With Kamala Harris now the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, the polls are coming hard and fast. On Tuesday morning, another survey was released showing that she had narrowed the gap compared to Joe Biden before he dropped out of the race.
The headline was clear: Harris has “reset” the race to the numbers we were seeing before the disastrous debate that ended the current president’s bid for re-election.
According to the poll, Trump leads Harris by three points, clocking in at 48 to 45 percent. When leaners are included, the former president’s lead grows to four points, with the spread being 52 to 48 percent.
Are you starting to see the problem? Yes, that is a better showing for Harris than Biden was posting before his dropping out, but she’s still losing. That’s a theme we see across the vast majority of the polls released over the last week of her being the presumptive nominee. Of the eight non-partisan polls released post-Biden, Trump leads six of them. In the two that Harris led, she’s only up one and two points respectively, which would suggest the former president would win the electoral college. The battleground polling isn’t much better.
SEE: Two New Swing State Polls Show the Trouble Kamala Harris Is In
That brings up the obvious question. What’s so great about “resetting the race” if the result is the same? There’s no prize for losing by a smaller margin. Do I fully expect Harris to continue to make this a closer contest, including possibly consolidating enough support in California and New York to win the popular vote? Sure, that seems probable based on what has transpired so far, but at this moment, she’s still losing.
Her hypothetical path to victory rests on one assumption, which is that the current bump she’s seeing is not her high-water mark. “She’s still going to get a bump when she picks a vice president,” they claim. I’m skeptical that’s true. The Trump campaign just placed a huge ad buy to begin to define Harris. It’s very likely she just had the best week of her campaign given the media onslaught in her favor and the fact that Republicans were caught somewhat flat-footed (who wouldn’t be when an opposition party swaps their nominee in late July via the machinations of nothing but insiders).
The next month is going to tell us a lot, but for now, Democrat adulation is countered by the situation on the ground. This is a sugar high driven by a subservient press proclaiming Harris the greatest candidate to ever exist. It hasn’t actually put her in position to win, though. Not yet, anyway.
