Vice President Kamala Harris is leading former president Donald Trump in battleground Pennsylvania, according to a new poll.
The Center for Working Class Politics/YouGov survey found Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, leading Trump among registered voters in the state by 46.8 percent to 44.7 percent.
Harris and Trump are locked in a tight contest, with Pennsylvania among the battleground states that will likely decide the winner of November’s presidential election.
Pennsylvania’s 19 Electoral College votes—more than any other swing state—are viewed as a significant prize for both Harris and Trump, and their paths to the presidency become significantly more difficult without it.
Newsweek contacted the Harris and Trump campaigns for comment via email.
The survey found another 5.5 percent of respondents were not sure who they would vote for, while 3 percent said they were backing another candidate. In a head-to-head matchup, excluding any other candidates, Harris has 51.3 percent support while 48.7 percent of voters prefer Trump.
The results were based on a survey of 1,000 registered voters between September 24 and October 2. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.19 percentage points.
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Pennsylvania was narrowly won by President Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2016. Polls indicate the race is set to be extremely close once again, with Harris ahead by 0.8 percentage points in the Keystone State as of Wednesday, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls.
The Center for Working Class Politics/YouGov poll showed Harris with a significant lead over Trump among the lowest-income voters, but trailing him with blue collar workers.
She had the support of 53.3 percent of lowest-income voters earning less than $30,000, while Trump had the support of 38.3 percent.
Trump led slightly among middle-income voters, by a margin of 0.6 percent among those earning between $30,000 and $60,000 and by 4.6 percent among those earning between $60,000 and $100,000.
Harris led among those earning between $100,000 and $200,000, with 47.6 percent support compared to Trump’s 45.6 percent. Trump was favorite among the highest-income voters, those who earn $200,000 or more, with 51.7 percent support to Harris’ 48.3 percent.
Trump had a significant lead with manual workers, with 55.9 percent backing Trump and only 36.2 percent supporting Harris.
But Harris had the support of more service and clerical workers, with 47.7 percent supporting her compared to 42 percent favoring Trump.
She was also ahead with professionals, with 47.3 percent support to Trump’s 44.9 percent, but the pair were tied when it came to managers and business owners, with each having 46.4 percent support.
Robert Speel, an associate professor of political science at Penn State Behrend, told Newsweek that the results were not too surprising.
“Voters with the lowest incomes tend to be young and are often not white. Those groups tends to be the strongest supporters of Democrats and Harris in general,” he said. “The poll results also indicate that voters with university degrees support Harris, while voters who did not go to college and rural voters support Trump. Those results are also consistent with partisan results and polls in other recent elections.”
Speel said the findings suggested that the race in Pennsylvania would continue to be extremely close.
“Trump is campaigning here in working-class areas that are his base to boost support and voter turnout as much as he can,” he said.
“Kamala Harris needs to focus on the Democratic base in the Philadelphia area and in Pittsburgh, but also in areas that have offered some swing voters in recent elections such as the Allentown-Bethlehem area and in Erie County in the northwest corner of the state, which voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020,” he added, noting that the Harris campaign has announced a visit to Erie on Monday.
“Pennsylvania is the center of the political universe, and there are precious few pathways to victory for either Harris or Trump without winning the Keystone State,” Thomas Gift, an associate professor of political science and director of the Centre on U.S. Politics at University College London, told Newsweek.
Gift said recent polling, including the Center for Working Class Politics/YouGov survey, suggested the race remained a statistical dead heat.
“Notably, while Harris appears to have a considerable lead over Trump among the lowest-income voters, there’s a real question about whether this demographic will turn out,” he said. “Voters at the lower ends of the socioeconomic spectrum tend to be the least reliable voting bloc.”
