The 2024 election season is coming to a head.
Labor Day traditionally marks the final stretch before a presidential election, with just nine weeks of campaigning remaining until Election Day on November 5.
However, in several states, elections begin this month. In North Carolina, a key state, mail-in voting begins on September 6. Early voting begins on September 16 in Pennsylvania and on September 26 in Michigan, two other key battleground states.
With the clock ticking, former President Donald Trump says he has the momentum.
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Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Friday, Aug. 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Rebecca Droke)
“We’re leading in the polls now,” the former president said in an interview Friday with Fox News’ Bryan Llenas.
Minutes later, at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Trump touted that “our poll numbers are starting to skyrocket.”
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Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris is urging her supporters to “not pay too much attention to the polls because we are the underdogs.”
Harris, at a rally in Savannah, Georgia, late last week, noted her clash with Trump, saying, “We’ve got a lot of hard work ahead of us.”
Vice President Kamala Harris gestures to supporters as she arrives at a rally in Savannah, Georgia, on Aug. 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Most recent national polls show Harris with a slim single-digit lead over Trump, but the presidential election is not a national popular vote contest but rather a battle over individual states and their electoral votes.
The latest polls in the seven battleground states that decided the 2020 election between Trump and President Biden (and will likely determine the outcome of the 2024 showdown) indicate a race with a margin of error. Among those polls is a batch from Fox News that made headlines last week.
It’s a big change from earlier this summer, when Biden was still campaigning.
Biden’s disastrous performance against Trump in their late June debate heightened existing doubts among Americans about whether the 81-year-old president would have the physical and mental stamina to endure another four years in the White House. It also set off a growing chorus of calls from top Democratic Party allies and elected officials for Biden to drop out of the race.
National and battleground state polls conducted in July indicated that Trump had opened up a small but significant lead over Biden.
Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. (Getty Images)
The president dropped his re-election bid on July 21 and endorsed his vice president, and Democrats immediately rallied around Harris, who quickly enjoyed a boost in her poll numbers and fundraising.
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Still, pollsters and political analysts stress that the race between Harris and Trump remains a toss-up at this point.
While the former president touts his standing in the polls, his team emphasizes that they like his current position in the polls, noting that the former president has a history of outperforming public opinion polls.
“At this point in the race in 2016, Donald Trump was trailing Hillary Clinton by an average of 5.9 points. At this point in the race in 2020, Joe Biden was leading her by 6.9,” senior adviser Corey Lewandowski said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday” this weekend.
Meanwhile, Harris predicts that “this will be a close race to the finish.”
Get the latest 2024 campaign updates, exclusive interviews and more in our Fox News digital election hub.
