Anointment Blues: Have Polls Moved At All?

AP Photo/Ronda Churchill

Has the Kamala Harris Anointment reset the presidential race? Has it even reset voter assessment of Harris? Pollsters have rushed into the gap to answer those questions, perhaps a bit too soon to avoid a predicted honeymoon effect of finally burying Joe Biden.

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Actually, scratch that. At least in the first-blush polls, nothing much has changed at all -- not in the Trump-Biden head-to-head, and not in the Trump-Harris H2H polling either. Yet, anyway.

Yesterday, the big news came from a Reuters-Ipsos poll that showed Harris up by two points, albeit among registered voters. The numbers on that seemed a bit low as well, with Harris up only 44/42 in the two-candidate mode. However, a look at the Reuters/Ipsos series shows that their results have generally favored Biden in the past compared to other pollsters; their last Trump-Biden result was 43/41 for a +2 in a week when other pollsters had Trump up by five or six points.

CNN came out today with a poll that it claimed to show movement, but ... it wasn't much:

The likely 2024 presidential election campaign between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump begins with no clear leader, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS after President Joe Biden ended his bid for reelection.

Trump holds 49% support among registered voters nationwide to Harris’ 46%, a finding within the poll’s margin of sampling error. That’s a closer contest than earlier CNN polling this year had found on the matchup between Biden and Trump. ...

The poll, conducted online July 22 and 23, surveyed registered voters who had previously participated in CNN surveys in April or June, both of which found Trump leading Biden by 6 points in a head-to-head matchup. 

That's not a game-changer, especially when the candidate is fresh and untouched yet by competitive campaign focus. CNN's last iteration did have Trump up six points, but it also got taken in the three days after the presidential debate. Biden's support sagged significantly in those days, which is why Democrats ginned up the Dump Biden movement and eventually pushed him out of the nomination. Harris was supposed to solve that problem, but there's no evidence that the replacement strategy is working yet.

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The same holds true in a new NPR/Marist poll:

Former President Donald Trump edges Vice President Kamala Harris by one point among registered voters in a potential head-to-head matchup in the race for the White House, according to the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist National Poll.

Trump leads Harris 46% to 45% in the poll results, with 9% undecided.

When third-party candidates are added to the field, Trump and Harris are tied with 42% each. Independent candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. receives 7% support, independent Cornel West and the Green Party's Jill Stein 1% each, and Libertarian Party nominee Chase Oliver less than 1%.

That certainly looks like Harris makes it close, except for one thing. The previous NPR/Marist iteration actually had Biden ahead by two points, not Trump. The movement in this series with Harris as the opponent was in Trump's favor, although that could just be coincidental. It was the only poll in July that showed Biden with a polling lead. 

The actual data among polling aggregated by RCP doesn't show much movement at all. Trump has a narrow 1.7-point lead in the average, 47.6/45.9 over a dozen or more polls taken in the past three weeks. Pollsters had begun testing this matchup ever since the debate, and the difference between these two match-ups have been minimal at best. Some of the cross-tabs in these polls indicate more openness to Harris than Biden, but that's hardly surprising given the newness of her candidacy. And at least so far, it's not converting to any significant increase in support, not even on first blush. 

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Again, these are early days, if not early hours. Harris could still get a rally effect in other polling, but it hasn't shown up now in multiple polling series despite the rush to unite the party elite behind Harris. Polling previous to Biden's withdrawal didn't suggest that a wave of enthusiasm would greet Harris as his replacement either. And history has shown us -- specifically from 2019 -- that Harris doesn't gain support as she gains visibility but sheds it. Perhaps that won't be the case at this time, but Harris probably needs a big enthusiasm wave at the start in anticipation of the inevitable erosion to come. 

All of this prompts the question: If Harris' polling doesn't improve right out of the gate -- or starts trending downward later in the week -- do Democrats suddenly embrace an "open process" at the convention instead of the Anointment?

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