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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump remain locked in an extremely close race for the presidency.
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In addition to horse racing, Harris is showing clear momentum in statistics such as her popularity.
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For the first time in years, more Americans have positive views of her than negative ones.
The race for the White House in 2024 remains uncertain, but Vice President Kamala Harris’ momentum is clear when you look beyond the horse race.
Earlier this week, Harris’ popularity appeared to have resurfaced for the first time since shortly after President Joe Biden took office.
“She has the opportunity here to write her own story and at least spread a more positive message about herself,” said Kristen Soltis Anderson, a co-founder of Echelon Insights, at a press conference hosted by AARP.
Soltis Anderson discussed a poll the advocacy group commissioned that showed Harris widening Biden’s once-slim lead among female voters 50 and older.
According to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average, Americans now have slightly more positive than negative opinions of Harris. This is a dramatic change, as Harris once polled so low that she sometimes flirted with being the least popular vice president in recent history.
“She’s been allowed to shine a little bit, which I think is really hard to do when you’re No. 2. By definition, a big part of your job is to stand a few feet to the left and a few feet behind the president and support him,” Debbie Walsh, executive director of the Center for American Women and Politics, told Business Insider. “As opposed to now being the person who’s up front and gets to talk about who she is, what she wants to accomplish, and gets to talk about her strengths and what she brings to the table.”
Tim Malloy, a polling analyst for the Quinnipiac University Poll, said that favorability is a vast umbrella that encompasses a wide range of emotions voters have for candidates. Likability also has a fraught history when it comes to female candidates, as best summed up by Barack Obama’s infamous 2008 quip that his Democratic Senate colleague Hillary Clinton was “likable enough.”
Harris’ about-face is a warning sign for former President Donald Trump’s campaign. Despite the best efforts of him and his allies, voters have yet to buy into their image of Harris as a progressive chameleon who cannot be trusted. Even top Republicans, including former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, have recoiled from Trump’s attacks, which include questions about her intelligence.
Harris has shaken up an election that once looked set to feature two of the least popular major presidential candidates since 1980, as FiveThirtyEight documented earlier this spring. Her rise is all the more remarkable given the hyper-partisanship that has clouded American politics to the point that some have even questioned whether popular presidential candidates would ever return.
As Gabe Fleisher wrote in his newsletter Wake Up To Politics, the explanation for the shift may be simple. Research shows that Americans don’t have strong opinions about vice presidents. Now that Harris has been reexamined on her terms, she has, to borrow one of her lines, “stripped away what was.”
But Trump can still win this election.
Harris’ campaign still sees itself as an underdog. Famed forecaster Nate Silver’s model has essentially reverted to a coin flip, though on Friday it showed Harris with a lead in the race to win the Electoral College for the first time in weeks. The former president has been here before. Despite the reality that the most favorable candidate usually wins, he emerged victorious in 2016 over Hillary Clinton (who was also unpopular, but not nearly as hated as he was).
This isn’t 2016, though. Walsh said Clinton’s failure was a turning point for women in American politics, a trend she believes Harris will benefit from. More women than ever are running for office and getting involved in politics. There are now a higher percentage of women in Congress than at any other time in U.S. history, according to the Pew Research Center.
Unlike Clinton, Walsh pointed out that Harris hasn’t spent decades in the spotlight and doesn’t face the challenge of allaying voters’ fears about a potential political dynasty. In fact, Clinton’s favorability was nearly the opposite of Harris’. Clinton was viewed more favorably as President Obama’s secretary of state. Yet that goodwill evaporated as she prepared to become the first woman to be a major party’s presidential nominee, and she became, in Walsh’s eyes, “a caricature of who she was.”
“I don’t know if you remember, but you could buy the ‘Hillary Clinton’ Nutcracker in airports,” said Walsh, whose center is based at Rutgers University. “It played out, a lot of it was gendered, but compounded by all these other factors that played into her candidacy and the public’s reaction to it.”
This isn’t Trump’s only battle
One of Trump’s allies, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, is continuing his arduous campaign for governor in a state that Democrats have won only once this century (2008) but that is now too close to call, with Harris on the rise. Robinson is trying to push the latest scandal, in which he called himself a “black Nazi” on a pornography forum decades ago. (Robinson has denied that those were his words, despite CNN obtaining ample evidence to the contrary.)
Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, remains deeply unpopular. And by almost all accounts, Trump lost the first and perhaps only debate to Harris. Democrats are even chipping away at Trump’s advantage on the economy, the biggest campaign issue.
The best news he’s gotten all week is that Republicans in Nebraska may make one last attempt to change state laws to strip Harris of her Electoral College vote, potentially jeopardizing her Great Lakes/Blue Wall strategy.
Trump himself has enjoyed a bit of a resurgence. Over the past year, he has risen about 6 points in FiveThirtyEight’s approval rating. But a majority of Americans still view him unfavorably, as they have since he descended the escalator at Trump Tower nine years ago.
Adding to Trump’s concern, Malloy pointed to recent Quinnipiac findings that Harris is ahead in Pennsylvania and Michigan, with a third key battleground, Wisconsin, still up for grabs. He said the combined results should be warning signs for the former president’s campaign. Harris’s approval rating was up slightly in both Pennsylvania and Michigan.
“That’s the warning sign for the Trump people, that’s the signal for them, because it means people are getting to know her as a person,” Malloy said.
Read the original article on Business Insider
