Former president Donald Trump has surged since September and now leads Vice President Kamala Harris 50 percent to 48 percent nationally, according to a Fox News poll.
The survey, published Wednesday, finds that Trump has taken the lead on Harris among likely voters and registered voters after trailing her in Fox News’s September poll. In that survey, Harris registered at 50 percent, and Trump garnered 48 percent with both groups. Harris’s two-point decline and Trump’s two-point boost translate into a net-four-point swing in the former president’s direction.
Trump is winning a substantial 29 percent of registered black voters to Harris’s 67 percent, while he is on her heels with Hispanic voters, as 52 percent prefer Harris and 47 percent support Trump. Support for Trump among black voters is unchanged month over month, even as he is making inroads with Hispanics.
He is up four points with Hispanics compared to September, while Harris has lost three points of support with the demographic.
Moreover, there is a major movement in Trump’s direction among college-educated voters. Harris holds a razor-thin edge with these voters 49 percent to 48 percent, marking a seismic shift from recent months.
Harris had a 14-point lead with these voters in August, at 56 percent to 42 percent. The margin tightened slightly in September to 55 percent to 43 percent in favor of Harris before it became neck and neck in October.
Looking deeper, Trump has pulled ahead with college-educated whites, a group with whom he trailed significantly in September and August. Currently, he leads Harris 51 percent to 46 percent with registered voters in this voting bloc.
In August, Harris had a 56-42 percent advantage among college-educated registered white voters, and in September, her edge was 55 percent to 43 percent.
However, the poll also shows that Harris has a six-point lead on Trump swing states at 52 percent to 46 percent. This trend, in concert with his national lead, breaks entirely with conventional wisdom around Trump, who lost the popular vote in 2020 but won the electoral college.
Veteran Democrat political strategist James Carville spoke to the traditional Trump effect in August, saying he typically overperforms polls that show him down once Election Day rolls around.
“First of all, most say we have to win by three in the popular vote to win the Electoral College,” he told Bill Mahr. “So when you see a poll that says we two up, well, actually, you’re one down if the poll is correct.”
The poll, jointly conducted by Beacon Research and Shaw & Company Research, sampled 1,100 registered voters, including 870 likely voters, from October 11-14. The margin of error for both samples is ± 3 percentage points.