One month out from Election Day on Nov. 5, the state of play in the 2024 race in New Hampshire remains – relatively stable.

Public opinion polls suggest that Vice President Kamala Harris retains an upper single-digit lead over former President Donald Trump for the swing state’s four electoral votes in the race for the White House.

Those same surveys point to a slight edge for former U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte over former Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig in the contest to succeed retiring GOP Gov. Chris Sununu in the corner office and indicate that the Democrats are in a strong position to retain both of the state’s two seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“The political environment in New Hampshire has remained relatively stable since September with very little change in the state’s top races,” said Neil Levesque, executive director of New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College.

The latest poll in New Hampshire – released on Thursday by the Saint Anselm College Survey Center – indicates Harris leading Trump by seven points in the Granite State – roughly the same margin that President Joe Biden carried the state over Trump in the 2020 election.

The survey also shows Ayotte holding a 47%-44% margin over Craig among likely New Hampshire voters in the gubernatorial race.

“Kelly Ayotte has improved her image somewhat while driving up Joyce Craig’s negatives, helping her pick up a point of ballot strength from previously undecided voters,” Levesque noted, as he compared the latest Saint Anselm survey with the previous one conducted last month.

In the race to succeed retiring six-term Democratic U.S. Rep Annie Kuster, Democrat Maggie Goodlander, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Biden administration, leads Republican entrepreneur Lily Tang Williams 50%-38% in the state’s 2nd Congressional District, which includes Concord. In the more competitive 1st Congressional District, three-term Democratic U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas is topping former Republican executive councilor and former state senator Russell Prescott 50%-41%.

Voters in New Hampshire have a history of ballot splitting when they head to the polls, and the latest surveys suggest that the 2024 election will be no different.

“Granite Staters look poised to show their independence from party-line voting,” veteran New Hampshire-based political scientist Wayne Lesperance, who is the president of the Henniker-based New England College.

“The most recent polling data suggest New Hampshire is firmly in the Harris camp while leaning towards Ayotte in a margin of error race for governor,” he added.

New Hampshire isn’t one of the seven crucial battleground states whose razor-thin margins decided Biden’s 2020 election victory over Trump and are likely to determine whether Harris or Trump wins the 2024 presidential election. Those seven states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada – are seeing most of the campaign traffic and ads in the White House race.

But Democrats in New Hampshire enjoyed a visit from the top of the ticket last month – as Harris held a campaign event in North Hampton. And high-profile political surrogates have been coming to New Hampshire to campaign on behalf of Harris and down-ballot Democrats. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey – a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate – is on deck – with a stop next week in the Granite State.

By comparison, Trump hasn’t set foot in New Hampshire since winning the state’s Republican presidential primary in late January, and there’s been a dearth of top GOP surrogates coming into the state.

The Democrats, with over 120 staffers and 17 coordinated field offices across New Hampshire, also enjoy a large ground game advantage over the Republicans when it comes to the crucial get-out-the-vote efforts.

“Democrats are in a really good spot right now,” former New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Kathy Sullivan told the Monitor.

“With the lead that Harris has over Trump in New Hampshire, certainly the Republicans nationally are not going to be putting anymore money into the state except for the governor’s race. That could depress Republican turnout,” predicted Sullivan, who for years also served as one of New Hampshire’s two members on the Democratic National Committee.

Sullivan noted that Democrats have “got a lot of work left to do. We’ve got to bring it across the finish line, but I’d rather be in the position we're in than the Republicans are in right now.”

And pointing to the party’s organizational advantage, she said “Identifying your voters and getting those voters out – that’s how you win elections. The Democrats in New Hampshire always outperform the Republicans on the ground. The Republicans just haven’t learned their lesson there.”

But Greg Moore, a longtime New Hampshire-based conservative activist and strategist, disagrees that a lack of resources from national GOP organizations and Trump’s polling deficit to Harris are a drag on down-ballot Republicans.

“I’m surprised that Trump’s number is as strong as it is given the fact of the amount of resources that Harris is pouring into New Hampshire is vastly dwarfing what the Trump campaign is putting into the state,” Moore, a regional director for Americans for Prosperity, a longtime highly influential fiscal conservative organization, said.

Moore said that “whether or not Trump will be putting resources into New Hampshire over the next month remains to be seen.”

“Obviously, the most interesting race right now is the race to succeed Gov. Sununu,” he emphasized. “It’s up to [Ayotte] to start making sure she does the blocking and tackling work to turn out voters and get them out to the polls.”

Moore also pointed to Granite Staters’ history of ticket-splitting, saying that “it looks like New Hampshire citizens are doing what they always do, which is looking at each individual race separately and making up their minds individually on a race-by-race basis.”