With less than a month to go before Election Day, former President Donald Trump has erased a four-point deficit among likely voters to tie Vice President Kamala Harris, according to a new poll.
Trump, 78, and Harris, 59, each receive 47% support among that cohort, the Yahoo News/YouGov survey found.
That’s a significant shift from the outlet’s September poll, which found Harris ahead of Trump, 49% to 45%, among likely voters.
Yahoo News/YouGov is one of the first pollsters to release the results of a survey following last week’s vice presidential debate between Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
A plurality (41%) of US adults who watched the CBS News forum felt that Vance was the winner, while just 32% said Walz got the better of the exchanges and 19% concluded it was a draw.
Both VP contenders got similar scores when voters were asked if they were “weird,” with 36% saying that about Walz and 38% about Vance.
Walz had pioneered the “weird” attack on Vance right after Harris tapped him to be her running mate Aug. 6.
Despite Walz, 60, failing to answer for past lies, including repeated claims to have been in Hong Kong at the time of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, more Americans were inclined to describe Vance, 40, as untruthful (42%) compared to the Democrat (33%).
Harris held a narrow popular vote lead over Trump (46%-45%) among registered voters in a five-way ballot test that included Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Libertarian Chase Oliver and independent candidate Cornel West.
Similar to other surveys, Yahoo News/YouGov shows Trump leading Harris on handling of four of six key issues: cost of living (45%-39%), crime (44%-36%), immigration (50%-35%) and the conflict in the Middle East (45%-32%).
Harris topped Trump on the issue of abortion (51%-29%) and democracy (45%-34%).
Just over a quarter of Americans (27%) say the US is heading in the right direction, while 60% say the country is on the wrong track.
Harris bested Trump by two percentage points in favorability rating among American adults (46-44%) and also had a lower unfavourability rating than her GOP rival (53%-49%).
However, Harris’ job approval rating was underwater by nine percentage points (41% approve, 50% disapprove), while Trump almost broke even in assessments of his four years in office (47% approve, 48% disapprove).
The Yahoo News/YouGov survey sampled 1,714 US adults Oct. 2–4 with a margin of error of plus-or-minus 2.9 percentage points.
Harris currently leads Trump by an average of 2.1% in the national popular vote, according to the latest RealClearPolitics aggregate of head-to-head polling — the same margin he lost by to Hillary Clinton in 2016 while winning the Electoral College.
The outlet’s no-tossup map of battleground states currently shows Trump flipping Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania to win 281 electoral votes and become the 47th president.
