Two Weeks Out, Neither Trump Nor Harris Have Notable Swing-State Advantage

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Neither Vice President Kamala Harris nor former President Donald Trump hold substantial leads across the 2024 battleground, elongating a nail-biter contest with less than two weeks to go until Election Day.

According to Morning Consult’s swing-state surveys on behalf of Bloomberg News, Harris holds slight advantages among likely voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada, while Trump has minor edges in Georgia and North Carolina.

Along with identical levels of support in Arizona and Wisconsin, the results from all seven states are within the Oct. 16-20 surveys’ margins of error, meaning no candidate has a clear advantage.

Across the map, Harris and Trump are virtually at parity with their own party’s voters and those who backed their respective nominees in 2020, similar to findings from our daily national-level tracking.

The surveys come as Harris and her allies have increasingly sought to cast Trump as a threat to the country in the final days of the campaign. While many voters do see the Republican nominee as potentially harmful, such rhetoric has hardly moved the needle.

According to the latest survey, 49% of likely swing-state voters view Trump as “dangerous” compared with 35% who say the same of Harris, in line with the shares who said so in July, August and September. The data tells a similar story when voters were asked which of the two candidates are “too old” or “mentally fit,” with the bulk of the swing-state electorate aligning with Trump on the age question and Harris on the competency question.

While the bulk of both Harris’ and Trump’s supporters are most likely to say their vote is an expression of support for their chosen candidate, the Democrat’s are less likely to do so than the Republican’s (73% to 82%). The gap is widest in Wisconsin, where nearly 2 in 5 Harris supporters say they’re voting against Trump compared to 1 in 5 of his supporters who say they are voting against her.

Among independent voters in the mix, those backing Harris are far less likely to cast their support as a vote in favor of her compared with those backing Trump (54% to 70%).

The bottom line

As early voting begins and Election Day approaches, swing-state voters are more confident in a Harris victory than a Trump win after ballots are counted next month, but the figures are very close. 

By a narrow 45% to 41% margin, likely swing-states voters are slightly more likely to expect Harris will win, in line with where things stood in August. Harris’ supporters are slightly more likely than Trump’s to predict the same (83% to 79%), but the figures — often seen as an arbiter of energy for candidates — are, like everything in this contest, extraordinarily close. 

More to the point: Our October survey shows virtually no movement in either candidate’s favor in the final weeks of the contest, be it in the head-to-head contest, their popularity or how voters perceive them, or even the underlying motivating factors among their supporters.

This survey and others we have conducted in recent weeks continue to suggest neither side clearly has the upper hand, leaving the fate of power in Washington unpredictable.