Pennsylvania and Georgia may choose America’s next president

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

(CNN) — The destiny of the White House may hang on a deadlocked fight between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris for Georgia and Pennsylvania, two battlegrounds that have been decisive in crowning the last two presidents.

The evolving electoral map is revealed in new CNN/SSRS polls out Wednesday of six swing states that captured the transformation in the race since the vice president replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee.

The surveys show Harris has vastly improved her party’s chances in November and could open several paths to the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win. But they suggest any stalling of her momentum could be disastrous to her hopes.

Trump, despite weeks of failing to find a coherent anti-Harris message, still has a serious chance nine weeks out of pulling off one of the most stunning political comebacks in US history. Strong showings in a few key states could land him back in the Oval Office.

More broadly, the new polls show that Harris has at least made a strong start on her extraordinary task of turning around an election that looked lost within the space of a few months. But they also reflect Trump’s stunning and enduring strength among millions of Americans in his third presidential election — eight years after he won his first.

A tight race after a turbulent summer

In Wisconsin, likely voters back Harris by 50% to 44% for Trump. In Michigan, the vice president is up 48% to 43%. In Arizona, the former president is ahead 49% to 44%. There’s no clear leader in Georgia and Nevada, where it’s 48% Harris to 47% Trump or in Pennsylvania, where they are even at 47%.

The polls represent a snapshot of the current moment after a tumultuous political summer and shouldn’t be seen as a prediction of what will happen in November. But they help explain how the fight for the White House could unfold in the next two months, underscore the strategic decisions facing both campaigns and pinpoint the current strengths and weakness of each candidate. For instance, across six states, Harris now trails Trump by only eight points on average on who is most trusted on the economy — a significantly lower deficit on the issue that matters most to voters than the one suffered by Biden in earlier polls.

The picture of a finely balanced contest is also a reminder of the critical nature of next week’s debate between Harris and Trump, one of the few scheduled events in the final months to November that could again turn the race upside down.

Harris is building a blue wall – but will it be sufficiently broad?

The polling data suggests that Harris is two-thirds of the way to consolidating, at least for now, the critical midwestern “Blue Wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that have long been the most credible route back to the White House for a Democratic nominee. But the tied race at this point in Pennsylvania suggests that Harris still faces a massive task in putting away a state that Biden won by only 1.2% of the vote four years ago.

Many Democrats had privately conceded that Georgia, a longtime conservative bastion that has been competitive since 2020, was probably lost when Biden was the presumptive nominee. But the arrival of Harris has thrust the Peach State back into the decisive sprint to the White House.

Both candidates have already made multiple visits to Pennsylvania and Georgia especially. Harris and Walz took a two-day bus tour through rural, southern parts of Georgia last week. And Harris was in Pittsburgh on Monday and will return to the Steel City for debate prep later this week.

Trump recently took steps to repair his ties to Georgia’s popular Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, whom he faults for not aiding his attempt to overturn Biden’s win in the state in 2020, and last week was in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, for a rally that exemplified his attraction to voters in former industrial powerhouses hurt by the flight of blue-collar jobs overseas.

The centrality of Pennsylvania and Georgia to the race can be seen when various scenarios are played out across the electoral map. There are tantalizing possibilities for Harris. Assuming each candidate holds all states solidly in their columns, Harris could win the presidency by pairing Wisconsin and Michigan with a Pennsylvania victory and one electoral vote from anywhere else.

But Trump also has a simple route-map back to power. If he wins North Carolina, another swing state not included in these surveys that has gone Republican ever since 2012, he could win a second term just by taking Pennsylvania and Georgia. In this case, it wouldn’t matter how he performs in Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada or Arizona.

Pennsylvania and Georgia have been critical bellwethers in recent years. In 2020, Biden captured each battleground and won the White House. In 2016, Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton in each state on the way to his shock election victory.

