Reuters/Ipsos polling shows that Harris is ahead of Trump among people in the suburbs

An analysis of Reuters/Ipsos polling shows that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has taken away Donald Trump’s edge among middle-class Americans who live in suburbs and have steady incomes.

Since July 21, when President Joe Biden ended his failing reelection bid, Vice President Harris has taken the lead in both of these big groups of voters. This has given Democrats a better chance of winning the Nov. 5 election, though the race is still very close.

A big prize is suburban voters, who make up about half of all voters in the U.S. and are as diverse physically as the rest of the country. Biden beat Trump by about six percentage points in areas in the suburbs in the 2020 election.

Reuters/Ipsos polls from June and July showed that Trump was ahead of Biden 43% to 40% among suburbanites before Biden dropped out. This shows that the Democrat is having a hard time getting his fans excited.

When Harris started her campaign in July, she started to close the gap. In September and October, polls in suburban areas showed that Harris had a 47% to 41% lead over Trump. According to an analysis of six Reuters/Ipsos polls with answers from over 6,000 registered voters, that’s a nine-point swing in favor of the Democrats.

In the same time period, Trump went from being ahead of Biden 44% to 37% among people whose income is between $50,000 and $100,000, which is about the middle third of the country, to being behind Harris 43% to 45%, which is also a nine-point swing against Trump. There were about 3 percentage point errors in the numbers.

A Pew Research Center study of exit polls shows that Trump won this group 52% to 47% in 2020.

Reuters/Ipsos polls show that voters think the economy is the most important problem before the election. In an October poll, 46% of voters said Trump was the better candidate for the economy, which is 8 percentage points more than Harris’ 38%.

Polls also show that Trump is the more trustworthy choice when it comes to crime and immigration. People who supported Trump in August were told that he would keep the suburbs safe and keep people coming across the border illegally “away from the suburbs.”

Trump has said that the Biden administration is to blame for the rising prices that have hurt middle-class Americans. Harris, on the other hand, has talked a lot about her plans to make the middle class bigger in her talks. Polls also show that more people think she is the best person to protect democracy and stand up to political violence.

David Wasserman, a political expert at the Cook Political Report, said, “Her focus on affordability has been very successful in diminishing Trump’s lead on inflation and the economy.”

Wasserman said that Harris seemed to be doing well with wealthy suburbanites who may be feeling better about the economy. On the other hand, her wins with middle-income voters may be due to her campaign’s repeated promises to help middle-class families.

But he said that the number of people who vote in Democratic-leaning cities and Republican-leaning rural places could also make a big difference in the outcome of the election.

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This week, Reuters called Harris supporters for follow-up interviews. They said they hadn’t paid much attention to her before she ran for president, but as they learned more about her, they became more supportive of her.

The most recent of the six polls, which were done from October 4th to 7th, showed that Harris was slightly ahead of Trump among registered voters (46% to 43%).

A small lead she has in national polls is important, but the real winners will likely be decided by the results in seven swing states: Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Georgia. In these states, too, the race is expected to be very close.

Winning the middle, whether it’s across the country or in the election’s key states, doesn’t always mean the winner. In 2016, Hillary Clinton got almost 3 million more votes than Trump across the country and beat him by about 1 percentage point in suburban counties. However, she still lost the election because Trump won six states that had voted Democratic in 2012.

Sheila Lester, an 83-year-old Harris backer who lives in Peoria, Arizona, which is mostly in Maricopa County, the state’s battleground, told me over the phone that she was now sure Trump would beat Biden.

She was happy when the Democratic Party quickly backed Harris’s campaign, especially since she could be the first woman to be president of the United States.

“The response that she has gotten has made me a little more proud of this country,” Lester, a middle-class retired customer service worker, said. She liked how tough Harris was on abortion rights and how she promised to make the middle class bigger. “I am definitely anti-Trump, but I believe I’m more pro-Harris.”

Maricopa County was a big part of Biden’s victory in 2020. After voting for Trump in 2016, the county barely switched to the Democratic Party.

The 83-year-old Karen Davidson lives in West Bloomfield, Michigan, which is a middle-class neighborhood of Detroit. She said she didn’t know much about Harris before she became the front-runner.

“I needed to know more about her to form any kind of thought,” he said.

“The way she stood up to people who were berating her, I had to respect that having been in the industrial machinery business when women didn’t work in it, I know what that’s like,” she said. “She had the strength, and that’s what’s needed to run our country.”

Kevin Garcia, a grocery store worker in Pooler, Georgia, a suburb of Savannah, said he was also glad Biden had dropped out and liked Harris’ promises to back small businesses more than Trump’s plan to tax imported goods.

Garcia, 24, lives in a neighborhood of single-family homes in a state that, like Arizona, barely went Democratic in 2020. “I just feel better about the chances,” he said.