harris trailed Trump by 2-point margins among registered voters, though the actual percentages for each candidate were slightly different. Trump led Biden 45%-43%, while he took 47% to Harris’ 45% in their matchup. Both ballot tests fell within the poll’s margin of error.
A national poll conducted the week before the assassination attempt on Trump shows him beating Harris by eight points in a six-way matchup. The Manhattan Institute poll of 2,100 likely voters, taken July 7-13 and released July 16, has Trump at 44 percent and Harris at 36 percent, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at six percent and Chase Oliver, Jill Stein, and Cornel West each at one percent. Five percent of respondents were unsure, four percent would vote for someone else, and two percent said they would not vote. The poll has a margin of error of 2.7 percent.
In a head-to-head matchup, Trump leads Harris 48 to 46 percent, with six percent undecided. Trump also beat Biden (48-45) and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (47-43) in head-to-head matchups.
2024 National GE:
— Political Polls (@Politics_Polls) July 21, 2024
Trump 44% (+8)
Harris 36%
Kennedy 6%
West 1%
Stein 1%
Oliver 1%
.@ManhattanInst, 2,100 LV, 7/7-13 https://t.co/ddAW0rJy9h
A statewide poll in Georgia by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, released on Sunday, shows President Trump leading Kamala Harris by five points in a head-to-head matchup, 51 to 46 percent. The poll, conducted from July 9-18, surveyed 1,000 likely voters and has a margin of error of 3.1 percent.
📊 Georgia GE: @ajc | University of Georgia
— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) July 21, 2024
🟥 Donald Trump: 51% (+5)
🟦 Kamala Harris: 46%
#63 (2.2/3.0) | 1,000 LV | July 9-18https://t.co/0mGYvUy2EG pic.twitter.com/IJhSsiQjQc
Real Clear Politics average has Donald Trump leading by 1.7% over Kamala Harris.
According to Politico, Joe Biden decided to drop out after his aides briefed him on polling data that showed he had no path to victory (excerpt):
Early Saturday, Biden told senior aides it was “full steam ahead” for the campaign. But by later that evening, he had changed his mind following a long discussion with his two closest aides.
Steve Ricchetti, who’s been with Biden since his days in the Senate, drove to see the president at his house on the Delaware shore on Friday. Mike Donilon arrived on Saturday. The two men, both of whom had been by Biden’s side during key decisions about whether to seek the presidency in 2016 and 2020, sat at a distance from the president, still testing positive for Covid, and presented damning new information in a meeting that would hasten the end of Biden’s political career.
In addition to presenting new concerns from lawmakers and updates on a fundraising operation that had slowed considerably, they carried the campaign’s own polls, which came back this week and showed his path to victory in November was gone, according to five people familiar with the matter, who, like others interviewed for this article, were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. Biden asked several questions during the exchange.
