The poll Democrats are freaking out over
Bad news for Harris - but there's a way back
Now that the Democratic National Convention is firmly in the rearview mirror, it seems that Kamala Harris didn’t get much of a “convention bounce” - an uptick in the polls which has traditionally followed a party’s convention. In fact, the aftermath of the convention has coincided with a seeming stalling of Harris’ momentum - her lead had widened to nearly 4% (which incidentally is about what she needs to win by to very confident of also winning the Electoral College) but is now back below 3%, according to the FiveThirtyEights poll tracker.1
Now along comes a new poll from NYT/Sienna which has Donald Trump leading Kamala Harris 48 to 47%. It’s only one poll, but Democrats are freaking out because NYT/Sienna is generally considered a highly credible pollster and one which tends to drive the national conversation because of the prominence of the New York Times. It’s possible that this marks the beginning of a new spate of polls which will be much more favorable for Trump.
So, on the eve of the debate, what exactly should we make of the state of the race? My basic takeaway is that you’d rather be Harris than Trump, but that some warning signs are flashing for her - and there are some things she needs to do in order to increase her chances of victory.
If you’re relatively new to following U.S. presidential elections closely, it’s important to realize that there are some important subtexts to polls, particularly for Democrats. In sum, these subtexts are:
Democrats need to win the national popular vote by significantly more than 50.1% to be assured of a victory in the Electoral College. Trump’s voters are distributed more “efficiently”, meaning that there are more of them in the swing states that will decide the election. In order to overcome that disadvantage, Democrats need to win the national popular vote not by 0.1% but by something more like 2 - 3%. In scenarios where Democrats win the national popular vote by about 2.5%, they will win the Electoral College only about half of the time - but the odds get better the more they win by.
But Democrats still don’t feel safe even with polls showing Harris 3 or 4% ahead, because polls in the last few national elections significantly underestimated the support Trump would actually receive on election day. There are various theories as to why this is the case, including the “shy Trump voter” theory (which I don’t really buy) and the theory that pollsters are not very good at reaching Trump voters to include in their surveys (more plausible, because Trump has mobilized a lot of people who previously didn’t vote). Pollsters claim that they have adjusted their methodology and that this time they’ll be more accurate, but it’s not clear that this is actually the case.
Finally, most Democrats were traumatized by 2016, when polls showed that Clinton was likely to win - and then she didn’t because she lost the Electoral College. After 2016, most Democrats were nervous as hell on election night in 2020, even though Biden had a pretty big polling lead over Trump (much larger than Harris’ lead now). And Biden still only barely won the Electoral College!
Nor are these just psychological quirks affecting the blue team - they are serious reasons why you have to be careful about how you interpret the polls. And when you add to that the fact that Harris’ lead in polling averages is now within the margin of error of the polls themselves, Democrats have plenty of reasons to be nervous.
But if you dig under the hood of the NYT/Sienna poll a bit, there are some indications of what Harris could do to try to turn things around. Basically, the poll found that a lot of voters see her as “too liberal”, that a significant chunk of voters say they don’t have enough information about her to form an opinion yet, and that Trump’s support has been remarkably resilient.
The “too liberal” finding is a tricky one. Since entering the race, Harris has done a lot to try to define herself as a moderate. She is the inheritor of the mantle of Biden-ism and she has shown that she understands its strengths. She has leaned into patriotism. She has avoided liberal policy proposals. On the other hand, she’s fighting some headwinds - there’s a general perception than women of color are very liberal, and Harris herself did take some very liberal positions in her attempt to win the 2019-20 primary. She has now disavowed these, but they continue to dog her.
But this challenge can be turned into an opportunity. Harris has so far avoided many policy announcements at all, which is one reason why a significant chunk of people are saying they need to know more about her and her plans. If there’s a general perception that you’re “too liberal”, just avoiding liberal proposals is not going to dispel it - you need to actually come out fighting for a moderate agenda. The threat of Trump and the historic nature of her candidacy means that Harris will get a lot of leeway from the left of her party if she attacks some of its shibboleths and puts forward a moderate agenda. She needs to do this, and do it in big, flashy ways.
Harris also needs to do more to persuade voters into deserting Trump. I think she’s been absolutely correct to avoid rising to his bait when he engages in racist attacks against her, but I don’t think she’s been doing enough to hit him in other areas. Trump was an atrocious president who plunged the country into chaos and then tried to sabotage the peaceful transfer of power. But his schtick has also lost so much of its shock value that people tend to just shrug it off rather than remember what the years of his presidency were actually like. They need to be reminded why his years in power made American life so miserable - and the new voters who have come to political consciousness since 2020 need to be educated about it in the first place.
These are the tasks that Harris needs to take up at the debate on Tuesday, in what might be the last big set piece of the campaign. She has to take risks and shake up her approach. Because even if she’s not losing this race, she’s currently not winning it either.
Different poll trackers have slightly different numbers.