Trump, Harris in dead heat in Pennsylvania polling

(The Center Square) – Friday’s polling average from Real Clear Politics shows a dead heat between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state in the battle for the White House.

Just 0.2 percentage points separate Trump and Harris, with the GOP nominee clinging to a residual lead that dominated President Joe Biden by 9 points before he bowed out of the race on July 21.

The RCP average represents results gathered by pollsters between July 22 and Aug. 19. In six of the 10 polls, Trump leads between 1 percentage point and 4 percentage points. In three matchups, Harris commands the same leads. A Fox News poll conducted between July 22 and July 24 that surveyed 1,034 registered voters found the candidates to be tied. The margin of error on the poll was 2%.

Of note, Trump’s two-tenths of a point lead when polls are averaged doesn’t factor in margin of error as is common to most polls. The range of smallest to largest in the 10 is 2.4% to 3.9%.

On Aug. 23 of the past two presidential election years, the RCP average showed Biden up 5.7 percentage points over Trump in 2020 and Hillary Clinton 9.2 percentage points ahead in 2016. Trump got the state’s 20 electoral college votes in 2016, winning by 0.7%; Biden got the 20 in 2020, winning by 1.2%.

Pennsylvania has 19 electoral college votes this year.

Harris formally accepted the Democratic nomination for president on Thursday night, promising to move the country forward past “bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles.”

During a week of glowing praise at the Democratic National Convention, party supporters pointed to the vice president’s humble beginnings – as a child born to immigrants in Oakland, Calif., who worked at McDonald’s while pursuing a bachelor’s degree at Howard University – as the bedrock of her commitment to supporting the middle class and protecting reproductive rights.

But the rosy characterization wasn’t always so for Harris, who many critics believed incapable of stepping out of the long shadow of Biden’s economic and national security policies amid skyrocketing inflation and U.S. involvement in wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

It’s unclear what impact the convention will have on Harris’ favorability among voters, though candidates historically enjoy a polling bump after the event wraps.

Meanwhile, Trump – who accepted his party’s nomination on July 18 at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee – has billed himself as a political outsider and the target of an establishment bent on lining their own pockets.

That sentiment, though central to Trump’s campaign rhetoric since 2016, was amplified 10-fold after a would-be assassin opened fire at the former president’s political rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13, killing one man and wounding two others. Trump narrowly escaped injury after he turned his head just beyond the bullet’s path, walking away with a grazed earlobe.