Will the polls tilt in Kamala Harris’ favor?

The Wisconsin delegation Tuesday night at the Democratic Convention in Chicago.
Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux for New York Magazine

Kamala Harris has never trailed Donald Trump in the FiveThirtyEight polls, and her approval rating is now close to 45 percent. On Tuesday, her campaign announced that it had raised a staggering $500 million in the past month. And here in Chicago, at the Democratic National Convention, it’s hard to avoid delegates’ talk of a landslide of realignment, of a fall campaign that will see Democrats battling Republican swing states like Texas, Florida, and even Mississippi.

But Harris campaign officials and longtime Democratic campaign veterans say it’s a buzz-driven bubble that’s likely to, if not burst completely, at least deflate by the fall.

“All of this is great, but this is not an election,” said Jared Moskowitz, a Democratic congressman from South Florida. “What we’re seeing in the polls is exactly what the vice president has said: She’s the underdog. And we need to run like we’re the underdog.”

Among the pitfalls ahead: Democratic base voters, particularly young Black and Latino men, still don’t support the Harris-Walz ticket to the extent they supported Biden in 2020, even though she has significantly improved Biden’s 2024 numbers in key states, according to recent polling. USA Today Conversely, Harris is performing surprisingly strongly among older white voters without college degrees, as is Biden, but there are concerns that they are the ones most likely to return to Trump’s fold as the campaign progresses.

“Our numbers are much less encouraging than what we’re seeing in the public,” Chauncey McLean, president of Future Forward, the main super PAC supporting Harris, said this week in Chicago. “We’re on solid ground, and pretty much everywhere.”

Since Biden announced he would not run again, Harris has basked in the positive media coverage she has received over the past month. Yet she has yet to give an interview to a member of the mainstream press since becoming the party’s presumptive nominee. There was no reason to do so, given the press’ enthusiasm and the poll numbers she has enjoyed. But the pressure is likely to increase, especially as the press’ grumbling will only grow louder.

At least one debate is scheduled between Harris and Trump on Sept. 10, the first time the two men will meet. If she stumbles there or during an interview, as she has in other high-stakes media moments, some Democratic officials worry it could remind voters of the Harris who struggled with low approval ratings for much of her tenure as vice president.

“They can’t protect her forever,” says a Republican strategist close to Trump. Many Republicans close to Harris see Harris as playing a remake of a movie they’ve seen before: the one Ron DeSantis tried to make during the Republican primaries. The Florida governor, once a front-runner for the Republican nomination, thought he could avoid the mainstream media but found he could only manage a hostile press corps if he had access to the candidate. By the time he reached out beyond his own base of supporters, Trump was already eclipsing him.

In Harris’s case, Republican media strategists believe that some of the positive press she’s getting is because outlets and reporters are angling for a big interview; once Harris speaks to one outlet, the others, they predict, will turn against her and her campaign. “We’ve never seen a candidate get the kind of press she’s gotten in the last month,” says Jim McClaughlin, a Republican pollster. “How come she hasn’t even done any house interviews on social media?” Joe in the morning or Joy Reid or The view“We hear about it in our discussion groups. We have the feeling that they are hiding it.”

Candidates tend to get a boost after conventions. Trump’s was minimal, largely because it coincided with the surge he received after surviving an assassination attempt the week before. Democratic strategists are skeptical that Harris will get such a boost, largely because she has already enjoyed a boost in popularity from the good press she’s received.

Republicans admit they were caught off guard by Joe Biden’s sudden withdrawal from the race and the party’s rapid embrace of Harris, who some Democrats were calling for last year to be removed from the Biden ticket. And they say Trump has yet to find his footing, not only because of what’s happening across the aisle but also because of the lingering effects of the assassination attempt on his mental state.

But they believe the stakes, particularly the economy, the border and crime, are still stacked in Trump’s favor, and that Harris has even less credibility on those issues than Biden (polls are mixed on that score). And Trump’s campaign maintains that there are persuasive voters who may not approve of his conduct but trust him more on the issues they care about. Democrats unaffiliated with Trump’s campaign grumbled in Chicago that the convention was more about tearing down Trump than about strengthening the Harris-Walz ticket or, more importantly, addressing the issues that matter to voters. “Trump is an asshole. Everybody knows that already,” one said.

But in the meantime, even veterans of the Democratic campaign are wondering aloud whether the good vibes of the past month can really last a little longer: Early voting begins in some states next month, and a nation exhausted by a pandemic and record inflation was, until very recently, choosing between two candidates whose combined ages exceeded 150.

“If she can continue on this path, she will be elected pope,” says Paul Begala, a veteran Democratic strategist. “There is an anti-Trump majority in America that has been solid since he slid down the escalator in your beloved city nine years ago. He never, for a day, commanded a majority of his fellow Americans. Kamala can muster that majority. Whether she does, we’ll see, but so far, so good.”