A Lot of Major Shifts Beneath the Surface in a New Trump-Harris Poll

After all the political tumult of the last month, Thursday’s latest New York Times/Siena College poll is full of findings unlike any we’ve seen this cycle, with one exception: who leads the presidential race.

The poll found Donald J. Trump ahead of Kamala Harris by one percentage point, 48 percent to 47 percent, among likely voters. Other than the name of the Democratic candidate, “Trump +1” is a result that could have been from any other Times/Siena poll before President Biden’s disastrous debate.

But on question after question, there are major shifts from previous Times-Siena polls, which were all taken before Vice President Harris essentially locked up her party’s nomination for president, before the Republican convention, and before the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump. Even the one-point Harris deficit represents a significant improvement for Democrats from Mr. Biden’s six-point deficit in our last Times/Siena poll.

As I have written, these events make it hard to know what to make of the results of recent polls, including this one. The survey is a useful marker of where the race stands now, but there’s no reason to be confident that this is where the race will stand once the dust settles.

While the overall result between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump may look familiar, the poll is full of signs that there’s a lot of dust still in the political air.

With all of these underlying changes in the attitudes about the candidates, there’s no reason to assume that this familiar Trump +1 result means that the race has simply returned to where it stood before the debate. For now, these developments have mostly canceled out, but whether that will still be true in a few weeks is much harder to say.