Vice President Kamala Harris continues to lead former president Donald Trump in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania, according to a new post-debate poll, while the race remains a dead heat nationally.
Half of Pennsylvanians said they would vote for Harris if the election were held today compared to 46 percent who said they’d back Trump, according to a set of polls conducted by the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Siena College in the week after the September 10 ABC News debate. Harris’s 4-point lead is slightly outside the Pennsylvania survey’s margin of error of 3.8 percentage points.
While Pennsylvania voters thought Harris outperformed Trump in last week’s debate — 69 percent of respondents said Harris performed well, compared to 36 percent who said the same of Trump — the contest did not move the needle in the Keystone State, where Harris’s lead remains unchanged since early August. Just over 70 percent of the Pennsylvania electorate answered that they watched the presidential debate.
Nationally, 67 percent of likely U.S. voters thought Harris performed well during the presidential debate, with her strongest numbers coming from Democrats and independents. Trump’s debate performance was viewed less favorably, with 40 percent of U.S. voters saying he did well.
Trump remains deadlocked with Harris nationally. The two are tied at 47 percent nationwide less than two months before the presidential election.
The Times/Inquirer/Siena survey was conducted from September 11 to 16, mostly before the second assassination attempt against the GOP nominee on Sunday.
In Pennsylvania, Harris consistently leads Trump in other post-debate polls. A Quinnipiac University poll, for example, shows a 5-point lead in Harris’s favor just between the two nominees. In a hypothetical race with third-party candidates, she extended her lead to 6 points. The Quinnipiac poll did not judge the candidates nationwide.
Of the surveys that the Times pulled for comparison, the polling average shows Harris ahead by 3 points nationally and by 2 points in Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, a new Washington Post poll reveals a much closer race in the critical battleground state. Harris is favored by 48 percent of likely and registered voters, and Trump is supported by 47 percent of both types of voters.
Most election forecasters agree that Harris’s path to the presidency runs inevitably through the Keystone State. In 2020, the state pushed President Joe Biden over the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House and did the same for Trump four years earlier.