Who is ahead in Harris vs. Trump 2024 presidential polls right now?

What’s changed: While we wait for the first post-debate polls to come in, let’s remind ourselves about the current state of the race. Vice President Kamala Harris leads the polls nationally, as well as in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Nevada and North Carolina are currently tied, while Donald Trump continues to lead in Georgia and Arizona.

The Washington Post is gathering the best available national and state-level polling data, and factoring how citizens in each state voted in the last two presidential elections, to calculate whom voters currently favor in the presidential race.

We’ll update our polling averages at least once per day. Remember, this isn’t a presidential forecast, but instead a snapshot of the state of public opinion.

Want to know more about how our polling averages work? Read our methodology.

How the national polls have changed since January

The presidential election isn’t decided by the national popular vote, which is why we rely heavily on state polls in our polling averages. However, national polls are still useful for understanding the overall state of the race. They tend to pick up changes in the overall environment quicker than state-level polls, and our polling averages do draw on national polls, especially in states where we don’t have a lot of high-quality polls. Here’s how the presidential race has changed in national polls since January.

The state polls driving our averages

All polls vary. Polling averages help us incorporate polls that point in different directions and let us easily compare trends. Here is a look at the results of all of the polls from the past six months that we’ve included in our averages.

The polls could underestimate Harris’s or Trump’s support

A polling average is the best way to understand the state of play in a presidential race, but as we know from previous presidential cycles, the polls aren’t always right. Take a look at how polling errors in the past three presidential elections would affect our current 2024 polling averages.

The economy could get better — or worse

One of the biggest factors that could affect the polls (beyond who the candidates are) is the economy.

It’s one of the most important issues for voters this cycle. And if we take a look at how the economy has affected previous elections, we can see that when the economy improves, the candidate of the incumbent party — in this case Harris — does better. If the economy gets worse, then the challenger — in this case Trump — fares better. (We’re specifically looking at two factors: consumer sentiment, or how optimistic people feel about the economy, and growth in gross domestic product per capita, or the rate at which the economy is growing.)

There’s a fair amount of uncertainty in these estimates, however, as there are a lot of ways the economy could change. But as we get closer to Election Day, the uncertainty around our estimates will shrink.

Explore our polling averages in each battleground state