Vice President Kamala Harris, who almost a week ago accepted the Democratic nomination for president, has supposedly had something of a honeymoon period. Her bump in the polls came from how President Joe Biden only endorsed her to replace him a little more than a month ago after exiting the race. The mainstream media has also been giving her a pass, and Harris hasn't even sat down for an interview yet. She'll do her first interview with CNN on Thursday, but it will be a joint interview with Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), her running mate. Candidates typically enjoy a bump in the polls after the convention, but Harris really isn't where she wants to be.
This is especially the case with the latest poll from Yahoo/YouGov that was released on Tuesday. "New Yahoo News/YouGov poll: A huge surge in Democratic optimism — but no big bounce for Harris — after the DNC," read the headline for Yahoo! News.
If there is supposedly so much "optimism," then why no bounce? It's not just that there's "no big bounce," it's that such a "bounce" is within the poll's margin of error.
According to this poll, Harris leads former and potentially future President Donald Trump by 47-46 percent among registered voters. She only went up +1 since a poll from a little more than a month ago, which was conducted in the middle of when Biden dropped out on July 21. With other candidates on the ballot, Harris leads Trump by 46-45 percent.
This poll was conducted August 22-26, 2024 with 1,788 U.S. adults, with some questions looking specifically at registered voters. The margin of error is at plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.
In sharing the poll results, InteractivePolls highlighted the numbers among those who voted in 2022 and those who did not. Among those who did vote in the midterm elections, Harris narrowly leads 48-46 percent. That's not surprising, given Democrats performed far better than expected. Among those who didn't, Trump leads by 46-40 percent, providing his campaign an opportunity.
While Harris leads Trump with black voters (79-13 percent) and Hispanic voters (50-39 percent), those numbers aren't all that great, especially with black voters and compared to how the Biden-Harris ticket won such demographics in 2020. According to Pew, by 92-8 percent, blacks voted for Biden. Hispanics voted for Biden by 59-38 percent.
Where there might be a "bounce," as well as where that optimism may have an effect, is that slightly more Americans believe Harris has a better chance of winning the November election. Previously, Trump had a wide lead over Biden there.
Sixty percent of Democrats now say they're "optimistic" about Harris. There's also more Democratic support for Harris (97 percent) than there is Republican strength for Trump (93 percent).
As the Yahoo! News article begins by mentioning, with a key admittance [Emphasis added]:
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.
In other words, if Harris got a “bounce” from the DNC, it was a very small one — too small to alter the fundamentally deadlocked nature of the 2024 contest.
The piece acknowledges a lack of a real bounce, as well as how there's a "big upshot of Harris’s campaign honeymoon" which "has been a corresponding surge in Democratic confidence." Among Democrats, 79 percent think she has the better chance of winning in November, while just 45 percent said so about Biden last month.
Harris' image has also improved, which again could be part of that honeymoon period, which as we discussed above, is not merely attributed to the typical bounce candidates get, but how the vice president has been hiding from the press. She's also supposedly flip-flopped on her major policy proposals when it comes to her far-left agenda. Then there's how she's copied ideas from Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH). What policy proposals are hers, like price controls, have been criticized as communist.
Harris, Trump, Vance, and Walz all have net favorable ratings, ranging from -1 for Walz to -9 for Trump. Harris is at a -2, while Vance is at a -8 net favorable rating. This likely isn't surprising about Vance, either, given the relentless attacks by Democrats, with Walz having led the charge on calling him "weird," and with the mainstream media also going after Vance. He's been handling it well, though, and at least he's speaking with the press, with press conferences and during interviews.
As the write-up mentions:
The new survey of 1,788 U.S. adults, which was in the field from Aug. 22 to Aug. 26, shows that perceptions of Harris have improved significantly during the first month of her campaign.
When Harris entered the race, more Americans saw her unfavorably (51%) than favorably (40%). Now those numbers are level at 47% — a net positive shift of 11 points for the vice president. In contrast, 55% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Trump; just 42% view him favorably. Biden’s numbers are similar.
And Harris’s gains are not limited to Democrats. Since July, her favorability rating has risen 9 points among members of her own party (from 83% to 92%), 10 points among independents (from 30% to 40%) and 4 points among Republicans (from 5% to 9%).
