Voters are now more likely to credit Vice President Kamala Harris than former President Donald Trump with representing change and caring about people like them, as Harris takes a slim lead nationally in the race for the White House, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll.
The finding is the first time Harris has led Trump in the Times/Siena poll since July, when President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and Democrats rallied behind Harris as his replacement. It comes as the contest moves into its final month, and surveys from the battleground states find the race to be one of the closest in modern history.
While the Times/Siena poll shows some solid advantages for Trump, the results suggest Harris is making gains, if small ones, on questions about temperament, trust and change that can be critical in a presidential race.
The poll, conducted from Sept. 29 to Oct. 6 among 3,385 likely voters, found that Harris led Trump, the Republican, 49% to 46%, a slight lead that is within the poll's margin of error.
Trump and Harris were even, at 47% each, in a mid-September Times/Siena poll, after the two candidates met in their first -- and probably only -- presidential debate.
Harris has since shored up her support among older voters and has begun making inroads among Republicans: 9% said they planned to support her, up slightly from 5% last month. She also appears to have closed the gap on the question of change, a critical factor in an election where voters have repeatedly told pollsters they believe the nation is heading in the wrong direction.
Trump, 78, who was voted out of the White House in 2020, has presented himself as an agent of change, and has regularly tried to saddle Harris with unpopular parts of Biden's record. But the Times/Siena poll found voters said Harris was the candidate representing change in this election, 46% to 44%. The finding was a first for Harris; in previous Times/Siena polls, Trump has been identified as the candidate of change.
Harris, 59, was seen by a wide margin, 61% to 29%, as the change candidate among voters who are not white. Younger voters see her as the change candidate by a lopsided margin: 58% to 34%.
"The age difference between the two candidates makes a huge difference on change," said Darry Knox, 58, a Democrat in Memphis, Tennessee, who said he intended to vote for Harris. "They see the world differently. They look at the world differently, and they have different views about the world."
Trump held onto the edge as a strong leader, albeit by a narrow margin, which could prove crucial with the Middle East in turmoil.
But Harris was, by a wide margin, seen as more honest and trustworthy than Trump. And Harris, whose campaign has promoted videos and memes of her laughing, joking and dancing, was viewed as the more fun of the two candidates. The poll found that 43% of likely voters -- and 13% of Republicans -- thought Harris was more fun.
But Trump has some clear advantages. He is leading among male voters by 11 points; he won them against Biden by 2 points in 2020. And 42% of respondents said Trump's policies had helped them personally, compared with 22% who said the same about Biden's policies.
More voters said they trusted Trump than Harris to manage what continues to be the top area of concern: the economy.
(Abortion and immigration were a distant second place.)
The economic mood in the nation remains glum -- 75 per cent of respondents said the economy was in fair or poor condition, the same as last month. And nearly three-quarters of respondents said they sometimes cut back on groceries in the last year because of cost.
"As a businessman, I think Trump can see the bigger picture and he can say, 'Oh, maybe we can do this to help people,'" said Barbara Storesina, 65, a retired school secretary in Canton, Ohio. "Whereas the Democrats and Harris, I don't feel that they care about the average person like me. They don't care about whether we're struggling or whether we need help with something."
But even on the critical question of whom voters trust to handle their most important issue, Harris has made some small strides: Trump's edge on that question is just 2 points, 48% to 46%, compared with 5 points in September.
"I can't trust Donald Trump," said Rance Johnson, 54, a construction manager in Houston, who said he did not identify with a party and intended to vote for Harris. "He is trying to get in office and I'm thinking he wants to be in office for his own gain."
With economic concerns prevalent, Harris was seen as more likely to "help people like you," 48% to 43%. She had a slightly narrower edge on who voters said would help them personally.
National polls are a good barometer of voters' mood and attitudes. But those numbers are not necessarily an indication of the Electoral College outcome, which will be determined by the battleground states, including Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where the polls have been exceedingly close.
In a sign of how sharply the country's presidential battlegrounds have realigned in recent years, Times/Siena polls also found Trump leading by 13 percentage points in Florida, a state that only recently was considered competitive for Democratic presidential candidates, and leading by 6 percentage points in Texas, a state that Democrats have long hoped to turn blue.
Nationally, however, the race remains close and remarkably static. The percentage of voters holding favorable or unfavorable views of both candidates has not changed since September. The group of undecided or persuadable voters had shrunk slightly to 17% of voters, down from 20% in early September. When pressed on which candidate they favored, they were evenly split. This group leaned slightly toward Trump in early September.
"I can't vote for Trump," said Elizabeth Mella, 64, a Republican from Utah who said she was leaning toward Harris. "Kamala is a decent human being, and I feel like she will work hard and, you know, I think I could be her friend. I don't necessarily know that I agree with all the changes that she wants to see."
Here are the key things to know about these polls:
-- Interviewers spoke with 3,385 likely voters nationwide from Sept. 29 to Oct. 6.
-- The national poll includes separate polls of 622 voters in Florida, and 617 voters in Texas. The weight given to each of these groups in the national poll has been adjusted so that the overall results are reflective of the entire country.
-- Times/Siena polls are conducted by telephone, using live interviewers, in both English and Spanish. Overall, about 98 per cent of respondents were contacted on a cellphone for these polls.
-- Voters are selected for the survey from a list of registered voters. The list contains information on the demographic characteristics of every registered voter, allowing us to make sure we reach the right number of voters of each party, race and region. For these polls, interviewers placed nearly 365,000 calls to nearly 150,000 voters.
-- To further ensure that the results reflect the entire voting population, not just those willing to take a poll, pollsters give more weight to respondents from demographic groups that are underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree.
-- The margin of sampling error among likely voters is plus or minus 2.4 points for the national poll and about plus or minus 5 points for each state poll. In theory, this means that the results should reflect the views of the overall population most of the time, though many other challenges create additional sources of error. When the difference between two values is computed, such as a candidate's lead in a race, the margin of error is twice as large.
—International New York Times