Did the Democrat convention boost Kamala Harris' poll numbers? Yes, and also no. Or no, and also yes, depending on what one watches.

It's been a while since we took a look at polling in the race, and honestly, perhaps it's still too soon to look at the numbers for any conclusions or predictions about where the race is heading. The replacement of Joe Biden with Kamala Harris five weeks ago turned this into a new contest, and until Harris sets out her agenda for a new term as president, most of the numbers are just, well ... vibes.

Of course, that's why Democrats keep hiding Kamala from reporters. Vibes may be all they have for victory after four years of Bidenomics and foreign-policy disasters.

Still, we can take a look to see what the numbers we do have show us. Let's start with the latest from YouGov, which shows Harris barely ahead of Donald Trump, almost no change at all from before the convention -- at least in the topline number. Harris may not have gotten any bounce in this series on the head-to-head, but there does seem to be an enthusiasm bounce for Democrats -- and mainly among Democrats:

In the wake of last week’s Democratic National Convention, Americans now think Vice President Kamala Harris has a better chance of winning the November election (39%) than former President Donald Trump (36%), according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll.

That’s a dizzying turnaround from last month, when President Biden (20%) was trailing Trump (53%) by 33 percentage points on the same question, and it reflects an enormous surge in Harris’s favorability rating and overall Democratic optimism since she replaced Biden as the party’s presumptive nominee in late July.

Yet in a sign of how polarized the U.S. remains, and how fixed Americans’ political allegiances have become, Harris (47%) leads Trump (46%) by only one point in a head-to-head matchup among registered voters — a margin that does not change (Harris 46% vs. Trump 45%) when third-party candidates are included on the hypothetical ballot.

The previous Yahoo News/YouGov poll — which was conducted just after the Republican National Convention but mostly before Biden ended his candidacy and endorsed Harris — found Harris and Trump tied at 46% apiece.

Even the enthusiasm boost may have less to do with the convention and more with Biden's removal. YouGov didn't poll in the intervening time, at least not for Yahoo, so the previous optimism level of 20% was when Biden was still in the race. And that made a lot of sense after the June 27 debate, but optimism was never high among Democrats with Biden as the nominee. His best rating, 36%, came in February; after that, Biden consistently scored 31-32%. Harris' current level of 39% is a high for Democrats in this cycle, and a statistically significant change from even before Biden's debate with Trump. 

And this is where Yes and also no come into play. Harris' nomination and/or the convention has spiked Democrat enthusiasm, but that hasn't changed the race, at least not in this series. Even the one-point bump is just statistical noise; it's still a dead heat in the YouGov national survey.

What about the aggregate data from all polling? RCP doesn't show any real impact from the convention yet either. There have been only two polls taken since the end of the convention, however -- the Yahoo/YouGov above and a Morning Consult poll showing Harris up by four. That, however, follows a previous Morning Consult poll showing Harris up by three, which is again nothing more than statistical noise. The lack of more polling for this aggregate makes me think that we're asking the convention-bounce question too soon.

The betting markets probably provide a better snapshot at this point. Those results are immediate, and appear to preview trending that shows up in polling a few days or a week later. If that's the case, then this result of RCP's betting-odds aggregation supports the theory that the race hasn't changed much at all from the convention:

Trump has narrow leads on Polymarket and Betfair (one point). Harris has a six-point lead in PredictIt and a two-point lead on Smartmarkets. They tie on Bovad and Bwin. The difference in aggregate odds are so thin at the moment that it's essentially a dead heat ... asYouGov suggests.

At any rate, none of the data we have as of this afternoon shows any real movement in the race after the convention. But it also doesn't show any impact on the national level from Robert F. Kennedy's endorsement of Trump last Friday, either, at least not yet. 

What about battleground-state polling? We don't have any post-convention numbers yet from those states. We may start seeing some polling at the end of the week or after Labor Day, but if the betting markets are predictive of polling trends, we may not see any changes there either. Yet. 

And this gets me back to where we started. All of this still feels premature while we leave the conventions behind but Harris has yet to take an adversarial question from a reporter. Democrats may have fixed their enthusiasm problem, but thus far they haven't really fixed their candidate problem. The gaps in the aggregation are still below two points, the same as the race was since spring, with the exception of Biden's decline after the debate. Harris has yet to be tested at all, and with debates coming up, persuadable voters will likely remain in a holding pattern until she has to respond in real time on the issues.