THE 100-DAY CAMPAIGN — When President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race in late July, polling showed that his path to retaining the White House looked rocky. Vice President Kamala Harris, who replaced Biden atop the Democratic ticket, appeared to inject a dose of new energy into her party and reset the presidential race, but there was no way of knowing for sure in the absence of any data. Now, a little over three weeks after Biden’s withdrawal, there’s a body of high-quality polling about the newly reconfigured race. Harris narrowly leads Donald Trump in some national polls and has cut into Trump’s lead in others. In a few key battleground states, she has outright overtaken Trump. But what else does the post-Biden polling tell us about the state of the presidential race? And what do the granular details reveal about the nominees’ strengths and weaknesses with various demographic groups? To better understand the polling environment and what it tells us about how the next three months will play out, Nightly spoke with Steve Shepard, POLITICO’s senior campaigns and elections editor and chief polling analyst. This conversation has been edited. The most recent New York Times/Siena polling showed some notable movement toward Kamala Harris, particularly in the so-called Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where it shows the vice president with a slight lead. The Trump campaign contends that polling is tainted. What is the gist of their objection? Other than that the polls show Trump trailing Harris? Their main argument is that the polls don’t include enough Trump voters — and by that measurement, they aren’t wrong. Among likely voters across the three states, 47 percent say they voted for President Joe Biden in 2020, while only 41 percent voted for Trump. Averaged across the three states, Biden actually won 50 percent of the vote in the 2020 election, to Trump’s 48 percent. So the Trump camp is arguing that Harris’ 4-point lead would evaporate if the poll were adjusted from the Biden +6 self-reported advantage among poll respondents, to the Biden +2 election result. But the Trump campaign’s accusation that the polls were conducted and weighted “with the clear intent and purpose of depressing support” for Trump is off-base. A lot of pollsters do weight — or adjust their samples — to respondents’ recalled vote in the previous presidential election. It’s become an increasingly popular way to address polls’ struggles in reaching enough Trump voters in 2016 and 2020. But the Times doesn’t, finding that it would have made their past data less accurate. Joe Biden was struggling with voters of color. How is Kamala Harris doing? Better, but still shy of where Democrats have been in recent elections. Biden won about 90 percent of Black voters and more than 60 percent of Latino voters in the 2020 election, but polls before his dropout put his numbers in the 60s among Black voters and sometimes even tied with Trump among Latinos. Harris, by contrast, was at 77 percent among Black voters and 58 percent among Hispanic voters in a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist College poll. What are some constituencies that Harris needs to worry about, based on the spate of new surveys? So far, Harris has improved upon Biden’s margins among most demographics. But Biden had been more durable with white voters and seniors than his overall margins would have suggested — and it’s worth monitoring to see if Harris can keep these voters in the fold as she claws back the younger voters and voters of color. Where has Harris approved the most on Biden’s margins? What does Sun Belt polling tell us about different routes to victory available to both candidates? Biden’s slippage with Black and Latino voters, in particular, had all but cut off any path to an Electoral College majority through the two Sun Belt states he flipped in 2020: Arizona and Georgia. Harris has, for now, brought many (though not quite all) of those voters back into the fold. And while Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are still central to any strategy for 270 electoral votes, Harris’ numbers with voters of color give her multiple paths to get there. That also includes North Carolina, which Trump won by 1 point in 2020. Both candidates will campaign there this week — Trump in Asheville on Wednesday, Harris in Raleigh on Friday — and both Trump and the top super PAC backing his campaign recently launched their first ads in the state. As Biden’s position in the polls deteriorated earlier this summer, we saw signs — or heard chatter — that some traditionally blue or purple states like Minnesota and Virginia were in danger of voting Republican. Is there any evidence that the campaign reset changed that? Is there any evidence of traditionally red states that might be in danger of voting Democratic? When Trump was leading Biden by a mid-single-digit margin — multiple polls showed him ahead by 6 points — it opened up states like Minnesota, New Hampshire and Virginia. But those states are not going to be particularly competitive if Harris is ahead nationally by 3 points, as the current FiveThirtyEight polling average suggests. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @calder_mchugh.
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