Kamala Harris entered Election Day with a 4-point lead over Donald Trump after slashing the gender gap, a final key poll has found.
Harris, 60, has the support of 51 per cent of likely voters, according to the latest PBS News/NPR/Marist poll. Trump has support from 47 per cent.
The survey found that Harris’ surge comes after Trump’s lead among male voters significantly declined in the final days leading up to the election.
Trump, 78, previously held a 57 per cent lead amongst male voters, but now only leads 51 per cent to Harris’ 47 per cent. However, the Democrat‘s lead among women shrunk from 18 to 11 points.
Analysts say the top line results of the Marist poll are nearly identical to those of the 2020 election, which reported Joe Biden leading Trump 51 to 47 per cent.
The outcome of this year’s knife-edge election, which has become the closest race to the White House in decades, is too close to call and could potentially come down to a few thousand votes in seven key swing states.
Kamala Harris (pictured Monday) entered Election Day with a 4-point lead over Donald Trump after slashing the gender gap, the final PBS News/NPR/Marist poll has found
Harris has the support of 51 per cent of likely voters, according to the poll. Donald Trump (pictured Monday) has support from 47 per cent
The survey found that Harris holds a 4-point lead over Trump nationally, which is just outside the poll’s 3.5-point margin of error.
Analysts say that most notable change in the last month of the campaign is the gender gap shrinking by half.
In October, Harris had the support of 41 per cent of men. That has now increased to 47 per cent.
Trump’s support amongst male voters dropped from 57 to 51 per cent, but he still maintains a lead over Harris in this demographic.
The Vice President maintained her lead amongst women voters, but did see it drop from 58 to 55 per cent from October to November.
Trump, however, saw a rise in support amongst women with 44 per cent now saying they will back him, a 4-point increase from last month.
The gender split in the Marist poll is nearly identical to the split between Biden and Trump in 2020, analysts noted.
Harris has also shrunken the lead that Trump has with white voters, the poll revealed. Trump led this demographic by 12 points in 2020, but now leads by 9.
However, compared to Biden in 2020, Harris has seen a slight decline in support from Black and Latino voters.
She has the support of 83 per cent of Black likely voters and 61 per cent of Latino likely voters, a drop of 8 and 2 points respectively from the share that support Biden four years ago.
The Vice President in recent weeks has also placed emphasis on attracting Republican voters who are disillusioned with Trump and campaigned in swing states with Republican officials who endorsed her.
The final Marist poll has found that 8 per cent of Republicans say they will vote for Harris, a 3-point increase from last month. It is also double the number of Democrats who say they will back Trump.
Additionally, more than half of independents polled say they will support Trump.
The outcome of this year’s knife-edge election is too close to call and could potentially come down to a few thousand votes in seven key swing states. The winner may not be known for days after Tuesday’s vote. Pictured are voters casting their ballots in Howell, Michigan Sunday, on the last day of early voting
Trump and Harris both predicted victory as they campaigned across Pennsylvania and other battleground states on Monday and urged supporters who have not yet cast their ballots to show up on Election Day.
The winner may not be known for days after Tuesday’s vote, though Trump has already signaled that he will attempt to fight any defeat, as he did in 2020.
The Harris campaign said Monday that its internal data shows undecided voters are breaking in their favor, and says it has seen an increase in early voting among core parts of its coalition, including young voters and voters of color.
Trump campaign officials said they were monitoring early-voting results that show more women have voted than men. That is significant given Harris led Trump by 50 per cent to 38 per cent among female registered voters, according to an October Reuters/Ipsos poll, while Trump led among men 48 per cent to 41 per cent.
One Trump campaign official said they thought the Republican would carry North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona, which would still require him to carry one of the battleground states in the Rust Belt – Michigan, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania – to win the White House.
Republicans also appeared to be posting strong early-vote results in Nevada, and have been heartened by robust early-voting numbers in the hurricane-ravaged western counties of North Carolina.
Trump and his allies, who falsely claim his 2020 defeat was the result of fraud, have spent months laying the groundwork to again challenge the result if he loses.
He has promised ‘retribution’ if elected, spoken of prosecuting his political rivals and described Democrats as the ‘enemy from within.’
Harris campaign officials said his attempts to allege fraud will fail. ‘Voters select the president, not Donald Trump,’ Dana Remus, a campaign legal adviser, told reporters.