Approval of Harris’s performance as vice president, meanwhile, has shot up 7 points overall, from 35% to 42%.
While 42 percent now approve of Harris job performance as the vice president, 46 percent of all respondents still disapprove. Forty-five percent of voters approve of Harris' job performance, while 50 percent still disapprove.
For all this talk about improvement for Harris, Trump's numbers are more even, as 47 percent of all respondents approve of the job he did, while 49 percent disapprove. Among registered voters, 48 percent approve while 50 percent disapprove.
Trump enjoys a job higher approval rating with Republicans (93 percent) than either Biden (84 percent) or Harris (86 percent) do with Democrats.
Biden's approval rating is worse, as just 39 percent of all respondents approve, while 55 percent disapprove of the job he's doing. Forty-three percent of registered voters approve, while 56 percent disapprove of the job he's doing.
The poll's write-up also touches upon the sense of the country going in the "right direction," with many still feeling the country is not heading that way. It's likely as "high" as it is if respondents are deluded enough into believing Harris' promises as well as her campaign being built on a sense of "joy."
Just 29 percent of all respondents and 32 percent of registered voters say the country is moving in "generally the right direction," while 60 percent of all respondents as well as registered voters say they're "off on the wrong track."
Even when talking about the advantages for Harris in the poll, the write-up still contains a caveat. "Just 10% of U.S. adults, on the other hand, think Harris will return the country "to the way it used to be” if elected — versus 32% for Trump," the piece warns. While a plurality of all respondents (39 percent) and registered voters (43 percent) say America will "move forward" if Harris wins, that could very well be "forward" in a far-left manner that the country may not recover from.
The poll closes with some benefits for Trump in noting the race is "too close to call" and they have to do with the issue advantages Trump has, but also the lack of importance for the issue advantages that Harris has:
Few Americans see either party’s nominee as moderate: just 11% for Trump and just 16% for Harris. During the summer of 2020, an average of 28% of Americans saw Biden as a moderate choice, while just 45% saw him as liberal — versus 63% for Harris today.
Likewise, Trump and Harris remain tied on two key metrics: who is "up to challenges facing the U.S." (46% Trump, 44% Harris) and whether “people like me” will benefit if a certain candidate is elected (31% Trump, 31% Harris).
Trump has some narrow advantages as well.
The number of Americans who say the country will become "more safe" if Trump is elected (41%) is 9 points higher than the number who say the same about Harris (32%) — though four in 10 say the country will become less safe under either candidate. Biden's dismal job approval rating — 39% approve, 55% disapprove — is still hurting rather than helping his vice president. A full 39% of Americans say the “cost of living” is the most important issue when thinking about next year’s election — the next closest is “democracy” at 17% — and a plurality think Trump (45%) would do a better job handling affordability than Harris (40%). A similar plurality — 43% to 37% — believe Trump would do better than Harris on crime. While Harris has an 18-point advantage over Trump on abortion — an issue that featured prominently at the DNC — just 6% of Americans say it’s their most important issue.
Finally, the public is evenly divided — 37% to 37% — on the question of "which party, Democrats or Republicans, has the clearer plans to solve America's problems."
That Harris is proposing communist-style price controls and making her messaging so much about affordability, only for Trump to lead on the issue by 45-40 percent, is certainly telling.
Especially as Harris comes around to conducting interviews--albeit joint ones with biased interviewers like Dana Bash and in a taped format--Americans may wise up to her radical record and policies. This lack of a bounce in potentially catastrophic for her and the Democrats.
With such a poll included, Harris leads Trump by +1.7 in the polls, per RealClearPolling. Biden led Trump by +6.9 on this day in 2020, and Hillary Clinton led Trump by +6.0 in 2016. Cygnal's Brent Buchanan cited Karl Rove in pointing to Harris being down in comparison to previous years. "This is a crucial data point no one is talking about. Best case scenario, Harris has half the margin against Trump that Biden did at the end of August - and he barely won. Once she becomes audible to voters (interviews, debates, etc.), her numbers will come down," he added.
Nate Silver and Polymarket are also showing Trump's numbers to be improving.
