A new Pew Research Center poll finds no clear leader nationally in the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, amid “clear signs that Harris has energized Democratic voters.”
In Pew’s latest poll, 46% of registered voters support Harris, 45% support Trump, and 7% support Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a shift from Pew’s July polling, when Trump held a 4-point edge over President Joe Biden.
Similarly sized majorities of both Harris supporters and Trump supporters now say they’re strong backers of their chosen candidate (64% of Trump supporters and 62% of Harris supporters say this). In July there was more of a gap: just 43% of Biden supporters said they supported their chosen candidate strongly, compared with 63% of Trump supporters.
The poll finds most of Harris’ gains coming at the expense of Kennedy. The vast majority of Biden’s former supporters now support Harris (97%) and Trump also has retained most of his July supporters (95%). But just 39% of voters who supported Kennedy in July still say they’re backing him, Pew finds, with 39% now backing Harris, and 20% now backing Trump. The poll did not test a head-to-head version of the race without Kennedy included.
Pew finds that Harris has improved on Biden’s performance with voters in a number of key subgroups, with Trump’s support remaining largely stable since July:
- 49% of female voters support her, with 42% backing Trump (in July, 40% backed Biden and 40% Trump)
- 77% of Black voters support her, with 13% backing Trump (in July, 64% backed Biden and 13% Trump); Kennedy’s support among Black voters dropped from 21% in July to 7% now
- 57% of voters younger than 30 support her, with 29% backing Trump (in July, 48% backed Biden and 28% Trump)
The Pew Research Center poll surveyed 7,569 registered voters on Aug. 5-11, using a nationally representative online panel. Results from the full sample have a margin of sampling error of +/- 1.4 percentage points.
