Leaving Trump Behind – Lawyers, Guns and Money

A new NYT/Siena poll shows a dramatic shift in key Midwestern states, with Harris leading Trump by identical 50-46 margins in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Nate Cohn:

It’s sometimes hard to explain why polls change from week to week or month to month. In today’s polarized political climate, it can even be hard to explain why voters change their minds. In this case, it’s easy: Harris’s entry into the race has upended the fundamentals of this election.

Until now, the fundamental dynamic of the race has been driven by Mr. Biden’s unpopularity. It has prevented Democrats from implementing their usual strategy against Mr. Trump and his MAGA allies: making the election a referendum on Mr. Trump by running a broadly acceptable candidate. Millions of voters were left with a wrenching choice between two candidates they didn’t like.

One might think of his position as a kind of “generic” Democrat. That may sound insulting, but it’s not. In fact, nothing is more coveted. An anonymous generic candidate—whether Democrat or Republican—almost always does better in the polls than nominated candidates, who are inevitably burdened by all the imperfections that voters discover during a campaign.

When we polled these three states last October, an anonymous Democrat led Mr. Trump by about 10 points, while Mr. Trump led Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris by about a point each. The advantage of another widely acceptable Democrat was, of course, purely hypothetical. There was no guarantee that a real-world Democrat could avoid alienating many voters who would rather vote for someone other than Mr. Trump. And there was certainly no reason to think that Ms. Harris would be such a Democrat, since she was disliked by a majority of voters and brought with her a lot of political baggage from her tenure as vice president and her failed 2020 presidential campaign.

But today, Ms. Harris looks a lot more like the unnamed Democratic presidential candidate. Question after question, the poll found, voters don’t seem to have any major reservations about her. Majorities say she’s honest and smart, brings the right kind of change and has the temperament to be president, and has a clear vision for the country. Nor do majorities think she’s too far left: Just 44 percent of likely voters think she’s too liberal or progressive, compared with 44 percent who say she’s not too far either way and 6 percent who say she’s not progressive enough. We didn’t need to ask voters whether they thought she was too old to be an effective president.

Voters in general, and swing voters in particular, disliked Biden for two reasons: he was old, in increasingly visible and worrisome ways, and he was the sitting president, in a political context where, around the world, there has been a massive backlash against current government leaders.

You might think that both of these answers are terribly unfair. It’s simply not relevant, given that:

(1) None of these factors could be changed; and

(2) Whether voters’ feelings are fair, reasonable, or defensible has nothing to do with the extent to which they can be managed to get a president re-elected.

What the Harris campaign appears to be doing is running against Trump as if he were the incumbent president, which he actually is. One of the main arguments for Biden’s reelection has always been the supposed incumbent advantage, but in the context of the specific political conditions of 2024, a national political leader is more likely to take on an incumbent president. inconvenience. This is, I think, one of the main factors that has produced the remarkable shift in the presidential race that we have seen in less than three weeks since Biden gave way to Harris.

Harris, as the Democratic nominee, can make this election about Donald Trump’s new presidency and his age. Both of these issues are losing issues for Trump against Harris in a way that they were not against Biden. Again, whatever unfairness this might imply for Biden, it simply is irrelevant to the task at hand.