Vice President Kamala Harris has pulled off an 8-point turnaround for the Democrats, helping her party—which was trailing former President Donald Trump just two months ago—surge ahead of the Republican nominee.
A new USA Today/Suffolk University poll released Thursday showed Harris leading by 5 percentage points, 48 percent to Trump’s 43 percent. Those figures are 8-points up from where President Joe Biden was in late June when he was still expected to be the Democratic nominee. Biden exited the race on July 21, endorsing his vice president instead. Harris formally accepted the party’s nomination last week.
Newsweek reached out to the Harris campaign via email for comment.
Harris has pulled ahead largely thanks to major shifts in key voting demographics that typically vote blue, but had showed a lack of enthusiasm for Biden’s reelection campaign. Harris is doing 13 percentage points better than Biden among Black voters and 19 percentage points better among both Hispanic voters and young voters under 35. She now leads Trump among Black voters by 62 points, Hispanic voters by 16 points and young voters by 13 points. Trump had the advantage over Biden in June among both Hispanic voters and young voters.
Harris has also performed remarkably well among voters making less than $20,000 annually. In late June, Trump had a three-point edge over Biden among this income bracket. Thursday’s new poll shows that Harris has emerged with a 23-point lead over Trump.
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“With the ‘Brat Summer’ of Kamala Harris memes and emojis winding down, young people, persons of color, and low-income households have swung dramatically toward the vice president,” David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, said in a press release. “These same demographics were emphasized and woven together by numerous speakers at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.”
The poll was conducted among 1,000 likely voters from August 25 to August 28 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
The good news for Harris’ campaign comes after last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The vice president rallied her party behind her as she painted a vision of a campaign focused on the future and contrasted what she called her politics of “joy” against Trump’s message about the “bad things” that could come with a second Democratic administration.
The survey was also the first that the pollsters conducted after independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy dropped out of the race last week and decided to endorse Trump. Kennedy’s bid was supported by 8 percent of respondents in the June poll. Comparably, 38 percent backed Biden and 41 percent backed Trump. Independent candidate Cornell West, Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver each received one percent support.
There was debate on if Kennedy’s decision to exit the race would benefit Trump. It’s unclear how the backing of the former candidate will change the former president’s polling, but the August survey shows Trump was up two points from late July. West also saw a 1 point bump, while Stein and Oliver remained at one percent support.
The June poll was conducted among 1,000 registered voters between June 28 and June 30 and had a margin of error of plus and minus 3.1 percentage points.