How Kamala Harris’ Polls Compare to Barack Obama’s with Black Voters

Kamala Harris is polling better among Black voters than President Joe Biden was, but she still lags behind the level of support that former President Barack Obama achieved.

Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian descent, is on track to become the second Black candidate to be the official presidential nominee for one of the two main parties in the U.S.

A recent poll produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates with fieldwork by Ipsos, found that 83 percent of Black voters responded that they would vote for her.

This marks a 12 percentage point swing in Harris’ favor compared to a July poll into whether Black people would vote for Biden or Donald Trump. This poll was conducted from August 9 to 13 with a sample of 2,336 adults.

Another poll by CBS News/YouGov found that 79 percent of Black voters say they intend to vote for Harris.

This poll surveyed 3,258 registered voters conducted from August 14 to 16, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.

A third recent poll by the Napolitan Institute showed similar figures, finding that 74 percent of Black voters intend to vote for Harris. This poll was conducted from August 12 to 14 and surveyed 2,708 registered voters.

Exit polls from the 2012 presidential election, in which secured Obama his second term, revealed that a landslide 93 percent of Black voters picked him over his opponent, Republican Mitt Romney.

While Harris is not yet reaching Obama’s levels of support among Black voters, she is already faring better than Biden was before he dropped out.

Exit polls showed that Biden had secured support from 87 percent of Black voters in 2020, but the president has been hemorrhaging support in that quarter ever since.

Harris has been making efforts to make inroads with Black voters, who are a crucial demographic for Democrats.

A Suffolk University/USA Today poll published on Sunday showed Harris leading Trump among Black voters with around 70 percent in the swing states of Pennsylvania and Michigan, which will be critical to winning the election in November.

“There is no question that Harris at the top of the ticket has caused an immediate jump in support at the expense of all other candidates and categories,” David Paleologos, the director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, said in a press release accompanying Sunday’s poll.

“She is well on her way to unifying the Black community, though she’s still short of the kind of Black voter margins that she must secure to win states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.”

Newsweek has reached out to Harris’s campaign for comment via email outside of regular working hours.