Two weeks into Kamala Harris’s campaign for president, I wanted to give you a polling and campaign-status gut check. The short version is that Harris is now slightly but measurably ahead in the Blue Wall states. She remains behind but now only barely in the southern tier states of Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. The margins in both directions are mostly between one and two points. Those are nominally margin of error numbers. But when they’re based on multiple polls they become a bit sturdier than that. (I’m following 538’s averages on this. They have Nevada tied.)
What this means is that Harris now has very small leads in the states she needs to win the election. Just as critically she’s now in shooting distance in all of the southern tier states, now including North Carolina. Together these represent a pro-Harris shift of 3 to 4 percentage points which is more or less matched by the shift at the national level.
Before his poll drop in the final week of his campaign, Biden was in contention but just slightly behind in the Blue Wall states necessary for a victory by the tiniest of margins. Harris now has multiple paths to an Electoral College victory. An EC margin of victory similar to Biden’s in 2020 is certainly possible. It was always assumed that a Harris coalition would do or could do relatively better than Biden in the southern tier states. It was also assumed that she would have a weaker hand in the Blue Wall states. It’s that last assumption which, so far, has not been borne out. She’s holding Biden’s numbers with white voters and expanding on them with non-white and younger voters.
There’s no question this is a transformed race. This shift is decisive. And while there’s no way to be sure it’s a lasting one there’s also no obvious reason to assume it won’t be.
I mentioned two weeks ago that we were at the cusp of a furious fight over two to three weeks to define Kamala Harris in the public mind. Both campaigns know that the public impression made at the outset is very hard to shift once it takes hold. Despite being the sitting Veep for going on four years and familiar as a name, Harris wasn’t terribly well known. Impressions tended toward the negative side. But they were the thinnest impressions. At two weeks there’s no question that the Harris campaign is decisively winning that battle to define Harris. This is the biggest campaign complaint you’re seeing from Republicans. Trump is clearly losing that fight so far.
Harris’s net favorability has soared. On July 4th, her net favorability was -17.4 percentage points. Today it’s -6.7 percentage points. I suspect not only the direction but the fluidity and dynamism of those numbers scare the Trump campaign far more than the horse race numbers I mentioned up top. Trump’s favorability also improved after the assassination attempt and his convention. But much more modestly, and the positive movement appears to have halted.
We live in a sour and polarized era in which national politicians tend to get less popular over time. The campaign until two weeks ago had two candidates who were both quite unpopular and whose popularity and support fluctuated within very narrow ranges. That fluidity was and is totally new. To date the Trump campaign has had no success in arresting it. Trump’s Black/Indian tirade was, as Jonathan Last argued here, an attempt to generate what the world of pro-wrestling calls “cheap heat,” to grab hold of attention and media dominance even if it’s negative attention and cut short Harris’s dominance of the campaign storyline.
After the initial shock at Trump’s comments I saw a lot of smart people thinking it might well work. I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t. But it barely held center stage for 24 hours. After 36 it was pretty much done. This is part of what I referred to on Friday in this post: Trump just isn’t the candidate he was eight years ago or even four years ago. He didn’t need to be as long as he held that small but persistent lead over Biden. But battling back is a different thing than coasting. As I noted when things seemed much worse for Democrats, having all lived through the historic presidential campaign month of July 2024 we’d be fools to assume that the remainder of the campaign will be a straight line from today to November 5th. But the sense of panic you now see in the Trump campaign is that they fear they’re going to get swamped by the Harris surge and that there won’t be enough time to shift the dynamic of the campaign. They’re right to be worried.
