We removed RFK Jr. from our model. But it didn’t hurt Kamala.
Harris's convention bounce has offset any impact — so far.
Like everything else about his presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy’s withdrawal from the presidential race was weird.
Kennedy endorsed Donald Trump yesterday and announced that he was “suspending” his campaign. But he’ll only attempt to remove his name from the ballot in roughly 10 swing states, Kennedy said, leaving himself on the ballot in the many other red states and blue states where he’d gone to great effort to qualify. And his swing-state efforts may not be entirely successful, either. Our research suggests it’s probably too late to get off the ballot in Wisconsin, for instance. In North Carolina, the first state to begin early voting, his name has already been physically printed on the ballots in around 30 counties, so he’s probably stuck there, too.
Under circumstances like these, sometimes simple is best. So we’ve changed RFK’s status in the model by changing a single cell in one spreadsheet. Before explaining the methodological change in detail, let me show you the impact on our national polling average. Both Trump and Kamala Harris have gained ground versus yesterday’s model run, the last one to include Kennedy. Harris’s polling average has improved from 48.0 percent yesterday to 48.8 percent today (+0.8), while Trump’s has increased from 43.7 to 44.8 (+1.1).
There are a couple of essential things to note here. First, yes, Trump has gained slightly more than Harris from the change, although it’s pretty minor, a net gain of 0.3 percentage points.1 And second, we’re seeing the beginnings of a convention bounce for Harris. Even with the Kennedy change, she’s now ahead by 4.0 points in the national polling average versus 2.3 points when the DNC started. Our best guess is that her lead will increase further, especially given that almost none of the polling was done after her strong acceptance speech on Thursday.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For now, there’s pretty much no change in the topline numbers — Harris is at around 53 percent to win the Electoral College, the same as in recent days. For paid subscribers — this is about to get a little wonky — here’s more about what the model is doing and why Harris hasn’t declined at all in our forecast.