Kamala Harris Plays Down Poll Lead Again: ‘We Are the Underdogs’

Vice President Kamala Harris has once again downplayed her lead in the polls, and recent surveys suggest she may be correct.

“It’s gonna be a tight race until the very end, so let’s not pay too much attention to those polls[…]we are the underdogs in this race,” Harris told the crowd at a Labor Day rally in Pittsburgh.

While poll trackers still show that Harris is around three points ahead of Donald Trump nationally, recent surveys have shown that her lead may be starting to decline.

The most recent ActiVote poll, conducted between August 25 and September 2, showed that Harris was leading Trump by 1.6 points, a drop from the five-point lead she had in a survey conducted from August 15 to 23.

Harris’ remarks were the second time in recent days that she and her campaign sought to downplay her polling lead, with Jen O’Malley Dillon, the vice president’s campaign manager, writing in a memo on Sunday that the margins are going to be “razor-thin” in November.

“Make no mistake: we head into the final stretch of this race as the clear underdogs,” O’Malley Dillon wrote in the memo. “Donald Trump has a motivated base of support, with more support and higher favorability than he has had at any point since 2020.”

“In 2020, the election came down to about 40,000 votes across the battleground states,” O’Malley Dillon continued. “This November, we anticipate margins to be similarly razor-thin.”

Pollster Nate Silver’s forecast model on Friday showed Trump leading Harris in the Electoral College for the first time since the beginning of August. His model gave Trump a 55 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, 11 points higher than Harris’s 44 percent.

Harris is the “favorite to win the popular vote but perhaps a slight underdog to win the White House because of the GOP advantage in the Electoral College,” Silver wrote.

His model also shows that the Republicans have made a net gain of between 0.2 and 2.1 points in every swing state other than Georgia in the past week.

Silver attributed Harris’ decline to several factors, including a lower than expected bump in the polls for the vice president following the Democratic National Convention (DNC). According to Silver’s model, Harris would have expected to see a two-point boost following the DNC. However, her lead has only increased by 1.2 points.

He added that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of Trump last week may have eaten into any expected increase from the DNC. However, he also said that Harris’ weak numbers in Pennsylvania influenced the model.

“Comparatively poor polling for Harris in Pennsylvania, which is disproportionately important given Pennsylvania’s likelihood of being the pivotal state. As a result, the Electoral College forecast has swung more than the popular vote forecast,” Silver wrote.

The latest surveys conducted by Wick and Emerson College between August 25 and 29 showed Harris and Trump tied in Pennsylvania. Another recent survey by Trafalgar Group showed the former president two points ahead in the battleground state.

Pennsylvania, with its 19 electoral votes, is most likely to be the tipping point state in this election, according to FiveThirtyEight.

Despite Silver’s assessment, no national poll has shown Trump in the lead since August 25, when an Echelon Insights survey put him one point ahead among likely voters. Altogether, only six polls have put the Republican ahead of Harris since the beginning of August.

FiveThirtyEight’s forecast model also shows that the Democrats are predicted to win in five of the seven swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada, with a tie in projected in Georgia and a GOP victory in North Carolina.

In the Sunday memo, O’Malley Dillon said Harris’s massive $540-million fundraising haul will be put into massive battleground states ground operations.

Harris’s “historic sum” will go “directly to a relentless battleground operation, with more than 312 coordinated offices and 2,000 coordinated staff in the states—a reflection of a campaign with presences in every corner of every battleground state and with the communities critical to victory,” she said.

Newsweek has contacted the Harris and Trump campaigns for comment via email.