Kamala Harris Erases Donald Trump’s Lead in Swing States on Inflation

New polling suggests Vice President Kamala Harris is now leading or tied with former President Donald Trump in all but one of the seven battleground states.
Harris’ lead is currently within the margin of error in Arizona (+2), Michigan (+3), Nevada (+1), Pennsylvania (+1) and Wisconsin (+2). Trump is ahead in Georgia with predicted results of 49 percent to 47 percent. The two candidates are also tied in North Carolina at 49 percent, according to findings from the Cook Political Report published today.
The path to victory in the Electoral College system is through swing states, where the electorate is more mixed in terms of which political party they voted for in the past. This election cycle, the winner will need to carry some or all of the following seven states: Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Similarly to 2016 and 2020, the Cook Political Report suggests Trump is unable to win more than 49 percent of the vote in swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona.
For the first time, however, the Cook Political Report suggested that a “plurality of swing state voters” now believe a Democrat will win the presidential election. According to the report, 46 percent of voters think Harris will win, compared to 39 percent favoring Trump.
This is an 11-point wing in Harris’ favor since August.
The Cook Political Report in August showed Harris with a narrow lead overall and leading or tied with Trump in all but one of the seven battleground states.
Political analysts Amy Walter and Jessica Taylor noted that under the numbers, they still found “significant shifts,” particularly around Trump’s advantage on his “two strongest issues – inflation and immigration.”
“However, Harris has seen some slippage of her own: as her lead among independent voters has shrunk from eight points this summer to two points in September,” they wrote.
Similar to the August report, Trump holds a five-point lead on who voters trust to “deal with the economy.”
That said, on specific issues, like “getting inflation under control,” Trump’s six-point lead from August has vanished. Today, voters are more evenly divided, at 47 percent, on who they trust more to handle the issue. In addition, 60 percent of swing state voters say the economy “concerns them the most.”
Walter and Taylor point to a few different explanations for this shift.
“The first is that Harris’ message on the economy has broken through,” they wrote. “Since kicking off her campaign two months ago, Harris has honed in on an ‘affordability’ message that stresses reducing the costs of pharmaceutical drugs, cracking down on price gouging and promoting affordable housing.”
Harris spoke about her economic plans last week in front of the Economic Club of Pittsburgh. She called herself a “pragmatic” pro-capitalist Democrat in the vein of Franklin Roosevelt.
The vice president used the speech, which her campaign billed as an important policy address, to make a pitch for job creation programs and argue that the economy works best for everyday Americans when private companies abide by “consistent and transparent rules of the road.”
Walter and Taylor also suggested that Trump’s attempts to link Harris to her role within President Joe Biden’s administration’s economic policies have “not been as effective as Republicans had hoped.”
Harris remains more popular than Biden, and the report shows her job approval rating as vice president as 12 points better than Biden’s.
Even more so, 45 percent of voters from swing states said that a 20 percent tariff on imported goods would “increase the prices consumers pay to pay for the tariff.” A lower number, 38 percent, of swing state voters said they thought the tariff would mean “companies would bring more manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.”
Sentiments around the economy and inflation show that voters believe the two are getting better or staying the same compared to August and May.
The Cook Political Report shows Trump with his largest lead over Harris, 51 percent to 42 percent, on the issue of border and immigration.
However, this is a five-point drop from his lead over Harris in August.
“Likely helping Harris is the fact that the southern border is no longer as overwhelmed with the surge of migrants, and as such is no longer in the center of media coverage,” Walter and Taylor wrote.
Voters in border states like Arizona and Nevada continue to give Trump an advantage on this issue, according to the report. In states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina, however, Trump’s lead has been cut in half.
“Harris has held onto a 1-point lead on being trusted to ‘make you feel safer,'” Patrick Toomey, partner at the Democratic polling firm BSG, wrote in the Cook report. “This tells us that voters’ dislike of Trump’s personal qualities isn’t just an aversion to insult-laden tirades, but a recognition that his personal vendettas and out of control reactions put Americans at risk of harm and hardship.”