Pennsylvania 2024 Trump-Harris Polls: Harris Leads Crucial Swing State In Latest Poll

Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris reacts as Former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during the first presidential debate at National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, PA on Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024.

Vice President Kamala Harris has a 3% lead in Pennsylvania over former President Donald Trump in a new poll Saturday, after three other polls this week reflected a virtual stalemate for the battleground state, where a win for either candidate could pave the way to the White House.

Key Facts

Harris leads Trump by four points (50% to 47%, but closer to a four point, according to the data) in a pair of New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena College polls, marking the third Times/Siena survey in two months where Harris was backed by at lest half the battleground state.

However, Trump had a one point advantage (46% to 45%) in Friday’s Wall Street Journal Poll that includes third-party candidates, a departure from the dead heat reflected in recent polls.

Trump maintained his one-point lead in an Emerson College survey released Thursday since the group’s September poll, but Harris lead by three points in a Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday.

Harris leads by 0.4 points in Pennsylvania in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average, Trump holds a slim 0.1 point lead in Real Clear Politics’ polling average and Harris is up 0.8 points in Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin.

Pennsylvania has more electoral votes, 19, than any other battleground, and Pennsylvanians routinely pick winners, voting for 10 of the last 12 White House winners—the candidate who has won Pennsylvania has also won Michigan and Wisconsin (the three states together are known as the “blue wall”) in the past eight elections.

Pennsylvania has a 29% chance of tipping the election, far more than any other battleground state, according to political analyst Nate Silver’s election forecasting model that found Harris has an 87.3% chance of winning the election if she wins Pennsylvania, while Trump has a 92.7% chance of winning.

Trump became the first Republican to win Pennsylvania since the 1980s in the 2016 election, and Biden, who is originally from Scranton, Pennsylvania, reversed the trend in 2020, with the state to putting him over the 270-vote threshold needed to win the Electoral College when the Associated Press called Pennsylvania for Biden four days after the election.

Underscoring Pennsylvania’s weight in the 2024 election, ABC News chose to host the first presidential debate between Trump and Harris there in Philadelphia; Pennsylvania is also significant to Trump personally, as he was shot there while speaking at a rally near Butler on July 14.

Pennsylvania has a large share of white, working class voters, with nearly 75% of the population identifying as non-Hispanic white—a demographic Trump typically performs well with, though Harris has made inroads with white voters compared to Biden’s performance in 2020, trailing Trump by only three points nationally, according to the latest PBS News/NPR/Marist poll, after Trump won the demographic by 12 points in 2020.

Surprising Fact

No Democrat has won the White House without Pennsylvania since 1948. If Harris wins Pennsylvania, and the trend of also winning Wisconsin and Michigan holds, she’s all but certain to win the White House.

Big Number

82%. That’s the share of registered voters in Pennsylvania who said the economy is a major factor in their 2024 vote, followed by inflation at 78% and the state of democracy at 70%, according to the CBS/YouGov survey. The results are on par with the national electorate, according to a recent Pew Research survey of registered voters that found 81% of registered voters rate the economy as “very important” in the election. 

Chief Critic

Trump and his allies have repeatedly attacked Harris over her previous endorsement of a fracking ban—Pennsylvania is the country’s second-largest natural gas producer. “Fracking? She’s been against it for 12 years,” Trump said during the debate in Philadelphia. Harris, who said during a 2019 CNN climate town hall while she was running for president “there’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” has said she’s since changed her stance. During the debate, she said she made “very clear” in 2020 that she’s against a fracking ban, presumably referring to her vice presidential debate with Mike Pence, and noted the Inflation Reduction Act opened new gas leases—reiterating a stance she took in a CNN interview last month. Harris didn’t actually say she changed her own position on the issue during the 2020 debate—instead she said then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden “will not end fracking.”

Tangent

Pennsylvania has a divided state legislature. The state’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, is widely popular in the state. Democrats also control the House, but Republicans hold the majority in the Senate.

Key Background

Harris leads Trump in four of seven battleground states, while Trump is ahead in North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages that show margins of less than two points in all seven battleground states (Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin). If Trump maintains his leads in Arizona and Georgia, and wins North Carolina, as he’s expected to, he would need just one of the “Blue Wall” states (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin) to win the White House.