Vice President Kamala Harris is narrowly beating rival Donald Trump in a national presidential poll released Tuesday, one of the first conducted since US President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign.
Harris holds a two-point lead over Trump, 44 per cent to 42 per cent, according to the Reuters/Ipsos poll.
It was conducted in the two days after Biden announced Sunday he was dropping out of the race and endorsing his vice president.
In the previous week’s poll, Harris, 59, and Trump, now the elder in the presidential race at 78, were tied at 44 per cent.
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Harris, the overwhelming frontrunner for the Democratic nomination who is raking in endorsements and donations as well as pledged delegates, narrowly trails Republican flag-bearer Trump in another survey also released Tuesday.
Both results are within the polls’ margins of error.
The new surveys followed both the Republican National Convention, where Trump formally accepted the party’s presidential nomination, and Biden’s leaving the race.
Harris’s performance in the polls, bolstered by the excitement among Democratic voters about the shakeup in the race, shows her apparently neutralising the bounce that a nominee gets in the days after his or her party’s nominating convention.
In a PBS News/NPR/Marist poll conducted Monday, Trump edges Harris with 46 per cent to 45 per cent of US registered voters, with nine per cent undecided.
If third-party candidates or independents are included in the contest, Trump and Harris are tied at 42 per cent, with the others far behind.
The PBS News survey notably found that 87 per cent of all Americans think Biden’s decision to drop out was the right move, a view that crossed partisan and generational lines.
A plurality of respondents (41 per cent) said Biden’s decision increases Democrats’ chances of winning in November, compared to 24 per cent who said it decreases the party’s odds and 34 per cent who said it makes no difference.
Both surveys come in the aftermath of Trump surviving a shock assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13.
Trump maintains a very narrow advantage of 1.6 percentage points against Harris, according to an average of polls collated by RealClearPolitics.
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