New polls published Monday by the New York Times and Siena College show Donald Trump has gained a lead over Kamala Harris in Arizona and remains ahead in Georgia and North Carolina, three crucial battleground states that could determine the outcome of the election.
The Times/Siena polls, which surveyed 2,077 likely voters in the Sun Belt states, were conducted from Sept. 17 to Sept. 21 and are the first since the presidential debate on Sept. 10. Times/Siena is ranked as the most reputable poll by FiveThirtyEight.
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Below is how Trump and Harris are faring in the three key states.
Arizona
The poll shows Trump leading Harris 50% to 45% among likely voters, which is outside the survey’s margin of error of 4.4 percentage points for the state. The results show a big shift from August to September, when Harris led by five percentage points in the August Times/Siena poll, which was outside the margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.
Arizona’s race was among the tightest state contests of the 2020 presidential election, with President Joe Biden beating Trump there by less than 10,500 votes.
Georgia
The poll shows Trump leading Harris 49% to 45% among likely voters, which is within the 4.6 percentage point margin of error for the state. Trump has consistently led Harris in Georgia in several high quality polls, including in a poll conducted by the University of Georgia last week, which showed him ahead by three percentage points, though that was just within the poll’s margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
In 2020, Biden narrowly beat Trump in Georgia by a margin of 0.23% and 11,779 votes.
North Carolina
The poll shows Trump leading Harris by 49% to 45% among likely voters, which is within the 4.2 percentage point margin of error for the state. The previous poll conducted in mid-August by Times/Siena showed Harris in the lead by three percentage points, which also fell within the poll’s margin of error of 4.2 percentage points among likely voters.
In 2020, Trump narrowly won North Carolina by less than 75,000 votes. The state has not gone blue in a presidential election since 2008.
Sun Belt and national polling averages
Polling averages carried out by the New York Times, citing polls collected by FiveThirtyEight and The Times, show Trump ahead 48% to 47% in Arizona and 49% to 47% in Georgia, with a slight lead of less than one percentage point in North Carolina.
Nationally, Harris still has a narrow lead over Trump, with a 50% to 47% lead, according to The New York Times’ election tracker.
According to FiveThirtyEight modeling, Harris would win 62 times out of 100 in their election simulations. However, their simulations have not taken into account the latest Times/Siena data.
The 2024 presidential election remains extremely tight. About 15% of the electorate in the Sun Belt states described themselves as undecided or not definitely decided, according to the latest Times/Siena polls. They now lean slightly toward Trump in all three states.
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