Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina are among the seven key states where the Trump and Harris campaigns have focused since Labor Day. Harris has shown strength in several key Midwestern states, including, most importantly for her presidential hopes, Pennsylvania.
But Arizona, which Mr. Biden won by just over 10,400 votes in 2020, is now a challenge for Harris’ campaign. Mr. Trump leads, 50 percent to 45 percent, according to the poll. A Times/Siena poll of the state in August found Ms. Harris leading by five percentage points. Latino voters, in particular, appear to have drifted away from Ms. Harris, though a significant number of them — 10 percent — said they were now undecided. And Mr. Trump is taking advantage of the split vote in the state: While Ms. Harris is trailing, the poll shows the Democratic Senate candidate leading.
In North Carolina, where Mr. Trump won by less than 75,000 votes in 2020, the former president has a slight lead over Ms. Harris, garnering 49 percent of the vote to Ms. Harris’s 47 percent. (The poll was conducted mostly before it became known that Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of that state, had posted disturbing messages on a pornography forum, which some Republicans feared could hurt Mr. Trump in that state.) And in Georgia, a state that Mr. Biden won by just under 11,800 votes in 2020, Mr. Trump continues to have a slight lead over Ms. Harris, 49 percent to 45 percent. The margin of error in each state is between four and five percentage points.
(Follow the latest polls and see updated Harris vs. Trump poll averages.)
Polls found that voters in this part of the country were worried about their own future and that of the nation, suggesting that Mr. Trump’s dark campaign rhetoric — “Our country is going to hell, we are a failed nation,” he said in the debate — may resonate with some voters. A majority of them said the nation’s problems were so dire that it was in danger of collapse. Republicans were much more likely to hold this unstable view of the future than Democrats, 72 percent to 16 percent.
“Whatever path we’re on right now, in my opinion, it doesn’t look like it’s going to end well,” said Tyler Stembridge, 41, a fire captain in Centerville, Ga., and a Republican who said he voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 and intends to support him again in November.
