Member Newsletter
Just before Labor Day, often treated as the quasi-official kick-off of the presidential election season proper, I wanted to share some notes on the state of the race — what the polls say, what they mean and whatever other scraps of information I’ve been able to pick up and glean.
Overall, I see a race that remains close, uncertain, but in which Kamala Harris holds a small but general advantage.
Let’s start with the shift from mid-summer and Harris’ entry into the campaign. When Biden left the race he was three or four points behind Trump in the national polls and was behind in all the swing states. This represented a small but critical drop from where he was in June before the debate. (Much of that drop was in the week prior to leaving the race.) Over the course of August, Harris moved from that starting point into a three- or four-point lead in national polls. So a shift of seven or eight points in Democrats’ direction, where she more or less remains. At the state level, Harris is now ahead or roughly tied in all the swing states. North Carolina, meanwhile, is now firmly in the swing state group, where it really hadn’t been under Biden.
The race now seems to have stabilized there, at least for the moment. There’s been a convention bump. But it’s a small one and difficult to disentangle from other things happening in the race. If you don’t look closely, it would be easy to miss it.
I don’t see this as totally unexpected. Harris may be near her ceiling already, at least for this part of the campaign. But it’s worth considering what a convention bump actually is. It’s an ephemeral rise in the polls that a candidate gets after a week of nonstop, concentrated messaging and generally positive press. There’s a good argument that Harris already had that in early August with all the boffo headlines coming out of the candidate switch.
So what does this all actually mean?
From the vantage point of late July, Harris’ entry into the race represents an almost unimaginable leap forward. When I say “unimaginable,” what I mean is that if you were gaming out the impact of a candidate hot swap in mid-July, what actually ended up happening would have to be at the very outer range of the possible, the most optimistic scenario one could imagine. It’s now quite plausible that Harris not only wins the election but wins the election with a larger Electoral College margin than Joe Biden got in 2020 — the potential addition of North Carolina being the key difference. It’s also quite plausible that she could lose. And when I say “quite plausible,” I mean quite plausible based on the polls as they are today, not assuming some downhill trend from here. It’s great to have leads in almost every swing state. But in most of those states, the size of the lead is small enough that it could really go either way even without a significant polling error. They’ll have to fight for every one of them.
A more positive way to look at this is that in June and July, Joe Biden was looking at a map where the only clear road to victory was through the Blue Wall states, so plausible victory was holding the Blue Wall and winning with literally a single electoral vote. Harris now has multiple paths to victory. She can win in the Blue Wall states. She could win with a mix of Blue Wall or Southern Tier states. She could win them all. Simply put, she has options. She has to fight for every one of them. But she doesn’t have to win every one of them. And Donald Trump is fairly close to having to win every one of them.
Let’s remind ourselves that a two-to-four point lead for Harris isn’t necessarily a “lead.” It’s the range a Democrat needs to be in to overcome Republicans’ Electoral College advantage. Going back many years, I always thought of Pennsylvania as the most secure of the Blue Wall states. But it’s clear that this year that’s not the case. It’s the weakest or the most tenuous. I’m trying to get a handle on where exactly the demographic or regional weakness is. But the issue with Pennsylvania is real, not just a figment of press coverage. Michigan and Wisconsin are still close, but the improvement in those states has been more clear than it has in Pennsylvania. And Pennsylvania is a critical lynchpin with 19 electoral votes that are difficult to make up elsewhere.
All this said, Donald Trump has no better than a tie now in four or five states, all of which he needs to win: Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania. That’s not a good place to be. At the moment Harris is nominally ahead in all but one of those states.
Another interesting detail is that even though Harris is doing better than Biden basically everywhere, the gap between her swing state numbers and Democratic Senate candidates in those states remains significant and consistent. That’s not necessarily bad for Harris. But it suggests that there is a pattern that is more than about Joe Biden. That was one of the arguments against his candidacy: Democratic potential in Michigan or Arizona or Pennsylvania was X but he was running at maybe X-5. But if we accept that logic — that the Senate candidates are a proxy for potential Democratic support — Harris is still running significantly behind X. My guess is that means that the Senate Democratic candidates are more able to run on themselves and their own attributes and on policies, while national polarization is kicking in much more with the presidential candidates, whether it’s Biden or Harris. Precisely what it means I’m not certain. But it’s worth noting that a key assumption many people had hasn’t born out.
Another thing to remember is that while most of us are going to be watching the national political conversation — Harris’ sit-down interview, Trump’s Arlington attacks — a lot of this fight is going to take place on TVs and devices in swing states, saturation-level ads most of us won’t see and aren’t even that well-equipped to understand. On that last point, I mean that there is going to be saturation-level paid messaging directed at people who don’t follow politics closely and who have loose political allegiances. As people with strong political allegiances who follow politics very closely, you and I have to do a lot of reimagining to understand how well these ads do or don’t work.
I like where Harris is at this point in the cycle. It’s infinitely better than where Biden was even though numerically speaking they’re not dramatically different. But this is going to be hard slog all the way to November 5th.