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Kamala Harris’s rise in the polls has helped her reduce Donald Trump’s large lead in Texas, a state where Republicans have been loyal for years.
According to a new poll from the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs, the Democratic candidate is trailing the former president by just five points.
According to the same pollster, the difference between Trump and President Joe Biden in June was nine points.
This comes as Harris has held a lead over Trump in many national and regional polls since Biden ended his re-election campaign last month.
But the numbers in Texas will give Democrats a huge boost, as the state has not given electoral votes to its candidates since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
A new poll shows Kamala Harris has eaten into Donald Trump’s lead in Texas. In June, he beat Joe Biden by nine points. Now his lead is less than five points.
The poll found that 49.5 percent of likely voters plan to vote for Trump, compared to 44.6 percent for Harris.
Still, Harris’ campaign has already indicated it will focus its resources elsewhere, in part because of high advertising costs in the state.
“Ultimately, it is our responsibility as a presidential campaign to make sure that we 270 [electoral votes]’ campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said during a rally at the Democratic National Convention.
“I would like to have a higher number, but that’s all we care about.”
Harris has erased Trump’s six percentage point lead among women over the past two months.
However, among the men he still has an 18-point lead.
In the state’s U.S. Senate race, 46.6 percent of likely Texas voters plan to cast their ballots for Republican Ted Cruz, while 44.5 percent say they will back Democrat Colin Allred. Those proportions are essentially unchanged from the June survey.
Harris has just spent a week in the spotlight, having been crowned by her party at its convention in Chicago.
Kamala Harris may have wiped out Donald Trump’s lead in the polls in Texas, but her campaign says she will focus on other issues, partly because it’s so expensive to buy advertising in the state
Her campaign hopes this will lead to a further rise in the polls.
Trump traveled through key states throughout the week to deliver a series of policy speeches.
Monday he was in Pennsylvania to talk about the economy. Tuesday it was Michigan and law and order.
On Wednesday it was the National Security Agency in North Carolina and a day later it was at the Arizona border.
A DailyMail.com poll suggests he should benefit from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to suspend his campaign on Friday.