Overall, the poll may bring Democratic exuberance back to earth after a buoyant party convention in Chicago last month and rapid gains in support for Harris after Biden’s poor showing in the polls.

Harris held on to some of the gains she has made with key groups with whom Biden had been slipping — such as women, young voters and Latino voters — but fell short of traditional Democratic strength. She continues to struggle to build a solid lead with Latino voters, a crucial demographic.

If November is about change, Harris will need to make the case that she can deliver it. More than 60 per cent of likely voters said the next president should represent a major change from Biden, but only 25 per cent said the vice president represented that change, while 53 per cent said Trump did.

“I don’t see how Kamala Harris instead of Trump would bring change,” said Steven Osborne, a 43-year-old plumber and Trump supporter in Branson, Missouri. “I mean, she’s Joe Biden’s vice president. How can she be seen as different?”

Another warning sign for Democrats: 47 per cent of likely voters viewed Harris as too liberal, compared with 32 per cent who saw Trump as too conservative.

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On the plus side for Harris, the Democrats’ hammering away at Project 2025 as a blueprint for another Trump presidency has sunk in. Trump has tried hard to distance himself from the document, drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation with input from Trump allies, which lays out plans for a second Trump presidency.

Among the many recommendations in the 900-page document, Project 2025 proposes to criminalise pornography, disband the Commerce and Education departments, reject the idea of abortion as health care, and shred climate protections.

Three-fourths of likely voters said they had heard about Project 2025, and of those, 63 per cent said they opposed it.

“It’s a horrible affront to American democracy,” said John Fisher, 71, a retiree in the pivotal swing area of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, and a registered Republican who is supporting Harris. “It’s a disgrace.”

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Trump’s distancing aside, 71 per cent of those who have heard of Project 2025 said they believed that the former president would try to enact some or most of the policies that it espouses.

Working in Trump’s favour is the fact that voters remain largely pessimistic about the direction of the country. Just 30 per cent of likely voters said the country was on the right track, largely unchanged since July.

But among voters who thought the country was headed in the wrong direction, 71 per cent were optimistic that things would get back on the right track, an improvement since 2022, when voters were more pessimistic about the nation’s direction.

Democrats have a slight edge when it comes to enthusiasm for voting: 91 per cent of Democrats said they were enthusiastic, compared with 85 per cent of Republicans.

“Oh, heavens, when it was Biden and Trump, it was the first time in my entire life I was like, I don’t know if I can vote this year,” said Carol Ploeger, 68, of Provo, Utah, who added that she would be voting for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in her life. “I feel like she’s got new blood, she’s younger, she knows what the American people need because she came from humble beginnings.”

Trump holds a 13-percentage-point advantage on the issue that remains most important to voters: the economy. Harris holds a 15-percentage-point advantage on another leading issue: abortion.

Harris faces a challenge with voters who hold her responsible for the Biden administration’s handling of some issues. About half of voters, largely Republicans, said Harris bore at least some blame for rising prices and problems during the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And nearly two-thirds of voters, from across the political spectrum, said she bore at least some blame for problems at the Mexican border.

Matthew Tucker, a 31-year-old vaccine scientist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said he intended to vote for Harris and he did not vote in 2020. But he said he felt that Harris bore responsibility for the problems at the border.

“It’s not like I’d lay it all on her,” he said, “but I’m not sure that I heard enough about her trying to deal with that. And I would like to hear more from Democrats or Republicans on more creative solutions to that problem, rather than just putting up walls.”

On abortion, Trump, who appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, has muddied the waters a bit. It is Harris’ strongest issue, with 54 per cent of voters trusting her to handle it, compared with 39 per cent who trust Trump. Yet, 16 per cent of Democrats and nearly half of independents said they did not think the former president would try to pass a law restricting abortion access nationwide.

At the same time, attacks on Trump’s character and fitness for office may not be working. Voters were only slightly more likely to view the former president — who was impeached twice and convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a sex scandal that threatened his 2016 presidential campaign — as a riskier choice for the country than Harris. Fifty-four percent viewed Trump as a risky choice, compared with 52 per cent who said the same about Harris.

The survey found that 70 per cent of voters said Trump had said something they found offensive. Nearly half of Trump voters said that they had been offended by him at some point but that they would still vote for him.

There was a sharp division on when voters found Trump’s comments offensive. Ninety-four percent of Harris’ voters said Trump had said something they found offensive, with 78 per cent saying he had offended them recently. Although a majority of Trump’s voters said he had never offended them, 37 per cent of them said he had but not recently.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.