With Kamala Harris on top of the ticket, Democrats have breathed a sigh of relief, telling themselves that the race for president has finally been reset and shifted their way.
Reuters reports that an enthusiastic Harris plans to ” tour battleground states next week with her vice presidential candidate, two sources familiar with the planning said on Tuesday, a sign the selection process for her running mate is coming to a close.”
But some poll watchers have begun to pour a little cold water on the Democratic excitement. Red State pointed out that “resetting” the race might not be all that it’s cracked up to be for the Democrats. She’s still losing after all.
According to the poll, Trump leads Harris by three points, clocking in at 48 to 45 percent. When leaners are included, the former president’s lead grows to four points, with the spread being 52 to 48 percent.
Are you starting to see the problem? Yes, that is a better showing for Harris than Biden was posting before his dropping out, but she’s still losing. That’s a theme we see across the vast majority of the polls released over the last week of her being the presumptive nominee. Of the eight non-partisan polls released post-Biden, Trump leads six of them. In the two that Harris led, she’s only up one and two points respectively, which would suggest the former president would win the electoral college. The battleground polling isn’t much better.
That brings up the obvious question. What’s so great about “resetting the race” if the result is the same? There’s no prize for losing by a smaller margin. Do I fully expect Harris to continue to make this a closer contest, including possibly consolidating enough support in California and New York to win the popular vote? Sure, that seems probable based on what has transpired so far, but at this moment, she’s still losing.
Her hypothetical path to victory rests on one assumption, which is that the current bump she’s seeing is not her high-water mark. “She’s still going to get a bump when she picks a vice president,” they claim. I’m skeptical that’s true. The Trump campaign just placed a huge ad buy to begin to define Harris. It’s very likely she just had the best week of her campaign given the media onslaught in her favor and the fact that Republicans were caught somewhat flat-footed (who wouldn’t be when an opposition party swaps their nominee in late July via the machinations of nothing but insiders).
#Updated @NateSilver538 Electoral collage model
🔴 Trump 61% (Chance)
🔵 Harris 38%@Polymarket odds
🔴 Trump 59% (Chance)
🔵 Harris 39%https://t.co/X95VbfTRZp pic.twitter.com/friIe6poHc— Political Polls (@PpollingNumbers) July 30, 2024
Red State isn’t the only one noticing that the “reset” of the race has led to the odds significantly moving toward Harris in November.
Election guru Nate Silver recently wrote that Harris is a “modest underdog to Trump in the Electoral College, risking a repeat of the popular vote-Electoral College split that cost Democrats the 2000 and 2016 elections. Harris isn’t unique in this regard: Biden also had a large Electoral College-popular vote gap in 2020, barely winning several tipping-point states despite winning the popular vote by 4.5 percentage points. But this is still a problem for Democrats, and we show Harris as having a slightly wider popular vote-Electoral College gap than Biden had in his version of the forecast.”
They seeded this years ago