The 2024 Election season is reaching its crescendo.
Labor Day traditionally marks the final stretch ahead of a presidential election, and there are just nine weeks of campaigning left until Election Day on Nov. 5.
In a slew of states, however, the election actually gets underway this month. 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.
With the clock ticking, former President Donald Trump says he has the momentum.
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Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on Friday, Aug. 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Rebecca Droke)
“We’re leading in the polls now,” the former president said in an interview Friday with Fox News’ Bryan Llenas.
Minutes later, at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Trump touted that “our poll numbers are starting to skyrocket.”
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Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris is urging her supporters to “not pay too much attention to the polls because we are running as the underdog.”
Harris, at a rally in Savannah, Georgia, late last week, pointed to her showdown with Trump and said, “We have some hard work ahead of us.”
Vice President Kamala Harris points to supporters as she arrives at a rally in Savannah, Georgia, on Aug. 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Most of the latest national surveys show Harris with a slight single-digit edge over Trump, but the presidential election is not a national popular vote contest. It is a battle for the individual states and their electoral votes.
The latest surveys in the seven battleground states that decided the 2020 election between Trump and President Biden – and will likely determine the outcome of the 2024 showdown – indicate a margin-of-error race. Among those polls are a batch from Fox News that made headlines last week.
It is a big change from earlier this summer when Biden was still running.
Biden’s disastrous performance against Trump in their late June debate turned up the volume of existing doubts from Americans that the 81-year-old president would have the physical and mental stamina to handle another four years in the White House. It also sparked a rising chorus of calls from top Democratic Party allies and elected officials for Biden to drop out of the race.
National and battleground state polls conducted in July indicated Trump had opened up a small but significant lead over Biden.
Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. (Getty Images)
The president dropped his re-election bid on July 21 and endorsed his vice president, and Democrats immediately coalesced around Harris, who quickly enjoyed a boost in her poll numbers and in fundraising.
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Still, pollsters and political analysts stress that the Harris-Trump contest remains a coin-flip at this point.
While the former president touts his standing in the polls, his team emphasizes they like the current poll position, as they point out that the former president has a history of outperforming public opinion surveys.
“At this point in the race in 2016, Donald Trump was down to Hillary Clinton by an average of 5.9 points. At this point in the race in 2020, it was 6.9 to Joe Biden,” senior adviser Corey Lewandowski noted this weekend in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”
Meanwhile, Harris predicts that “this is going to be a tight race until the very end.”