According to new polling of the 2024 presidential election from The New York Times and Siena College, Vice President Kamala Harris — this year’s Democratic pick for the general election — is leading Republican nominee Donald Trump in the closely watched Arizona.
Arizona was a swing state in recent presidential elections, moving from a Trump win in 2016 to a victory for Joe Biden four years later in the presidential race that put the Democrat in the White House. Democrats also saw other recent electoral success there, including wins in 2022 in races for Senate, governor, and state attorney general.
Now, the new polling finds a lead for Harris of five percent among likely voters when just the two major party candidates were presented to respondents.
Harris’ lead dropped to four percent when presidential candidates outside the major parties were also named.
The margin of error for the registered voters polled in Arizona is just above four percent, though that kind of metric tends to go up with smaller groups, like the pool of likely voters taken from the broader group of those registered at all. Thus, in a polling context, the Harris lead comes with some usual caveats of the limits of a pre-election survey in making many sweeping generalizations about the race — but if this margin repeats in the election in November, that’s obviously a win for Harris.
Arizona also has another Senate election on the ballot this year, pitting Democratic pick Ruben Gallego against Republican nominee Kari Lake, who is known for close alignment with Trump. And it looks like Lake is losing massively. She was nine percentage points behind in this polling, and she was trailing by 11 percent in other recent election survey data. The seat up for grabs is currently held by Democrat-turned-independent Kyrsten Sinema, who didn’t seek another term.