Kamala Harris has managed to do in a few weeks what President Biden could not do from September 2023 until the end of his campaign in July 2024: she overtook Donald Trump in the RealClearPolitics polling aggregate, and currently leads him by 1.7 points. Most major betting sites now give both candidates the same odds for victory, with Harris being the heavy favourite to win the popular vote.
This is quite a turnaround from just six weeks ago, when the general consensus was that Donald Trump is the shoo-in to win the presidency.
Yet the Harris campaign seems to be taking inspiration for their economic policies from Donald Trump,
the candidate they have just passed, and, according to many in the mainstream media, are on track to beat.
The most blatant example of this is Kamala Harris’s claim that she would eliminate taxes on tips at a rally in Las Vegas, Nevada on 10 August. Former President Trump, however, made the exact same pledge in the very same location—Las Vegas—on 9 June.
An additional issue with Harris’ ‘copycat’ proposal is that she was in fact the tie-breaking vote in the US Senate in the fall of 2022 to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. Not only did it not reduce inflation, it even included new schemes for the IRS to collect taxes on tips more effectively. Some conservative social media personalities also drew a contrast between how the mainstream media covered the same proposal by the two different candidates.
Similarly, it was Ohio Senator and Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance who made the proposal for a tax credit of $5,000 per child for American parents on an 11 August broadcast of the CBS programme Face the Nation. Just six days ago, on 17 August, the Harris campaign included the agenda point of a $6,000 tax credit per newborn child in their economic plan.
And the Harris camp also seems to like President Trump’s campaign methods. Donald Trump appeared on a stream with popular streamer Adin Ross on 6 August. Just a few days later, fellow streamer Kai Cenat claimed during his live broadcast that the Secret Service and the Harris campaign had both reached out to him for collaboration, an invitation which he declined. Both Ross and Cenat are popular personalities on the live streaming site Kick.
What Current Polling Means for the 2024 US Presidential Election
Having said all that, the fact that Harris is leading a national polling aggregate is significant change compared to the race between President Biden and Trump. However, it does not mean that Donald Trump is likely to lose, even the popular vote.
Candidates tend to perform the best in polling after their party’s national conventions. In 2016, Hillary Clinton had a lead as high as 6.9 points a week after the DNC, and ended up winning the popular vote by 2.1 points and losing the electoral college. Joe Biden led the RCP average by 7.1 points a week after the 2020 DNC, and won the popular vote in the election by 4.5 points.
At this time of year, the national RCP aggregate underestimated Republicans in the 2022 House elections as well. In late August 2022, the GOP led the national generic ballot polling by less than a point (the Democrats even took a narrow lead in early September), but they ended up winning it by 2.8 points. That is despite the fact the 2022 midterms are often brought up to suggest that pollsters may overestimate Republicans.
Harris’s current 1.7-point lead is also mitigated by the fact that she just got her nomination a month ago, replacing President Biden who was historically unpopular with his own party, thus triggering an additional level of enthusiasm among Democrat voters. Candidates also tend to get a polling bump after they receive their party’s nomination, which, in the case of Harris, was also unusually close to the party convention.
Additionally,
Donald Trump is winning the independent vote in two recently released polls by historically left-leaning firms,
YouGov and Yahoo News, by five points and ten points, respectively, despite being down by 1–2 points overall in both. Joe Biden had to win independent voters by nine points to give him his 4.5-point margin of victory in the popular vote in the last presidential election cycle.
Related articles:
