Latest presidential election polls: Harris vs Trump

Assassination attempts, the dropping out of the incumbent, criminal convictions and a record-breaking donation haul – the 2024 US presidential election cycle is a rollercoaster ride. 
With only a matter of weeks to go until Americans head to the polls on November 5th, the Telegraph is tracking the race at every turn.
Kamala Harris has maintained a lead over Donald Trump ever since Joe Biden withdrew and endorsed her as the Democratic nominee, according to our national polling aggregates.
Few sparks flew during the televised debate between vice presidential candidates JD Vance and Tim Walz, with neither inflicting a blow likely to impact the race. 
Harris maintains a three-point lead, but the contest is anything but settled. The immigration crisis and abortion debate continue to polarise, the candidates’ running mates are moving the dial in unpredictable ways, and almost all of the swing states look set to go right down to the wire. 

The road to the White House is anything but straightforward. Five times the winner of the popular vote has lost the election – Hillary Clinton in 2016 most recently.
The outcome depends on Electoral College votes: each state returns a share of the country’s 538 electors, distributed according to population. The magic number for the presidency is a 270 majority.
Current margins in state-level polls would have Harris closer to the line than her rival. But there is less than half a point between them for around 100 pivotal electors, most of whom from the swing states.
Immigration has arguably been the most hot-button issue of the campaign. Harris was handed the task of tackling the “root causes” of Central American migration early in her term. A gift to a Trump campaign that last won on a platform of “Build the Wall”, she has repeatedly been accused of being a “failed border tsar”.
When Biden dropped out, his vice president had a net disapproval rating of 16 points. Her popularity has skyrocketed since, recently drawing even. The president’s approval is tanking, however, as he becomes the scapegoat for all of his Democratic administration’s shortcomings.
Trump, on the other hand, is far more vulnerable on reproductive rights. Polls of US adults consistently find a majority support the right to abortion at least in some circumstances, and Harris has strongly voiced her desire to undo the reversal of Roe vs Wade. The Republican candidate is currently running at a net disapproval rating of 10 points.
Vice presidential picks are often more about political calculation than aptitude for the top job. They can balance out a ticket, moderating a fiery presidential candidate, expand its appeal to a broader range of demographic groups or deliver a key state.
JD Vance, the 40-year-old Ohio senator, bestselling author and Yale-educated venture capitalist was unveiled as Trump’s running mate in July. A series of gaffes at rallies, as well as unearthed comments about America being run by “childless cat ladies”, have seen him shape out to be the least popular VP hopeful in history.
His counterpart is 60-year-old Minnesota governor Tim Walz. A relative unknown on the national political stage, the Democrats have been keen to emphasise his small-town Nebraskan roots with a view to swaying undecided Midwestern voters. While more popular than his counterpart, he also emerged as a divisive figure with the electorate.
The pair went head-to-head on the debate stage on October 1st, in what turned out to be a relatively courteous affair – save a fiery exchange on Trump’s earlier claim that migrants were “eating cats and dogs”. Snap polls gave the Republican the edge, his ease and affable manner contrasting with a flustered Walz.
Some states are blue through-and-through – think California and Washington on the Pacific coast, or Massachusetts and New York on the shores of the Atlantic – others are strongholds of the GOP: the Great Plains’ Wyoming, the Rust Belt’s West Virginia or the Deep South’s Alabama.
Minds here are assumed made up regardless of who appears on the ballot, and candidates rarely lavish them with their time or money as a result. The outcome of the election instead hinges on a handful of key battlegrounds that could “swing” either way.
In 2024, these are Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada. Together they account for 93 Electoral College votes, all of which are to play for.
With more votes to cast than any other swing state, clinching Pennsylvania will be election night’s most sought-after prize. After siding with the Democratic candidate in every presidential contest between 1988 and 2012, Trump bested Hillary Clinton there in 2016 by a margin of just 0.8 per cent. In 2020, Biden won it back.
The most recent polls have the 2024 contenders neck-and-neck, in what is shaping up to be the tightest race in the country. It’s no surprise that a disproportionate share of campaign resources have been spent here.
