Kamala Harris Is Falling Behind
But her pathway to victory remains clear.
1. Where Are We?
Let’s be clear-eyed: With 56 days to the election Kamala Harris is not where she needs to be.
I’m going to give you three reasons to be concerned. And then three reasons to be optimistic. Let’s take the medicine first.
(1) 50.5 or Bust
Donald Trump is going to get somewhere between 46.0 percent and 48.0 percent of the vote.1 In order to have a solid chance to win the Electoral College, Harris needs to be over 50.5 percent; for a good chance she’ll need to be at 51 percent.2
No matter which polling average you look at, she’s not there.
Where are those last 2 or 3 percentage points supposed to come from? She’s not going to take from Trump. His voters are locked, cocked, and ready to rock.
Harris is going to have to achieve at least one of three outcomes:
Win late-breaking undecideds by a large margin.
Juice Democratic turnout so that it swamps Trump’s turnout of low-propensity voters.
Hold down the numbers of those low-propensity Trump voters, either by making herself unobjectionable to them or dampening their enthusiasm for Trump.
Of those, (1) and (2) seem like the best bets.
One more thing: It is concerning that Harris’s post-convention ceiling never broke the 50 percent mark in the polling averages.
She had the best month any presidential candidate has had in a long time. Her convention was an unalloyed success. Yet in the dozens of polls taken since she became the nominee, she’s touched 50 percent in only seven.
(2) Her momentum is gone.
When Harris entered the race and performed at a high level, it seemed possible that she could slingshot on that momentum all the way to Election Day. Shooting the moon was always going to be hard—a hundred days is a short campaign but it’s a long time to maintain fever-pitch excitement.
We now know that she isn’t going to shoot the moon.
Democrats ran a letter-perfect convention and Harris’s bounce coming out of it was still only about 2 points. Last week she started drifting backwards.
You have to zoom in pretty tight to see it, but the numbers are there:
After a month of hockey-stick growth, Harris flattened and then ticked backwards over the last two weeks.
This isn’t the end of the world, but it is the end of one of her pathways to victory. She isn’t going to swamp Trump with a tsunami of momentum. She’s in a dogfight.
(3) Trump won the last two weeks.
Campaigns exist in an attention economy. Harris dominated attention for her first four weeks. Trump won the last two weeks.
How?
First, he had the choreographed endorsement from RFK Jr. waiting for the end of the Democratic convention. And then he went to Arlington National Cemetery and caused a scene.
Trump’s decision to use the graves of his supporters as campaign props was insulting—but it was effective, because it made him the main character of the campaign. (Again.)
That’s where Trump thrives. He needs attention—even if the attention is the Department of Defense calling him out as a bully and a narcissist. Once he has the spotlight he can maneuver in it.
The Harris campaign made two tactical errors during this period.
First, they ceded the field to Trump. Coming out of the convention the campaign should have continued to roll out attention-grabbing events.
Second, they engaged Trump on his Arlington Cemetery stunt, giving him the space to turn it into a back-and-forth with her. It would have been better to let the fight stay as Trump versus the DoD.
2. Cakes
By this point in 2020, the cake was largely baked. That is not the case today. There’s plenty of movement happening and lots of outcomes are still possible.
Also: There are reasons to believe that Harris can move the election in her direction.