Polls Are Breaking Hard for Kamala Harris

By Jacob Weindling  |  August 8, 2024 | 2:25pm
Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Elections 2024 Election
Polls Are Breaking Hard for Kamala Harris

I still think it’s too early to take many definitive assumptions from presidential polls because they are most useful in the aggregate and presidential candidate Kamala Harris just hasn’t existed for long enough. Given the traditional post-convention polling bump every presidential candidate receives, we likely will not get a firm sense of Kamala Harris’s stature in America’s eye until late September or October, but this title is one conclusion we can come to already.

Split Ticket and Data for Progress polled the Rust Belt and found a four-point swing from Donald Trump to Kamala Harris from July 18-23 to July 29-August 2. Everywhere you look, polls which indicated that Donald Trump was a slight favorite now say either Kamala Harris is marginally ahead, or it is break-even. Even more encouraging for Harris is that at least according to this Split Ticket and Data for Progress poll, these gains are not concentrated among younger or non-white voters as many expected would happen once the old white guy stepped down.

In fact, Harris’ gains with whites are significantly more pronounced than any pro-Democratic shift she sees with nonwhites, even though her vote share rises with both groups.

Harris’s main strength comes from consolidating the Democratic base that contains many young and non-white voters, which anyone with a cursory understanding of presidential polling and the timing of events could see coming. Joe Biden’s approval rating slipped into the thirties, which is where George W. Bush and Donald Trump found themselves at the end of their presidencies, a classic signifier that significant chunks of their own party had abandoned them under disastrous situations. Democratic Party voters made it abundantly clear that Kamala Harris could just pick up some support off the ground that was sitting there for any non-Biden candidate.

That consolidation of the Democratic base alone might be enough to pull her even with Trump, but what seems to be pushing her ahead so far are her gains with America’s broader white population. Trump has yet to really mount a concentrated or coherent attack on the Harris/Walz ticket, and so no one should assume this spread will endure once conditions change. Some voters who have jumped on the Kamala train will fall off as the campaign mounts its twists and turns on the way to November, and Harris’s fraught moment last night insinuating that protesters of the Israeli genocide are Trump voters reminds us how nothing is for certain in politics. There’s no reason she couldn’t wind up having the same baggage with the left or center that Joe Biden has.

But what’s clear is that her floor is much higher than Joe Biden’s, which means that the switch was a smart move. Everyone who assumed that Harris’s Biden-esque polling as vice president would translate to her as a potential president has been proven wrong. A lot of voters are willing to give Kamala a chance to earn their vote in a way they were not for Joe Biden, and now it is on her to do it.

 
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