It’s been more than a week since the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention, and one thing seems clear: Vice President Kamala Harris isn’t seeing a post-convention polling bump typical of most presidential campaigns.
Still, the race remains remarkably tight. Harris marginally improved her numbers before the Aug. 19-22 Chicago confab. She is virtually deadlocked with former President Donald Trump in any number of national polls, with operatives expecting that to remain the case through November.
Patrick Murray, director of the Polling Institute at Monmouth University, told the Washington Examiner that Harris saw her bump before the convention after President Joe Biden ended his 2024 bid on July 21 and Democrats quickly united around Harris as his chosen successor.
“We have an unprecedented situation here, where we have a candidate who was just announced as the candidate a month before the convention, and quite frankly, that’s when she got her bounce,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. “What we’re looking at with polling since the convention is that she held on to it.”
The Real Clear Politics average of national polls on Tuesday has Harris leading Trump in a head-to-head matchup by 1.9 percentage points. That’s virtually unchanged from Aug. 19, when Harris was ahead by 1.5 percentage points.
A handful of veteran Democratic operatives with close ties to the Harris campaign voiced some anxiety to the Washington Examiner about the state of the race.
“It certainly would have been nice to see a bump,” one such operative stated. “The stakes are so high, you’d hope that the vice president’s message and demeanor alone would be enough to cut through the negative attacks and lies coming from the other side, but that’s just the current state of politics, I guess.”
The next major moment for Trump and Harris to capture a large national audience will be Sept. 10, when the two will face off for their first, perhaps only, presidential debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
“I’ve said this before, but it all comes down to Sept. 10. Trump’s main critique of Vice President Harris has been that she’s slow-rolling her presidential agenda,” a second operative said ahead of the debate. “She’ll lay it all out on that stage. I just hope people will go into the night with open minds and think about who we want running the country: a woman who will fight like hell to actually help real, American families or a felon who only cares about himself and his cronies.”
National polls are one thing, but the election will likely be decided by the results of just seven battleground states, where, again, Harris and Trump remain extremely competitive.
Morgan Jackson, a Democratic strategist based out of battleground North Carolina, told the Washington Examiner that, given how entrenched both candidates’ bases were, he didn’t expect Harris to sustain a significant post-convention bounce.
“I didn’t think we’d see a ton of movement, and I don’t think within any demographic cells, whether it is women, African Americans, young voters, seniors — whatever demographic cell we want to talk about. I think my gut is this race is not going to move very much in any of those individual cells or overall,” he explained. “I think at the end of the day, this is a 47-48 race — somebody’s going to get 48, and somebody’s going to get 47 or potentially both get 48 in some degrees, right? I think that’s where we’re headed in this race.”
The historic, truncated 2024 race seems to have some polling experts confused as well.
Pollster Nate Silver wrote Tuesday that while his polling average shows Harris leading Trump in national polls, his electoral odds model still presents her as an underdog, though that might change in the coming weeks.
“Harris’s odds have declined slightly over the past two weeks, as she’s gone from roughly a 55/45 favorite to a 45/55 underdog. It’s not a huge change. Probability calculations can be highly sensitive just to either side of the 50/50 mark,” Silver wrote. “If the New York Knicks make a buzzer-beater just before halftime to go from trailing the Boston Celtics 61-60 to leading them 62-61, they might tick over from ‘underdog’ to ‘favorite’ in a win probability model. But it isn’t as though the game has been fundamentally transformed.”
Murray predicted that even with the Harris-Trump debate on Sept. 10, polling “margins stay fairly close,” but due to the “unprecedented” nature of this election, he “also won’t be that surprised if something moves them a few more points.”
“The thing that we have with Harris is that it’s a situation we’ve never faced before, so who knows what this means,” Murray said.
While polls don’t necessarily grant Harris a post-convention lift, she has improved since last month in less tangible ways.
A poll published over the weekend by ABC and Ipsos found that people on both sides give Harris better marks than Trump for how her campaign has been run to date.
More than half of all respondents, including 93% of Democrats, 56% of independents, and 24% of Republicans, say Harris is running an “excellent” or “good” campaign.
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By comparison, just 41% of respondents, including 79% of Republicans, 38% of independents, and 13% of Democrats, said the same of Trump.
Meanwhile, that same poll showed Harris opening her previously 6-point lead among women up to 13 points.
