Americans trust Kamala Harris to handle gun violence better than Donald Trump but still don’t prioritize guns very highly in a new batch of post-debate polling.
An ABC News and Ipsos poll released this week shows Harris leading Trump by five points on the question of who’d handle gun violence better. 66 percent of respondents said the issue was more important to their vote, with 26 saying it was one of their single most important issues. That put guns above issues like abortion and the war in Gaza, but only seventh on the overall list of Americans’ concerns.
The latest Fox News poll tells a similar story but with a closer divide. It found voters favored Trump on the issue of guns by a single point, though that was down two points from when the outlet asked in August. Fox also found voters gave the topic little consideration compared to other issues. Only three percent of voters said guns were their top issue, tied for last with foreign policy and crime.
That’s a trend every scientific poll taken after the debate and Apalachee High School shooting in Winder, Georgia, that’s asked about guns has identified. Americans have consistently ranked guns or gun violence in the middle or near the bottom of their priority list in those surveys. That’s in line with how the issue polls in normal times, but it indicates neither the recent school shooting nor the highly-watched debate increased gun policy as a priority in the minds of voters.
A recent poll from The Economist and YouGov found a slight uptick in support for the kinds of gun restrictions Kamala Harris backs, which may have moved the needle on who Americans trust to handle guns. A Data for Progress poll of 1,283 likely voters from September 12th through the 13th also showed some of Harris’s recent messaging has gotten through to voters, with 71 percent reporting they’d heard about her and running mate Tim Walz’s gun ownership. Democrats were also more likely to identify guns as their top issue than Republicans in the Fox poll, and those with strong opinions on the matter trusted how Harris would handle gun violence over Trump by four points.
Still, every major poll has put the issue far from top of mind for most voters.
A Yahoo News and YouGov poll that ran between September 11th and 13th found five percent of the 1,755 Americans surveyed listed guns as their top issue, putting it sixth out of nine issues. A poll the Angus Reid Institute ran between September 13th and 16th reported that 19 percent of 1,707 registered voters said gun violence was an issue they cared about most, making it sixth of 11 issues.
All the polls also put Harris ahead of Trump overall by varying amounts. The race remains tight, though, especially in states likely to decide the election’s outcome. The RealClearPolitics polling average had Harris leading Trump by two points in national polling but only a point or less in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada as of Wednesday. It had her trailing Trump by a point and a half or less in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina.
ABC News and Ipsos polled 3,276 adults, with a margin of error of two points, between September 11th and 13th. Fox News polled 1,102 registered voters from September 13th to 16th. It had a margin of error of three points.