Former President Donald Trump is ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris in the critical Sun Belt battleground states of Arizona and Nevada, according to new surveys from the pollster InsiderAdvantage.
The Arizona poll put the Republican nominee 2.5 points ahead of Harris, with 49.5 percent of the vote against the vice president's 47 percent. The poll surveyed 800 likely Arizona voters and had a margin of error of 3 percentage points. InsiderAdvantage also surveyed 800 likely voters in Nevada, who gave Trump a wafer-thin lead over Harris: 47.9 percent of the vote against her 47.7 percent. The poll's margin of error was 3.5 percentage points.
Recent election analysis suggests Trump has made some ground over the past week in what remains a tightly fought contest. On Friday, the polling analytics website 538 said that for the first time since August 7, its model showed the Republican nominee was the favorite to win—with a 51 percent chance of victory against 49 percent for Harris. Separately, an average of betting odds compiled by the data aggregator RealClearPolitics gave Trump a 58.5 percent chance of winning versus 40.4 percent for Harris.
Newsweek contacted the Trump and Harris campaigns for comment via email on Tuesday outside regular office hours.
The InsiderAdvantage surveys had better news for the Democrats in Arizona's and Nevada's Senate races, finding the party ahead with a comfortable margin in both.
In Arizona, the pollster put Democratic candidate Ruben Gallego ahead of Republican Kari Lake, with 50 percent of the vote to Lake's 45.8 percent. The two candidates are vying for the Senate seat occupied by Kyrsten Sinema, who was elected as a Democrat but sits as an independent and is not seeking reelection.
Senator Jacky Rosen, a Democrat from Nevada, also pulled ahead of Sam Brown, her Republican challenger—receiving 48.2 percent of the vote against Brown's 43.9 percent.
In its pollster ratings, which are "based on the historical track record and methodological transparency of each polling firm's polls," 538 gave InsiderAdvantage two out of three stars for reliability.
On October 21, 538's latest analysis of recent polling gave Harris a 1.8-point national lead over Trump, down from 2.4 percent on October 17. Though the vice president has maintained a narrow lead in national popular-vote polling, the Electoral College will decide the election. It is possible for a candidate to win the popular vote but lose the election, as Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
In a boost for Harris, a Data for Progress poll released on Monday found that 50 percent of 1,206 likely voters favored the Democratic candidate to handle "climate and extreme weather disasters," while 46 percent favored Trump. The survey was conducted between October 11 and 13 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
The survey took place days after Hurricane Milton crashed into Florida, which followed close behind Hurricane Helene, the devastating storm that killed at least 225 people when it tore across the southeastern United States in late September.
Elsewhere on the campaign trail, photographs of Trump serving fries at a McDonald's restaurant in Pennsylvania went viral on social media on Sunday. The following day, former House Republican Liz Cheney, an outspoken Trump critic, took part in three moderated conversations with Harris in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin as the Democratic nominee seeks to attract GOP voters.
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