October 11, 2024 - 6:30pm

This is the race Democrats feared. Less than a month before the US election, Donald Trump is regaining the slight edge he held before Democrats convened in Chicago to nominate Kamala Harris. According to the RealClearPolitics polling average in battleground states, Trump trailed Harris from late August until late September. Now, though, he’s back on top at 48.4 to 48.1. His lead may be fractional — and Harris is up two points in the popular vote — but the numbers have Kellyanne Conway feeling good.

Alongside a picture of the RCP numbers, the pollster argued this week that Trump is “in his best polling ever era, even as media outlets are likely undercounting his voters — again”. On CNN, Harry Enten crunched the numbers too. “Let’s say we have a polling miss like we had in 2020. What happens then?” he asked on Tuesday. “Well, then Donald Trump wins the election in a blowout with 312 electoral votes.”

In his Wednesday column, Charles Blow of the New York Times lamented that FiveThirtyEight now gives Harris and Trump “close-to-even chances” of winning. “The campaign doesn’t need a post-joy strategy,” he wrote, “but it definitely needs an in-addition-to-joy strategy.” FiveThirtyEight‘s win probability chart mirrors RCP‘s battleground chart in that as Harris’s DNC bump has waned, Trump’s numbers have gone up, closing the gap significantly in just the last few weeks.

Harris’s media blitz this week clearly sought to reverse the trend. New York Times political correspondent Michael Bender noted on Wednesday that data in a recent poll found “voters wanting more information about Ms. Harris were primarily young and Black or Hispanic.” What’s more, “they typically did not identify with either political party and largely consumed news from social media or online outlets rather than newspapers or cable networks.” Bender added: “Ms. Harris’s schedule was essentially a media map of those specific demographics.”

Harris, Bender wrote, “keeps answering the question she wants, not the one that was asked”. For Democrats, it’s been a week of tightening polls, media flops, and poor reviews in the paper of record. When the party was eagerly working to push Joe Biden out of the race after his June debate performance, one Democratic megadonor told Politico: “Be careful what you wish for.”

That story was one of many that revealed Democrats were wary of ousting Biden in large part because Harris, for a number of reasons, would likely assume the mantle. Her numbers were similar to Biden’s, and his were not good. She’d become something of a joke in the memeverse. She’d proven to be a weak national candidate ahead of the 2020 election. So it seems as though two things will prove to be simultaneously true: the “joy” of the Harris campaign was real and it sustained her for about a month, but it couldn’t last forever under the unforgiving campaign spotlight.

The risk aversion that characterised Harris’s campaign before Labor Day might be her best bet. Tack to the centre, stick to the script, and stay the hell away from Bill Whitaker. Perhaps remaining a blank slate for some small group of undecided voters is better than Harris trying to define herself at all.


Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington D.C. Correspondent.

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