Vice President Kamala Harris has stormed into contention in the fast-growing and diverse states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, not long after Donald J. Trump had seemed on the verge of running away with those states when President Biden was still the Democratic nominee.
The new polls from The New York Times and Siena College show how quickly Ms. Harris has reshaped the terrain of 2024 and thrust the Sun Belt back to the center of the battleground-state map.
Ms. Harris is now leading Mr. Trump among likely voters in Arizona, 50 percent to 45 percent, and has even edged ahead of Mr. Trump in North Carolina — a state Mr. Trump won four years ago — while narrowing his lead significantly in Georgia and Nevada.
Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris are tied at 48 percent across an average of the four Sun Belt states in surveys conducted Aug. 8 to 15.
That marks a significant improvement for Democrats compared with May, when Mr. Trump led Mr. Biden 50 percent to 41 percent across Arizona, Georgia and Nevada in the previous set of Times/Siena Sun Belt polls, which did not include North Carolina.
[A dead heat in these four states is not great news for Donald Trump, and it represents a huge shift from earlier in the cycle, Nate Cohn writes.]