Where Harris has improved the most on Biden

She’s doing much better than Biden in every swing state.

I’ll have a story forthcoming for you later this week — if I can find the time in between the zillion podcasts I’m doing — on renewed GOP efforts to “unskew the polls”. To be fair to our Republican readers, this is very much a bipartisan thing: Democrats and even the White House itself were doing plenty of unskewing when Joe Biden was losing to Trump. But it’s a bullish indicator for Kamala Harris that even though Donald Trump isn’t that far behind and there’s still plenty of time to go, Republicans can’t seem to believe the numbers they’re seeing.

And that’s because Harris has improved on Biden’s numbers by somewhere between 3.9 points and 8.5 points in literally every swing state — and by more than 7 points nationally. It’s a completely transformed race. So let’s do a relatively straightforward Model Talk column on where her numbers have improved the most.

First, here is the data from our polling averages, comparing Harris’s standing as of today to Biden’s when we froze his numbers:

This is … a bit random actually? And I mean that somewhat literally. While there have been dozens of national polls since Biden exited the race, some of the fringier swing states have been polled more sparsely. Individual polls can still make a fair amount of difference, like in Nevada where Harris got some weak numbers today after a string of strong surveys:

Harris’s largest gains have come in Arizona, which supports the theory that her relative strengths are in the Sunbelt rather than the Rust Belt. And Nevada and North Carolina sort of support that theory too, though her gains are no larger there than in the Rust Belt “Blue Wall” states. But Georgia, interestingly, hasn’t moved as much. That may be because Georgia is among the most inelastic states, meaning that there aren’t all that many swing voters there. Instead, the state is divided about 50/50 between strongly Republican groups (white Evangelicals) and strongly Democratic ones (Black voters, young professionals, etc).

You may also notice that Harris’s relative gains over Biden are larger in national polls than in most of the swing states. Does that mean she faces a larger Electoral College-popular vote gap than Biden?