Trump Surges Past Kamala in Pollster’s Final Results

A poll that in August had Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump by five percentage points has now swung to give Trump a three-point lead.

The DailyMail.com/J.L. Partners national poll gives Trump 49 percent support against 46 percent support for Harris, according to the U.K. Daily Mail.

The poll of 1,000 likely voters, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, meaning the race could be as close as a dead heat or a Trump blowout.

The Mail interpreted the results to mean that Trump could become the first Republican president since former President George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004 to win the popular vote.

Harris led the Mail’s poll in September by one point. In August, the Daily Mail reported her lead was five percentage points.

“The movement under the surface suggests Trump is having a better closing moment in driving up enthusiasm than Harris is, and undecideds and third-party candidate supporters have also broken for Trump in the last month,” James Johnson, co-founder of J.L. Partners said.

“He has also seen improvement among voters of every race, and leads in all age groups apart from 18–29-year-olds,” Johnson said.

Johnson said the gender dynamics make this race unusual.

“When voters go to the polls next week, they will be sharply divided on their gender, with women being more likely to vote for Harris and men more likely to vote for Trump,” he said.

The Mail’s poll said Harris has a 54 percent to 40 percent lead among women; while Trump has a 59 percent to 37 percent lead among men.

“And there is more good news for Trump as his campaign works to turn out the vote. Enthusiasm for the former president is higher (74 percent say they are very enthusiastic for him) than Harris (67),” the Mail reported.

The tsunami of male voters backing Trump led John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, to say Trump’s effort to attract young men “could peel enough away from the Democratic Party to transform the country’s electoral math for years to come,” according to Della Volpe’s Op-Ed for The New York Times.

Della Volpe said that since 2020, “the of young men identifying as registered Democrats has dropped by seven percentage points, while those identifying as Republicans have increased by seven points — a net shift of 14 points in just four years.”

Della Volpe said the men with whom Trump connects view the future with pessimism, and that Trump  “has tapped these anxieties by weaving a hypermasculine message of strength and defiance into his broader narrative that undermines confidence in democratic institutions. And it’s working.”

“His playbook? A master class in bro whispering,” Della Volpe wrote, saying that Trump’s tactics include “championing crypto, securing the endorsement of Dave Portnoy — the unapologetically offensive founder of Barstool Sports — and giving the U.F.C. president, Dana White, who embodies the alpha-male archetype that appeals to many young men, a prime spot at the Republican National Convention.”

On Thursday, the Mail offered an analysis of early voting data.

In North Carolina, where Harris counted on black voters to put the swing state in her column, the Mail said black turnout is not keeping up with the 2020 pace, which it interpreted as a troubling sign for Harris.

The Mail also noted that in Nevada, Republican early voting turnout is exceeding expectations, teasing the possibility that the state will break for Trump.

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