It’s Been Long Enough: Harris Has Momentum in the Polls

August 6, 2024

Chicago. Tuesday afternoon. August 6, 2024. I have been here for the past week attending the American Bar Association conference. The city is getting ready for the Democratic National Convention in a couple of weeks. I wanted to get this post out today as most of the political chatter will be about Harris’s selection of Gov. Tim Walz (MN) as her running mate. I thought the tea leaves were pointing us to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. Perhaps in time we will find if something in the past few days moved her away from Shapiro and towards Walz or whether it was a mistake to ever think Shapiro was the odds-on favorite. In any case, Walz is a good choice in my opinion. I think he is probably the best communicator of the Democratic agenda and values among the short-listed candidates, he has a really good background and story, and has been an effective progressive governor in a state with significant Republican opposition in the state legislature. In many ways, Walz represents a kind of through-line for what makes one a Democrat, which is why we saw AOC and Joe Manchin both endorse him immediately. Well, let’s look at the state of the race today.

The polling from the first couple of weeks after Biden withdrew from the race was difficult to assess for a few reasons. First, some of these polls were in the field before or when Biden dropped out. Second, some polls tested Harris as a hypothetical candidate or essentially treated the poll as testing support for the “Democratic candidate.” Finally, it could not be known at first whether the excitement and novelty of the Harris campaign was causing a short-lived bump in support or whether it was real. We are now three weeks from Harris announcing her candidacy and less than 100 days before the election. It’s been long enough to start considering the polling.

The polling average from the New York Times Poll Tracker has Harris and Trump tied at the national level in both the two-way and multi-candidate races, as well as tied in Pennsylvania, Michigan (Trump is actually +1), and Wisconsin. The trend is increasing support for Harris. Trump appears to have hit his ceiling. This is a real problem for the Republican nominee. While he has a very strong base of support, it doesn’t appear that he can get more than 45-47% of the vote. This is one reason why he and his supporters have been propping up the increasingly bizarre independent campaign of Robert Kennedy. For Trump to win, he needs to hold Harris to about 45% of the vote. While it’s more complicated than that when we factor in Electoral College dynamics, this general idea is operative.

In the most recent polling, Harris is starting to pull into a lead against Trump. In the recent CBS/YouGov poll, Harris is leading in both the two-way and multi-candidate races. It appears that Kennedy is drawing pretty much all of his support from Trump supporters. He gets 2% in the multi-candidate race, but when the two-way race question is posed Trump’s support jumps by two points. Harris does pick up a point in the two-way race, but that may be drawn more from West and Stein supporters (both candidates round down to zero in the multi-candidate race).

The strong gains Harris has made in three weeks suggest this is momentum, not a bump. (That doesn’t mean it can’t go the other way at some point.) What we have seen since Biden withdrew on July 21st is steady gains to the presumptive nominee Harris. This is a very different race than it was three weeks ago.

It's pretty amazing how competitive Harris is in the battleground states compared to where Biden was at when he dropped out of the race. It appeared that in some of those states that Biden had already lost them, and he was going to have to focus on a narrow 270-vote strategy focusing on the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania plus Nebraska’s 2^nd Congressional District. Harris has not only made those states competitive in the three weeks since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee, but she is competitive in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina now.

Biden was doing so poorly in battleground states that it was getting difficult to keep calling some of them battleground states. He was losing all of them, and several were starting to look completely lost. Virginia was starting to tighten and there was on-the-ground evidence in New Mexico that the state might be trending away from him. There is reason to believe that it was internal polling in those two states that convinced Biden he could not win. (I have seen no public polling in New Mexico.) There was no path to victory for Biden if he lost Virginia and New Mexico, at least not one that seems plausible.

Harris has quickly moved into ties with Trump in the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. She is looking strong in Georgia, whereas Biden was going to lose that state and perhaps by large margin. The same is true of Arizona. Harris seems to have made gains in Nevada as well.

The 538 averages for the battleground states show Harris leading in the Blue Wall states plus Nevada and close behind in Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona. Nationally, she is up by two points. The New York Times polling averages are calculated differently than 538. For instance, the Times does not include any polls in its averages that were conducted partially or in full before July 19^th, when Biden withdrew. They take the position that any polling before then was either hypothetical (if Harris was named) and thus unreliable, or was for Biden and thus is not transferable. I agree with the Times’ approach. The downside is that it will take some more time before they get enough new polling to calculate battleground averages for all the relevant states (they require at least five polls from at least three different pollsters).

What’s interesting about the 538 averages is how well Harris is doing even with using older data that was less favorable to her. Both aggregators weigh the data for recency and based on pollster quality – although each does it a little differently.

Here are the FiveThirtyEight polling averages this morning (Blue Wall states are in bold):

• National: Harris +2

• Michigan: Harris +2.1

• Wisconsin: Harris +1.6

• Pennsylvania: Harris +1.1

• Nevada: Harris +0.3

• Georgia: Trump +0.7

• North Carolina: Trump +1.0

• Arizona: Trump +1.9

Not only have Trump’s fortunes changed dramatically since Biden withdrew, but Kennedy has seen his campaign start to evaporate. There was always reason to believe that Democrats supporting him were really using him as a none-of-the-above choice. Kennedy has spent so much time double-downing on his conspiracy theories that he has, and apparently continues, to take support from Trump. He has a predictable coalition of the irrational wing of the wellness community, crypto fanboys, and QAnon-type conspiracy theorists.

The idea of propping up Kennedy to take votes away from Biden always had the wrong idea behind it. Right wing donors apparently thought a lot of Democrats would give any Kennedy knee-jerk support, and that would cleave Biden’s support. That was always 100% wrong, and provides more evidence of how people with too much money don’t always know what they are doing. But it did work in an unintended way, sort of. Kennedy became an option for those folks who didn’t want either Biden or Trump to run. So, it did dig into Biden’s support, but also into Trump’s. And Trump’s was stickier because Kennedy is not a normal Democrat, let alone a liberal one. If you’ll excuse my language, he is a batshit crazy conspiracy theorist who also happens to be a textbook narcissist. This appeals to all these groups. Perhaps the wellness folks would not support Trump (although some definitely do), but some would have written in Marianne Williamson or voted for Jill Stein - if they even voted. Others are so enamored of Kennedy’s irresponsible anti-vaccine stance that they would stay with him. Here is the one thing none of the right wingers counted on: Biden would withdraw.

With Biden out, the Democrats who were supporting Kennedy as a protest vote against Biden now could come home to Harris. And so far, it looks like that is happening. Kennedy’s support nationally (and in some state polling) has been cut in half in the past three weeks. In some cases, but not all, Harris’ movement in the polls can be attributed to Kennedy supporters abandoning him. This puts Trump in a real bind. Kennedy cannot pivot to being a progressive at this point - although he might try - because no one will believe he is more progressive than Kamala Harris at this point. Anyone who won’t support Harris from the left will vote for West or Stein, not Kennedy. Trump needs Kennedy to get out of the race now. But Kennedy, like any narcissist, thinks he the most important person in the world. He can’t imagine not being in the race now - and he even floated the idea that Democrats might nominate him after Biden withdrew, which shows you how his brain works. And my guess is he actually thinks he is going to win the presidency, and if he doesn’t it will be because the entire system was conspiring against him. If he does drop out, expect that to be his rationale.