Is Kamala Harris at Risk of Losing Virginia? What Polls Suggest

Vice President Kamala Harris is leading former President Donald Trump in Virginia, according to polling.
At a rally in the Philadelphia suburbs on Monday night, Trump claimed he had seen good numbers coming out of Virginia, where Harris is currently 7.6 points ahead, according to FiveThirtyEight.
“If we win Pennsylvania, we’re going to win the whole thing, right,” he said. “So it’s going to really be something. We just had some numbers coming out of Virginia, which is great.”
It is not clear which polls Trump was referring to. Newsweek has contacted the Trump campaign via email for more information.
Although Virginia has voted Democrat in every presidential election since 2008 and isn’t typically viewed as a swing state, polls before Harris became the candidate in July indicated a much closer contest between Trump and President Joe Biden, with some showing Trump ahead by as much as 5 points.
But polls now show that the Democrats are set to take the state, with Trump not leading in a poll since July 15, and surveys now show Harris in the lead in the state by up to 11 points.
Since the 1990s, Virginia has seen vast changes in its population, with demographics that typically vote Democratic growing.
Between 2010 and 2022, the Hispanic/Latino population had the most growth in the state, increasing by more than 270,000 between 2010 and 2022, according to Census data.
At the same time, the white population decreased by 5 percent from 64.9 percent to 59.8 percent, while one in 10 people who are now eligible to vote in the state were born outside the United States as of 2022, up from one in 28 in 1990, according to the Pew Research Center.
It is these demographic shifts, along with the spread of high-density suburbs, that experts have said contributed to Democratic victories in the state since 2004, including Biden’s 10-point victory in 2020, and Hillary Clinton’s 5-point victory in 2016. And polls from the state show that Harris is on track to follow in the footsteps of her predecessors and beat Trump by a solid margin this year.
The most recent poll conducted by Christopher Newport University between September 28 and October 4 showed Harris leading by 11 points among registered voters and likely voters. The poll had a margin of error of +/-4.4 percent.
Meanwhile, the latest ActiVote poll, conducted between August 19 and September 17, showed that Harris was 10 points ahead among likely voters. The poll had a margin of error of +/-4.9 percent.
Another poll, conducted by the Washington Post between September 4 and 8 among 1,005 likely voters, showed Harris was 8 points ahead—a lead well outside of the poll’s margin of error of +/-3.5 percent, while a poll conducted by Emerson College in September put her 7 points ahead.
However, other polls have given Harris a smaller lead. A Morning Consult poll from August 9 to 18 gave Harris a 6-point lead among likely voters, while a Quantus poll from August 22 gave Harris a 3-point advantage among registered voters—a lead within the poll’s 4 percent margin of error.
Meanwhile, a poll conducted by the University of Mary Washington between September 3 and 9 showed that Harris is just 1 point ahead, 47 percent to 46 percent, among 756 Virginia likely voters—a lead well within the survey’s margin of error of +/- 4.1 percent.
In September, RealClearPolitics updated its Electoral College map predictions to include Virginia among its list of states that lean Democrat, having previously suggested the race between Harris and Trump there could go either way.
RealClearPolitics’ forecast currently shows Harris with a lead of 6.4 points in Virginia.