The Peach State is in play after all.
That’s the takeaway from a Landmark Communications poll of 400 likely voters in Georgia conducted Monday, a day after President Biden renounced his re-election bid.
The difference between Republican nominee Donald Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is well inside the +/- 5% margin of error.
Trump has 45.8% support, just 1.5% above Harris in a 6-way race that includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (4%), independent candidate Cornel West (1.1%), Libertarian Chase Oliver and Green Party hopeful Jill Stein (0.3% each).
A binary race is even closer — Trump has 48% in that scenario, with Harris taking 46.7% and the remainder undecided.
Though Harris has been an official presidential candidate for fewer than 72 hours, she’s consolidating Georgia Democrats quickly according to this survey.
In the two-way race, she has 93% support among her own party — which is better than the 91.4% of Republicans siding with Trump.
In the six-way scenario, Harris also outperforms the GOP standard bearer in intraparty support. She garners 88.8% of Democrats, which is a point better than Trump does with Republicans.
To those paying attention in recent days, this suggests rank-and-file Democrats are falling in line with party leaders. Georgia Democrats enthusiastically endorsed the VP earlier this week, with Chair Rep. Nikema Williams saying her party is “united”: “eyes are on the prize . . . ready to send her back to the White House as President.”
Another feature of the race in Georgia in this poll, which is likely to be replicated in other battleground states, is a deep gender gap.
Harris takes 55.8% of women in a head-to-head with Trump, who commands the support of 57.9% of men in the same scenario.
That dynamic is replicated in the expanded field, where 52.1% of women back Harris, and 54.7% of men back Trump.
In this context, expect the Harris team to do what the Biden-Harris campaign did before the shakeup at the top of the ticket. Last week, it launched an ad in Atlanta called “Access,” which was intended, per the campaign, to commemorate the “the two-year anniversary of Georgia’s abortion ban taking effect,” an “extreme ban that is only possible because of Trump overturning Roe.”
That ad spotlights “black maternal health,” and as one might expect given that the veep is the first black woman to be nominated (unless something unexpected happens) by a major party, black voters resoundingly back Harris. She’s at 82% in the head-to-head race with Trump and 80% in the six-way scramble — with black professor Cornel West taking 2% to decrease her share slightly.
Perhaps most worrisome for Team Trump is that, at least in this survey, Harris dominates with independent voters. She leads Trump by 11.9% in the two-way matchup (47.6% to 35.7%), and by a still-formidable 9.1% in the six-way battle (40.9% to 31.8%). Among indy voters, Kennedy, Stein and West are factors for now, with Kennedy grabbing 9.1% of that cohort and West and Stein taking 2.3% each.
This survey is far more favorable for Harris than an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll released this week, though that was conducted before the reality of the candidate change set in.
It showed Trump leading Harris, 50.5% to 45.9%. Trump’s lead over Harris was more than the 3.5% advantage he had over the current president in the same sample.