Amid the Democratic Party’s euphoric August, there were some indications in the polling that suggested Kamala Harris had managed to shed the deadweight with which Joe Biden had manacled his governing partner. She presented herself as the candidate for change, and voters seemed to be buying it. That was a counterintuitive conclusion for voters to reach of the incumbent vice president, and the New York Times/Siena poll has shown this false oasis out to be the mirage it always was.
As even casual political observers might expect, voters see Donald Trump as the candidate to produce either “major” or “minor” change to the status quo as president (61 percent). By contrast, a majority of voters (56 percent) believe Harris will deliver “more of the same.” That’s a problem for any candidate in a race in which only 3 — 3 — percent of voters hope the next president doesn’t divert at all from Biden’s record. Fully 95 percent of voters want the next president to depart from Biden’s approach, the level of divergence from the unpopular president being the only point of disagreement among nearly all Americans.
Voters are defaulting to the impression of Harris as a continuation of Biden’s presidency, in part because they don’t know enough about her to develop a contrary impression. While two-thirds of registered voters believe they know all they need to know about Harris, the Times/Siena survey also found that a third feel like “they need to learn more about Kamala Harris.” In the absence of new inputs, voters are falling back on the impression of Harris that she cultivated over the course of her near-decade in national public life. That is not going to change — not in Harris’s favor, at least — so long as the Harris campaign keeps their candidate interred behind Plexiglass.
As even Harris’s allies have begun to admit, the campaign’s snakebit trepidation toward allowing their principal to engage directly with the press or voters in extended, extemporaneous engagements has become a (predictable) liability. Some attribute the Harris campaign’s overcaution to the prominence of some former Biden campaign staffers on her team and the acute trauma they suffered anytime the senescent president stepped in front of a live microphone. Harris’s critics would posit a less charitable explanation for the candidate’s conspicuous absence from settings where she might be challenged. Either way, the Harris campaign has demonstrated an allergy to risk.
As such, by quarantining Harris as much as they did Biden, the campaign has shown that they still don’t trust voters to reach their preferred conclusions about their candidate. The voters who aren’t insulted by that lack of faith must, therefore, assume that Harris represents continuity with the Biden administration in all the worst ways. By preserving the ambiguity around her, the Harris campaign is doing team Trump’s work for them. They hope to cast Harris as unready for the presidency, and her campaign appears happy to oblige.
Right now, Harris is an inaccessible curiosity. Soon enough, that perception will evolve into the assumption that she is fragile — that she cannot handle extended exposure to challenges that demand quick thinking and deft maneuvering. That is not a quality anyone should want to see in a potential commander in chief of the armed forces. And that’s not all Trump has going for him in the latest Times/Siena poll. The former president — the “change” candidate amid a widespread desire for change — still owns the issues. By seven points (50 to 43 percent), Trump is more trusted on the policy particulars “most important” to voters. With so few undecided voters on the sidelines of this race, it’s reasonable to expect that voters will break the tie in their heads by deferring to their own parochial interests.
The poll is a red flag for Harris’s campaign, but the most glaring problem it identifies might be remedied if the campaign had enough faith in its candidate to thrust her into the spotlight more often. So many of her supporters assume that their campaign’s paranoia is a vestigial holdover from the Biden era. They imply that it’s unfair to assume that Harris struggles equally when exposed to cameras for extended periods. Perhaps. But maybe Harris’s campaign knows exactly what their candidate’s weaknesses are.
The number-crunchers over at The Economist also confirm what we all suspected: “With the conventions behind us, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s polling bounce is a no-show.”
Empirically, convention bounces have been waning for some time (see chart). Before 2000 the spike was worth an average of 3.7 percentage points in two-party polling. Since then the post-performance high has been smaller — around 1.7 points — and has faded faster. But the absence of a jump in this year’s polls is still striking: Ms Harris’s post-convention gains are smaller than those of 17 of the past 19 Democratic nominees.
The silver lining for Democrats is that Harris already had gotten the equivalent of her polling bounce before the conventions; The Economist gang calculates that in the initial weeks of her campaign, she “gained two percentage points in polls, putting her 4.7 points ahead of the final polls of Mr Biden’s campaign.”
But you can understand why Democrats might be irritable this morning, beyond the neck-and-neck New York Times poll. On paper, the Democratic convention in Chicago went about as well as the party could have possibly hoped — minimal protests and four nights of gushing coverage and well-delivered rah-rah speeches. And after all that, Harris and Tim Walz got bupkis. (Hey, maybe most of the speeches really did run too late to do any good on the East Coast. More likely, the audience watching was overwhelmingly already supportive of Harris.)
Harris still has a good chance of winning, somewhere around 50–50 odds. But Democrats ought to be sweating, swearing, or both, because she’s enjoyed an almost unparalleled run of effusive press, with little or no scrutiny of her record. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has stumbled, rambled, created all kinds of new headaches for himself, and yet . . . all seven key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin look to be within two or so percentage points.
There’s been a lot of discussion — seemingly well-founded — around the notion that Trump has a “hard ceiling” in his polling numbers — that even on his best days, he’s unlikely to ever get beyond 50 percent, and is likely to finish in the mid to upper 40s.
But what’s Harris’s ceiling, and is it comparably “hard”?
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