I wanted to do a short post on expectations setting now that we’ve absorbed the stunning and sometimes euphoric news of the last 48 hours. What will the polls say about this new race? What are Harris’s chances of winning? As my colleague David Kurtz has rightly stated, we’re truly flying blind here. There are so many unprecedented variables we can’t be certain about anything. My own best guess is that we should be not so much expecting but prepared to see Harris roughly where Joe Biden was before the late June debate. That speculation is based mostly on the fact that the polls have been primarily driven by the size of the Republican and Democratic voting blocks with a large percentage of voters supporting third party candidates.
A few polls have come out. But the ones I’ve seen either come from pollsters I have little confidence in (Mark Penn’s “Harris” poll, for instance) or come mostly from before Biden left the race. One out this morning from Florida Atlantic University says the polling took place from the 19th to the 21st. So that poll seems to have few if any respondents who knew that Harris was in effect the new candidate. As we noted, before the events of this weekend, you can’t really poll a hypothetical, just as you can’t understand many things before they actually happen. Harris vs. Trump polls prior to Biden leaving the race give some very general indications. But they aren’t real and mostly now they don’t matter.
I saw a segment on CNN this morning saying that polls now show that Trump is the most popular he’s ever been based on a series of new polls. But the polls referred to came right after the attempted shooting and from what I could tell at the very end of the GOP convention. Those numbers are real but you can’t tell much from a poll taken at the very tip of a convention bounce.
The truth is that the last 10 days have had so many successive shocks to the political system, not least of which is Harris’s entry into the race itself, that it’s going to be a good week before we have any real indication of the state of this new race. And that will only be the first indication. From there we see the new dynamics of the race, how the different candidates interact, their relative strengths and the new realities that emerge from their confrontation. But again, something close to the status quo ante pre-debate — when Biden was behind but not by much — is I think a realistic expectation.
When I say realistic mainly it’s because that’s what I expect. But I also think that the response to the new Harris campaign has been so thunderous and overwhelming within the Democratic coalition that it’s easy to think that maybe she’s winning. But there’s no reason to expect that based on that response. What we’ve seen over the last 36 hours is a very good indication that you’ve got a united and energized Democratic party, an absolute sine qua non of success. What you need to win is to bring over a critical slice of undecided or currently third party voters. Those people have a totally different decision-matrix. They’re not just slightly less Democratic. Their ways of approaching the questions are fundamentally different. No less important, most are only now beginning to pay attention. That’s the work that Harris has taken on for the next three months.
This also isn’t a downcast outlook. Maybe we’ll be surprised and Harris will move quickly into a small lead. I don’t remotely count out the possibility. I can’t overstate the degree to which we are stepping into the unknown here, on the up and downsides. But the realistic argument to make this switch should never have been that a new candidate would hop into the lead. It’s that a new candidate was better able to make the argument against Trump and for the Democrats in the critical final three months of the campaign when the full electorate is finally engaged.