Kamala Harris hasn’t trailed Donald Trump once in the FiveThirtyEight polling average, and her favorability rating has now ticked up to just shy of 45 percent. On Tuesday, her campaign announced that it has raised a staggering $500 million in the past month. And here in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, it is hard to avoid talk from delegates of a realignment-level landslide, of a fall campaign that sees Democrats competing in red states like Texas, Florida, and even Mississippi.
But Harris campaign officials and longtime veterans of Democratic campaigns say that this amounts to a vibes-based bubble that is likely to if not quite burst at least deflate by the fall.
“This is all great, but this isn’t the election,” says Jared Moskowitz, a Democratic member of Congress from South Florida. “What we are seeing in the polls is just what the vice-president said — she is the underdog. And we have to run like we are the underdog.”
Among the pitfalls ahead: Democratic base voters, especially young Black and Latino men, still do not support the Harris-Walz ticket to the degree they supported Biden in 2020, even as she has vastly improved on Biden’s 2024 numbers in the swing states, according to a recent USA Today poll. Conversely, Harris is running surprisingly strong among older white voters without college degrees, as did Biden, but there is concern that these are the likeliest to return to the Trump fold as the campaign wears on.
“Our numbers are much less rosy than what you’re seeing in the public,” Chauncey McLean, president of Future Forward, the main super PAC backing Harris, said this week in Chicago. “We have it tight as a tick, and pretty much across the board.”
Harris has spent the month since Biden announced he would not run again surfing a wave of positive media coverage, but she still has not sat for an interview with a member of the mainstream press since she became the party’s presumptive nominee — there has been no need to given the positive press and polling boost she has received. But the pressure is likely to grow, not least because grumbles from the press will only get louder.
There is also at least one debate scheduled between Harris and Trump on September 10, the first time the two will have ever met. If she stumbles there or during an interview, as she has done in other high-stakes media moments, some Democratic operatives fret that it could remind voters of the Harris who struggled with low approval ratings for most of her tenure as vice-president.
“They are not going to be able to protect her forever,” says one Republican strategist close to Trump. Many Republicans in his orbit see Harris running a replay of a movie they have seen before: the one Ron DeSantis tried in the Republican primary. The Florida governor and onetime nominal front-runner for the GOP nomination thought he could avoid the mainstream media but ultimately discovered that a hostile press corps could only be managed if given access to the candidate. By the time he engaged beyond his own base of supporters, Trump was already overshadowing him.
In Harris’s case, Republican media strategists believe that part of the positive press she has been receiving is because outlets and reporters are currying favor in an attempt to land a big interview; once Harris speaks to one outlet, the others, they predict, will turn on her and the campaign. “We have never seen any candidate get the kind of press she has gotten over the past month,” says Jim McClaughlin, a Republican pollster. “How has she not even done ‘home game’ interviews on Morning Joe or Joy Reid or The View? We are hearing about it in our focus groups. There is a sense they are hiding her.”
Candidates tend to get a polling bounce after conventions. Trump’s was minimal, largely because it coincided with the uptick in approval that he received after surviving an attempt on his life the week before. Democratic strategists are skeptical that Harris will get much of one, either, largely because she already received a bounce in the wake of the run of good press she has been enjoying.
Republicans admit that they were caught off guard both by Joe Biden’s sudden withdrawal from the race and the party’s quick embrace of Harris, who as late as last year some Democrats were urging to be dropped from the Biden ticket. And they say that Trump has not yet found his footing, not just because of what is happening on the other side of the aisle but because of the lingering effects of the assassination attempt on Trump’s mental state.
But they think the issues, in particular the economy, the border, and crime, still favor Trump, and that Harris has even less credibility on those issues than Biden does. (Polling is mixed on this point.) And the Trump campaign maintains that there are persuadable voters out there who may not approve of his conduct but trust him more on the issues they care about. Democrats unaffiliated with the campaign have grumbled in Chicago that the convention has been more about tearing down Trump than building up the Harris-Walz ticket, or, more important, addressing the issues that matter to voters. “Trump is an asshole. Everyone knows this already,” said one.
But, meanwhile, even Democratic campaign veterans are wondering aloud if in fact the good vibes of the past month can be sustained for just a little while longer: Early voting begins in some states next month, and a nation exhausted by a pandemic and record inflation was, until very recently, choosing between two candidates with a cumulative age of over 150 years.
“I mean, if she is able to continue on this trajectory, she will be elected pope,” says Paul Begala, a veteran Democratic strategist. “There is an anti-Trump majority in America that has been solid ever since he slithered down the escalator in your beloved city nine years ago. Never for a day has he commanded a majority of his fellow Americans. Kamala can assemble that. Will she, we have to see, but so far, so good.”
