We’re all destined for a couple months watching horse-race polls because many of us simply can’t help ourselves. (What is it? A desire for information? Managing anxiety? A questing play for agency over the contingent and unknown?) But I want to go back to something I mentioned a week or two ago: Kamala Harris’s favorability numbers, apart from the horse race. Those have now gone from a deficit of negative 17.4 percentage points on July 4th to .9 net negative percentage points today. (I’m using 538’s composite average just because I find that one easy to find and navigable.) As I mentioned in that earlier post, that kind of movement is, as far as I know, more or less unprecedented. You simply don’t get more popular these days. Not like that. Undulations, sure. But generally you get less popular over time, not more.
There are certainly a number of extraordinary circumstances that explain this movement in Harris’s case. But what I want to draw your attention to here is that these numbers continue to move in her direction. They haven’t stopped. The horse-race numbers have been fairly stable for a couple weeks and may have tracked down a speck depending on which average you look at. But these favorability numbers continue to creep up. Today’s number is the best since the July 21st switch, and that’s been pretty much the case almost every day since July 21st.
Obviously, you don’t win elections based on favorability. It’s the horse-race polls which at least purport to measure the binary voter choice which wins an election. But the continued movement in those favorability numbers tells me that Republican attacks on Harris, by the most basic metric, do not appear to be breaking through.
It’s true that most of the movement in this net favorability composite is the growth of people with a favorable view of Harris rather than a reduction in the number of people with an unfavorable view. That suggests that the bulk of that roughly 17 point move is consolidating support in the Democratic coalition and picking up the support of loosely politicked people who had no opinion before. But unfavorable number is coming down too. In the 538 data set the percentage of people with a negative view of Harris is at the lowest it’s been since she entered the race and lowest it’s been since almost exactly three years ago. (For context, Trump’s favorability numbers were improving too after the assassination attempt coupled with the GOP convention. But that stopped in mid-August and trended back in a negative direction.)
What does this all amount to? As I said, I think it shows a clear lack of traction in the attacks on Harris. More than that, favorability is the prism through which all of us see new attacks, new news. The more positive impression we have of a person, the more we see new information about them in glass-full more than glass-empty terms; we revolve benefits of the doubt in their favor. So it can be both predictive and protective. Meanwhile, again according 538, the Democrats are on an upswing on the generic ballot more less since Harris entered the race. Dems are currently up 2.3 percentage points. Taken together these strike me as directional indicators about where the election is going that are as indicative or perhaps more indicative than the daily horse-race numbers.
