SAVANNAH, GA – As the 2024 edition of the race for the White House enters the final stretch, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump have very different takes on the latest polls.
Harris is preaching caution amid a surge in fundraising and rising polling numbers since replacing President Biden atop the Democrats’ national ticket six weeks ago. Trump, who has a history of outperforming underwhelming poll numbers, touted in an interview with Fox News’ Bryan Llenas on Friday that “we’re leading in the polls now.”
Twenty-four hours earlier, Harris cautioned that “this is going to be a tight race until the very end.” The vice president spoke to supporters at a packed arena in this historic coastal city in Georgia, one of seven crucial battleground states that will likely determine the outcome of the presidential election.
Harris spoke on Thursday after the release of a series of polls – including new surveys from Fox News – that indicated a margin-of-error race in the key swing states and a trio of national polls showing Harris with a very slight edge.
NEW FOX NEWS POLL NUMBERS IN 4 KEY BATTLEGROUND STATES
But the vice president told the crowd at Savannah’s Enmarket Arena: “Let’s not pay too much attention to the polls because we are running as the underdog.”
“We have some hard work ahead of us. But we like hard work. Hard work is good work,” Harris said to cheers. “And with your help, we are going to win this November.”
Trump, running to win back his old job in the White House, has repeatedly dismissed the polling bump for Harris and touted his standing.
“She’s not having success. I’m having success,” Trump told Martha MacCallum in an interview last week on the Fox News Channel. “I’m doing great with the Hispanic voters. I’m doing great with Black men. I’m doing great with women. We’re doing very well in the polls.”
And on Friday, at a large rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Trump emphasized that “our poll numbers are starting to skyrocket.”
For much of this year, polls suggested a close contest between Trump and Biden as the pair engaged in a rematch of their 2020 showdown. Trump opened up a small but significant lead in the weeks after Biden’s disastrous late-June debate performance in Atlanta.
But since Biden ended his re-election bid in a blockbuster July 21 announcement, Harris has benefited from a swell of media attention that’s helped boost the prospects of the Democratic Party ticket.
Harris’ rally in Savannah came at the end of a two-day swing through parts of southeastern Georgia with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. And she arrived at the arena about two hours after sitting for her first network interview since becoming the Democrats’ standard-bearer.
Georgia had long been a reliably red state in presidential politics until Biden narrowly edged Trump in 2020 to become the first Democrat in nearly three decades to capture the state.
In runoff elections there two months later, Democrats flipped both of the state’s GOP-held Senate seats.
But fast-forward to this summer, as Biden was facing a rising chorus of calls from within his own party to end his 2024 bid, and Trump had begun to build a lead in Georgia.
THIS STATE MAY DECIDE THE 2024 SHOWDOWN BETWEEN HARRIS AND TRUMP
Harris’ trip this week, however, sends a signal that Democrats feel the state is once again in play.
“Georgia, for the past two election cycles, voters in this very state … have delivered,” Harris told the crowd. “You did that, and so now we are asking you to do it again. Let’s do it again.”
Georgia’s popular two-term Republican governor agrees that his state is very competitive.
“Certainly this is a battleground state,” Gov. Brian Kemp said during a Fox News Digital interview on Tuesday. “I’ve been saying for a long time that the road to the White House is going to run through Georgia. And there’s no path for former President Trump to win, or any Republican … to get to 270 without Georgia.”
But Kemp, who on Thursday headlined a fundraiser in Atlanta for Trump, added that Georgia “should be one that we win if we have all the mechanics that we need. And I’m working hard to help provide those in a lot of ways and turn the Republican vote out and make sure that we win this state in November.”
Labor Day marks the start of the unofficial final sprint in the presidential election.
One week later, on Sept. 10, the first – and possibly the only – presidential debate between Harris and Trump is scheduled to take place in Philadelphia.
And while Election Day remains more than two months away, some voters will start casting ballots in the coming weeks.
In swing state North Carolina, mail-in voting begins on Sept. 6. Early voting begins on Sept. 16 in Pennsylvania and Sept. 26 in Michigan, two other crucial electoral battlegrounds.
