Vice President Kamala Harris has flipped a 2-point lead by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump from July to a 5-point lead for herself (49%-44%) in the latest NBC News poll, which hails "newly popular" Harris on momentum and the candidate for "change."
Harris' lead is "enormously" powered by the "gender gap," according to NBC News analyst Steve Kornacki, as Harris leads among women by 21 points while Trump leads among men by just 12 points.
The poll comes after the lone presidential debate, where a 57% majority of those polled say it made no change in their vote, but 29% said it made them more likely to vote Harris compared to just 12% for Trump, who largely has a long locked-in MAGA base.
There has been a large flip on personal views of Harris, too, since she got in the race. She was largely viewed negatively from a 50% majority to just 32% that viewed her positively when she was merely President Joe Biden's vice president in July. Now Harris is viewed positively by 48% (still 45% negative, but a net-3 positive compared to a net-18 negative) by just being handed the Democrat nomination by Biden's ouster.
NBC host Kristen Welker, who comes from a family with Democrat roots, said this was "the largest increase for any politician" since President George Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Kornacki added these polling data points, as the Democrat has gained in many of the long-held, Democrat-stranglehold demographics where Biden was weakened against Trump:
- Voters under 30 (plus-26 points): Harris is a much younger candidate than Biden or Trump, and Harris flipped a 29-point Trump edge on mental fitness for office to a 20-point edge for her.
- Blacks (plus-24 points): Harris would be the first Black and Asian woman president.
- Hispanics (plus-21 points): Trump had made huge gains here due to largely Hispanic locales that have been overwhelmed with crowding and crime amid Biden-Harris' immigration failures.
- Independents (plus-20 points): Trump had long held an edge on the American middle against Biden.
In looking at a chart of the 2024 presidential campaign figures, Harris is the only one with a net-positive feelings, and both Welker and Kornacki pointed out Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, has the lowest positive rating and Trump has the highest negative rating.
Trump has long been critical of Welker and NBC News after the 2020 presidential debate.
Despite the poll showing all the Harris momentum, Kornacki admitted the overall electorate numbers "are not much different" from the 2020 presidential election decided by mere thousands of votes in key battleground states, keeping the election "within reach" for Trump.
"In July, there was a stiff breeze heading directly at President Biden and obscuring a clear path to victory. Today, the winds have turned in Kamala Harris' favor," NBC News' Democrat pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates said.
"All of this movement to Harris essentially returns the race to where it was in 2020 at the end of the campaign: a very close election."
NBC News' GOP pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies noted Harris picked up some Republicans who are not locked in on giving Trump another term, but those tend "come back."
"We have seen this movie before," McInturff said. "They can get squishy on Trump, and then in the end they come back and they vote the way they're going to vote on a Republican-versus-Democrat preference for Congress."
The NBC News poll surveyed 1,000 registered voters nationally Sept. 13-17 and the results had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
Newsmax poll analysts long note national polls oversample Democrats, particularly in large Democrat-strangleholds of California and New York that do not swing the actual Electoral College vote. Also nationwide samples of just 1,000 are just too small compared similar sample sizes in actual battleground state polls done internally by the political campaigns, according to Trump campaign pollster John McLaughlin.