New 2024 election polling from a team at Florida Atlantic University and Mainstreet Research finds Vice President Kamala Harris narrowing the gap between Democrats and Republicans following the exit from this year’s presidential race of President Joe Biden, who stepped aside in July and endorsed Harris.
Barack Obama won Florida in both the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, but Donald Trump — now Republicans’ presidential nominee yet again — won it in 2016 and 2020. In April polling from this same source, Biden — then expected to be Democrats’ torchbearer in the 2024 election — was eight percentage points behind Trump among likely voters. Now, Harris is three percent behind. When independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was also presented to poll respondents, Harris trailed Trump by only two percent — again among likely voters specifically.
In 2020, Trump won the Sunshine State by a margin of more than three percentage points.
Florida will also have a U.S. Senate race on the ballot this year, contesting the seat currently held by Republican Rick Scott, a former governor. He is running for re-election, and although the Democratic primary in that race is still forthcoming, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell — a former Congresswoman — is a leading contender.
Meanwhile, other polling from elsewhere in the country and at the national level continues to show promising signs for the Harris campaign, with the nation’s second-in-command recently taking to the actual campaign trail in battleground states much more than Trump.
New national polling from Emerson College found Harris in the lead by five percentage points, both with and without candidates outside the major political parties also named to respondents. Surging support for the Democratic presidential ticket could translate to growing support for Democrats on the ballot elsewhere as well, with more high-stakes Senate elections taking place this year in Arizona, Nevada, Montana, Michigan, and beyond.