This year, Harris needs to drive out strong turnout in the cities like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Augusta, especially among minority voters. She is also targeting a strong performance among voters in the suburbs of these and other cities. The CNN/SSRS polls show the vice president already has double digit leads among female likely voters in both states, no doubt helped by being a stronger messenger on abortion than Biden, which the data also shows.

Trump is always strong among White male, White non-college educated and rural voters. One of the obvious goals of the Harris campaign — as can be seen by her trips with vice presidential nominee Tim Walz to rural areas — is to try to trim some of the Republican nominee’s margins in districts where he runs most strongly.

Implications of Harris’ fresh candidacy

One of the most interesting questions at this stage of the race — that is also impossible to answer – is whether Harris’ rise still has some way to go and whether she has not just unified the Democratic base but is also making new inroads among moderate Republicans and independent voters. Another development to watch in coming weeks is whether her apparent strength in Wisconsin and Michigan in the new CNN polls is a harbinger of similar strength to come in Pennsylvania.

But if Harris’ ascent has already peaked, these polls underscore just how close Trump may still be to a second term. A narrow loss by Harris in Pennsylvania that hands the ex-president the White House would cause second guessing among Democrats at her decision to pass on the state’s governor – Josh Shapiro, who won it by nearly 15 percentage points in 2022 – as a running mate.

The polls were conducted between August 23-29, following the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and are being published at the beginning of an intense two-month derby to Election Day. They represent some of the most comprehensive overviews of the race in the swing states that will decide the election that have yet emerged.

And their publication follows a stunning presidential race that saw Biden fold his reelection campaign less than four months before Election Day and his rival, Trump, who is vying to become only the second president to win non-consecutive White House terms, escape an assassination attempt in one of those vital states: Pennsylvania.

The campaign has moved up several notches in intensity even since Labor Day on Monday, and a key focus of both sides in the coming weeks will be identifying and turning out voters who are not yet committed to their choice.

Across the states surveyed by CNN, an average of 15% of likely voters say they have not firmly decided who they will vote for. This means that if either Harris or Trump can close strongly and carve out a significant advantage among this group, they could lock down the race.

Warning signs

There are some warning signs for both the vice president and the former president in the data.

Harris polls at 85% among Black likely voters in Georgia and at 84% in Pennsylvania. These findings may support claims by the Trump campaign that it has made inroads into a constituency that forms a bedrock of the Democratic coalition. According to exit polls in the 2020 election, Biden won 92% of Black voters in Pennsylvania and 88% in Georgia. One key focus of the Harris campaign and grass roots organizing groups will be to try to elevate those numbers in the next eight weeks and to make sure Black voters get to the polls in big numbers. In both states however, Black registered voters express less motivation to vote than White voters do.

Trump, meanwhile, has spent recent days oscillating in his position on reproductive rights and IVF fertility treatments, keenly aware that his most significant domestic political achievement – the construction of a conservative Supreme Court majority that overturned the nationwide constitutional right to an abortion – has turned into a massive electoral liability. The CNN/SSRS polling bears this out. It finds that Harris has increased Biden’s lead on abortion and reproductive rights across the six states surveyed and that it now stands at an average of 27 percentage points among women.

The current messaging from each side underscores this fraught moment in a bitter race.

Trump’s team put out a memo on Tuesday that pulsated with frustration that Harris’ policy reversals and ties to Biden, an unpopular president, were not already decisive in Trump’s favor. His top advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita wrote that their candidate had the true momentum. “Do the Democrats and voters realize this? Or does the mainstream media, in its attempt to manage public opinion and continue the ‘Harris Honeymoon,’ report a version of reality that is at odds with the facts?” they said.

The Harris campaign released its own memo over the weekend seeking to temper euphoria that lifted the vice president at her Chicago convention. Democratic leaders, after all, need their voters to fear a close race and see a Trump return as a realistic probability in order to boost turnout.

“Make no mistake: we head into the final stretch of this race as the clear underdogs,” Harris Campaign Manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon warned.

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