The race between President Donald Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who will formally accept the Democratic nomination later this week, has seemingly become more competitive, at least, according to a CNN Poll conducted by SSRS and released Sunday evening.
The poll, which was conducted over cell phones and landlines between August 12-15, shows Biden receiving 50% of the vote and Trump receiving 46% support among registered voters. When this poll was conducted in early June, Biden held a 14 point lead over Trump.
Biden’s lead shrinks even more when analyzing the responses from places that the pollsters identified as battleground states, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin.
Across the 15 states expected to help swing the final outcome in the Electoral College, 49% of respondents told the pollsters they would vote for the Democratic ticket. Meanwhile, 48% of respondents said they would vote for Trump.
The two have nearly identical favorable and unfavorable ratings in battleground states as well. (Trump leads the unfavorability rating by two points, but they both have a 45% favorability rating.)
The sample size for the entire poll was 1,108 adults across the country, 89% of whom were registered to vote, with a 3.7% margin of error, according to CNN. The battleground state subset contained 636 adult respondents, 89% of whom were registered to vote, and contained a slightly higher 5% margin of error.
The poll also suggests that the president has cut into the support of Trump-skeptical Republicans and right-leaning voters. When the poll was conducted in June, Biden received support from 8% of voters who lean Republican. He now only has 4% support from voters who lean Republican.
A new factor in the CNN poll comes in the form of Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), who has only been in Congress since 2017 and recently joined Biden on the Democratic presidential ticket. The poll shows 41% of respondents have a favorable view of Harris, whereas 38% have an unfavorable view of her.
Although Harris has been touted by mainstream media outlets as having a “moderate” appeal, the California senator has embraced a bevy of radical positions in her short time in Congress.
For example, Harris was a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, a $93 trillion wish-list that the Competitive Enterprise Institute summarized as “an overwhelmingly expensive proposal reliant on technologies that have not yet been invented.”
According to GovTrack, Harris is the fourth most-liberal senator in Congress — in terms of legislation she has sponsored or co-sponsored — behind Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), and Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR).
Notably, the California senator was measured as more liberal than Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who, in 2016, reportedly pushed former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton toward adopting more progressive economic policies because the economic policies of the Obama administration had not been sufficiently radical.
According to FiveThirtyEight, Biden still maintains a sizable lead in other national polls, averaging at about 51% support to Trump’s 42.4% support.