7 quick thoughts on the latest Harris-Trump polling
It may take some time for the race to stabilize.
We’re probably still going to wait until next week to turn the election model back on. That’s partly for logistical reasons — I need to block out some time to make sure everything is working properly with Kamala Harris replacing Joe Biden in the forecast — but also because I’m not sure that that we should be in a hurry to assume that whatever the polls say reflects the “new normal” in the race. So far, indeed, polls of the matchup since Biden announced he wouldn’t seek a second term have been all over the place, showing everything from an 8-point Trump lead to a 4-point Harris edge:
Harris is doing better in the most recent surveys, trailing Trump by only 1 point in the average of three surveys that were conducted entirely since the Biden news, versus 2.9 points in the broader sample. And note that it was only yesterday that Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee; the news cycle is moving incredibly quickly. (Biden’s fateful debate happened less than a month ago, and the assassination attempt against Trump occurred only 9 days ago.) It may not be until the first week or two of August that the race enters some sort of steady state.
But with those constraints in mind, here are a few quick thoughts for paying subscribers — we’ll make this our weekly Model Talk column — on how to interpret the data.
In general, I’d expect a candidate’s numbers to improve when they go from a hypothetical candidate to an actual one, giving speeches and so forth. So that’s a good reason to focus only on the most recent data for Harris.