Pre Debate Panic?

The race has tightened, but Harris - especially with a good performance tonight - has reasons for optimism

We knew it wouldn’t last.

Kamalamentum has stalled. In just one month after taking over as Democratic standard bearer, Harris resurrected President Biden’s dead-in-the-water campaign and surged into a small lead over Donald Trump. Her lead reached 3.8 points in Five Thirty Eight’s poll consensus formula near the end of August.

Now, the lead is down to 2.8 points, 538 says - 47.1% for Harris vs. 44.4% for Trump (or a 2.8 point difference after adjusting for a rounding error). Worse, two prominent pollsters, New York Times/Siena and Pew Research Center, have released polls the past couple of days calling the race a dead heat.

“Is Kamala Harris’s surge beginning to ebb?” asked Nate Cohn, New York Times polling guru, on Sept. 8 as the paper revealed the first major, nonpartisan, national poll that showed Trump with a (tiny) lead in more than a month.

Cohn, while acknowledging that the poll might be an outlier, suggested several reasons why Harris might be concerned: Trump’s popularity is near its peak and higher than it was in 2016 or 2020, voters trust him a little more on the issues they care the most about, voters want change and see Trump as the change candidate, and voters see Trump as a closer to the center candidate than Harris.

Excuse me, I need a minute to scream into the void that voters view Trump as a more centrist candidate than Attila the Hun, let alone Kamala Harris. But like it or not, they do.

I’ve just given you four paragraphs of bad news, and when I resume, I’m going to give you one more. But let me give you this column’s spoiler before we move on: Even now, when Trump has regained some momentum, Harris has the easier path to victory.

Here’s the remaining bad news, which actually isn’t so bad: A substantial minority of voters say they’re still making up their minds about Harris. In one of the more striking contrasts, a CBS News poll released today said about 40% of voters in the Blue Wall battleground states Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania say they don’t know what Harris stands for, double the percentage who say they don’t know what Trump stands for.

Two points on these uncertain voters:

1) Of course large numbers of voters don’t have a clear picture of Harris yet. She’s spent the last 3 1/2 years as vice president, the witness protection program for national politicians.

2) These uncertain voters are an opportunity for Harris. She’s been a presidential candidate for only seven weeks. Time is short, but she still has enough of it to explain herself to voters who are reluctant to vote for Trump but need to feel a little more confident about who they’re voting for. We know that, so far, as voters learn more about Harris, they really like her. Two months ago, Harris’s net favorability rating was negative 17 points. Now it’s almost even, while Trump remains nearly 10 points underwater.

And that’s why tonight’s debate is so pivotal. This will be Harris’s best chance to create a favorable impression with the undecided voter. Trump, because voters know him so much better, has less to gain or lose.

I see the argument for betting on Trump. He was down in the high single digits in early September in both 2016 and 2020. He won one of those races and came darn close to winning the other. Why shouldn’t he expect to do 4 or 5 points better in the election than current polls indicate, just like the last two elections?

Because this race doesn’t look like 2016 or 2020. It looks, in fact, like a mirror image of 2016. In 2016, Trump made up a big polling deficit because it turned out that the undecided voters were dominated by Republican-leaning voters who needed convincing to do what they usually do and vote for the Republican again.

This time, it appears that most of the undecided voters are Democratic-leaning voters. The 2024 election story, so far, has been the collapse of the anti-Trump coalition that sent Biden to victory in 2020 and the re-assembly of that coalition under Harris. In that light, the polls have made perfect sense. Harris’s early momentum largely consisted of 2020 anti-Trump coalition members returning to the fold. She brought most of the strays back into the fold with remarkable speed.

The momentum stall is the point where Harris has brought back the easiest of the strays. Now she has to persuade the anti-Trump holdouts, who are a tougher but not impossible sell, and a small but significant pocket of folks who voted for Trump twice but are open to jumping ship. None of these voters will be easy to attract, but they are gettable - especially if Harris performs well tonight.

Now, look at the race from Trump’s viewpoint: He is even with Harris, but he needs to win over a respectable chunk of the undecided voters to stay there. How is he going to get them?

Data analyst Lakshya Jain told host Greg Sargent on The New Republic’s The Daily Blast podcast contrasted the relative prospects of Trump and Harris to attract that final 10% or so of the voter pool that says it’s undecided. “The task that Trump has is to convince a bunch of people who don’t like him that he’s still better than the alternative,” Jain said.

But all Harris has to do is convince people who don’t know her that well that she’s better than the alternative that they don’t like. If they liked Trump, they wouldn’t be undecided. Can he win over enough of them? He could, but if Trump can’t make them terrified of Harris or get a boost from the news, I think most of them are likely to break for Harris.

And, finally, there’s this: “I’ve seen this film three or four times by now,” Jain said. “Every time Donald Trump comes into the limelight, he does something or the other to remind the public why he’s the most unpopular presidential candidate in generations.”