Last time round, Biden squeaked to victory in Georgia by 49.5 per cent to 49.3 per cent – the narrowest margin in the country and breaking a quarter-century Republican streak. The Trump campaign’s legal challenges, all of which have since been dropped or dismissed, became the centrepiece of his election interference claims.
Although the swelling population of Atlanta is believed to be tilting the state ever more to the left, the latest polling shows the contest there is anything but settled.
Despite the Democrats’ success in North Carolina’s gubernatorial races, in presidential politics the state is reliably Republican: the GOP candidate has prevailed here in 12 of the last 14 presidential races.
But Trump’s margin of victory fell from 3.6 per cent in 2016 to just 1.3 per cent in 2020. Entering the home stretch of the 2024 race, the Democrats smell opportunity, with a handful of pollsters finding Harris in the lead.
Michigan was the beating heart of the American auto industry until the 1970s. Economic woes have since precipitated population decline. The state’s weight in the Electoral College is reducing as a result, but it remains consequential and unpredictable.
The state returned Barack Obama by a margin of 9.5 per cent in 2012, swung for Trump by 0.2 per cent in 2016, then back to blue for Biden by 2.8 per cent in 2020. Most recent polls have Harris edging ahead by margins of up to three points.
Arizona’s electoral college votes have gone to the Democrats just twice in presidential elections since 1952 – most recently for Biden in 2020, albeit by a margin of only 0.3 per cent. This result was also repeatedly and unsuccessfully challenged in the courts.
The burgeoning Latino community, which has grown from a quarter to a third of the population since 2000, is thought to be behind the state’s emergence as one to watch. The latest polls have the result on a knife edge, with Trump leading just one point to Ms Harris.
Until Trump’s 2016 victory, Wisconsin voters opted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential contest between 1988 and 2012. But this overlooks how close the race usually is: Al Gore carried the state by just 5,700 votes in 2000, and John Kerry by just 11,000 votes in 2004. Biden’s 2020 margin was just 0.7 per cent.
The decision to host the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee – Wisconsin’s most populous city – was a calculated one. With just over a month to go until election day, Harris is slightly ahead, but that could change fast.
Nevada has been a political bellwether for the past century, having been carried by the president-to-be in more elections than any other – Hillary Clinton a notable exception. The state is split between a deserted and conservative north, and the Democratic stronghold of Clark County, home to the bright lights of Las Vegas.
In 2020, Biden won Nevada by 2.5 per cent. Most recent pollsters, however, hand Trump the lead in the state in the closing stages of the 2024 race.
The Telegraph relies on a variety of US polls aggregated by FiveThirtyEight. Only head-to-heads between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are considered.
Exclusively polls of registered voters feed into our national voting intention tracker, which is updated hourly. Our locally estimated scatterplot smoothing (LOESS) model fits multiple regressions over subsets of five per cent of the data around each point.
Polls are also weighted based on the grade assigned to the pollster by FiveThirtyEight – taking into account past empirical accuracy and methodological transparency. Low-rated pollsters are ignored.
Sampling error is unavoidable – there is always a risk that the chosen population’s views are not representative of the public as a whole, and as such an individual poll may not be an exact depiction of reality. This is why we take a poll of polls, and why we depict the 95 per cent confidence interval with shading.
For the running predictor of electoral college votes, we start by taking an average of the last five polls to come out of each state. Due to the lower availability of state-level polling, polls of all population groups – all adults, registered voters and likely voters – are considered.
If either candidate is polling five or more points ahead of the other, the state is deemed to be “solidly” on their side, and the corresponding number of electoral college votes is awarded to them. If their lead is between 0.5 and five points, the state is said to be “leaning” their way. Where margins are tighter, the state is considered a “tossup”. Total votes represent the sum of “solidly” and “leaning” states.
Our swing state tracker charts the latest three individual polls in each 2024 battleground.
Approval ratings are national net proportions of respondents approving, minus those disapproving. Joe Biden’s current presidential approval and Harris’s vice-presidential approval, is compared to Trump’s on the same day of his term in office.
The favourability of vice-presidential picks JD Vance and Tim Walz is the sum of national “Very favourable” and “Somewhat favourable” response shares (and vice-versa for unfavourable views). The net figure is the subtraction of the two.