Kamala Harris‘s rise in the polls have seen her eat into Donald Trump‘s big lead in Texas, a reliably Republican state.
The Democratic candidate trails the former president by just five points, according to a new poll conducted by the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs.
In June, the gap between Trump and President Joe Biden was nine points, according to the same pollster.
It comes as Harris has taken a lead over Trump in many national and state polls since Biden ended his reelection campaign last month.
But the numbers in Texas will give Democrats a huge boost as the state has not given its Electoral College votes their candidates since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
A new poll shows that Kamala Harris has eaten into Donald Trump’s lead in Texas. In June he was beating Joe Biden by nine points. Now his advantage is less than five points
The poll found that 49.5 percent of likely voters intend to vote for Trump, compared with 44.6% Harris.
Yet the Harris campaign has already signaled that it will focus resources elsewhere, in part because of the high cost of advertising in the state.
‘At the end of the day, our responsibility as a presidential campaign is to ensure we get to 270 [electoral votes],’ campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said at an event at the Democratic National Convention.
‘I would love to get to a bigger number than that, but that is all we care about.’
Harris has wiped out Trump’s six-point lead with women during the past two months.
However, he still holds an 18-point lead among men.
In the state’s U.S. Senate race, 46.6 percent of Texas likely voters intend to vote for Republican Ted Cruz, while 44.5 percent say they are supporting Democrat Colin Allred. These proportions are essentially unchanged from those in the June survey.
Harris has just enjoyed a week in the limelight. She was crowned by her party at its Chicago convention.
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Kamala Harris may have eaten into Donald Trump’s poll lead in Texas but her campaign says it will focus elsewhere, in part because it is so expensive to buy advertising in the state
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Her campaign will hope that translates into a further poll boost.
Trump spent the week traveling across battleground states for a series of policy speeches.
On Monday he was in Pennsylvania to talk about the economy. On Tuesday it was Michigan and law and order.
On Wednesday, it was national security in North Carolina, and a day later he was at the Arizona border.
A DailyMail.com poll shows that he should benefit from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to suspend his campaign on Friday.
