Kyle Kondik shares his insights about the effect of 2024 third party/independent presidential candidates at Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

A smaller number of “double-haters” naturally will have the effect of reducing the number of voters open to third party candidates. Back in 2016, the national exit poll indicated that third party voters generally had unfavorable views of both major party nominees. Trump and Clinton each won 98% of the voters who were favorable only toward them, with just 1% voting for the other candidate and another 1% voting third party and/or not answering the question. But 23% of the nearly one-fifth of voters who had negative views of each said they voted third party (or did not answer). So those kinds of voters provided the lion’s share of the total third party votes in 2016, which made up 6% of the electorate that year (Clinton and Trump won, combined, 94% of the total votes cast).

With a smaller number of double-haters likely this time, the total third party vote probably will be lower than 6% nationally. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the most prominent third party candidate, has already seen his share of the vote dip into just the mid-single digits lately. In the final FiveThirtyEight polling average of the Biden vs. Trump matchup, Kennedy was getting about 9% of the vote. He’s now at about 5%.

Libertarian Gary Johnson—the former New Mexico governor and Republican presidential aspirant who was the 2016 cycle’s most prominent third party option—was polling at 8%-9% for much of the late summer. He ended up getting just 3.3% of the vote in November. With Kennedy now polling clearly worse than Johnson was at this point in the race, Kennedy may end up performing even worse than Johnson ultimately did (and ballot access remains a question for RFK Jr. and the other third party options—RFK Jr. was dealt a setback in New York on Monday, for instance).

Since Harris entered the race, it appears that she has pulled some Democrats back from the Kennedy column, and most polls now suggest Kennedy is hurting Trump more than Harris. This could actually represent a small but still hidden source of Trump growth—if one believes that RFK Jr. is still polling higher than what he’ll ultimately get in November, perhaps Trump will benefit from further Kennedy erosion just as Harris has benefited recently. The other noteworthy third party candidates—likely Green Party nominee Jill Stein, progressive academic Cornel West, and Libertarian nominee Chase Oliver—all appear likelier to see their level of national support measured in tenths of a percentage point as opposed to 1% or more come November.

It is likely that all of the these third party candidates know they aren’t going to be elected and that they are well-aware of their ‘spoiler’ potential. Some soul-searching about the point of their campaigns might serve them well.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

The Democrats have had a good two weeks, nosing ahead of Trump in the national polling averages and even in some key swing states. Nate Silver’s prediction model shows the race now as basically a toss-up, with Harris actually on the good end of a 53-47 probability-of-victory split. That’s a dramatic improvement from where the Democrats were in the fading days of Biden’s campaign.

But it’s still a campaign on a knife’s edge that could go either way. Recognizing this, the Harris campaign has sought to remedy Harris’s vulnerabilities on a host of issues where her status as a liberal California Democrat and her publicly-stated past positions put her far away from the median American voter. They know the more voters view her as a moderate and close to the center of American politics, the better her chances of winning the election.

So far, this move to the center has revolved around several strategies. None of them seem very likely to remedy the problem to which they are addressed. They include:

(1) The “I take it back” strategy. Harris has a long record of taking unpopular, even toxic, stances on various policies that played well, at various times, with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party but are not remotely centrist. These include, but are hardly limited to, banning fracking, banning offshore drilling, backing a Green New Deal, mandatory gun buybacks, defunding the police and casting doubt on whether police really improve public safety, abolishing ICE, decriminalizing illegal border crossings, and abolishing private health insurance.

Do you, the median voter, see something there you don’t like? The Harris campaign says: no problem. Harris now takes it back! Whatever she said in the past that seems bonkers, she now enthusiastically disavows.

Of course, these position reversals raise many questions. Why did she have these positions in the first place? Why did she change those positions—what accounts for her conversion? And what is her position now on those contentious policy issues—besides not being for dumb position X? That leads to a second strategy in the moving-to-the-center campaign.

(2) The “No questions please—we’re Democrats!” strategy. The Harris campaign’s current approach to the logical and potentially embarrassing questions raised by these policy reversals has the beauty of simplicity: don’t answer them! In fact, avoid questions entirely by confining Harris’s activities to scripted rallies. After all, you can’t get in trouble for your answers if nobody gets to ask you questions.

The downside of course is it makes the disavowals less convincing, leaving voters wondering whether Harris’s views really have changed and, critically, whether and to what extent Harris’s positions are really centrist and close to their own.

The media has been remarkably tolerant of this strategy which has contributed to the almost 100 percent positive coverage of her campaign so far. While it doesn’t seem like that can last, the Harris campaign certainly hopes it will; they much prefer a “vibes” campaign with only vague policy commitments (the campaign website does not even have an issues section), super-broad themes like “freedom” and social media memes around policy-independent things like “brat,” “coconut tree,” and “weird.”

But perhaps not all the voters they need to reach will be susceptible to a vibes campaign, especially non-online, working-class voters in key states. That brings us to a third moving-to-the-center strategy, designed especially to reach recalcitrant working-class voters.

(3) The “Hey, we’re working class too!” strategy. This appears to be part of the thinking behind the selection of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as Harris’s running mate, instead of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro. Shapiro, of course, was not beloved of the progressive left and their campaign against him and for Walz apparently had an effect. But Shapiro also, in terms of background and personal affect, does not code as working class in a way Walz does. The Harris campaign hopes that his persona will help them reach the working class, particularly white working-class voters, whose support they so desperately need in key Midwestern/Rustbelt states.

There are some problems with this. Walz, while he was a relatively conservative Democrat when he was representing a rural district in the House of Representatives, as governor of Minnesota he has been pretty much a down-the-line progressive. Indeed, in his current incarnation he is more a coastal liberal Democrat’s idea of what white working-class guys from the Midwest should be like rather than what they really are like.

Nor does his electoral record suggest unusual blue collar appeal. Shapiro in 2022 won his governor’s race in Pennsylvania by 15 points in a state with a +3 Republican partisan lean. He outran Biden’s 2020 performance in the state by 14 points. In contrast, Walz won his governor’s race in 2022 by 8 points in a state with a +2 Democratic partisan lean. And he ran ahead of Biden’s 2020 performance in the state but just a single percentage point. Walz also lost white working-class voters in his state by 8 points, 6 points worse than Shapiro did in his race.

An interesting analysis by Steve Kornacki underscores this point. He explains:

Forty-nine of Minnesota’s 87 counties might be considered “Trump surge” counties; that is, Republicans ran at least 20 points better there under Trump in 2016 and 2020 than they had in the 2012 election, when Mitt Romney was the GOP nominee. Those counties are all part of Greater Minnesota, many are rural, and virtually all are overwhelmingly white. The share of white adults without four-year degrees in those counties 72 percent to 85 percent.

Demographically, those counties almost perfectly fit the mold of the swaths of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania where Democrats have lost the most ground in the Trump era. They were also, before Trump, politically competitive, and some even voted for Barack Obama in 2012. In other words, these are the first counties you’d look at to assess whether Walz has unique appeal where his party has experienced its most dramatic Trump-era slide.

As it turns out, Walz had no special appeal in these counties; his performance was similar to Biden’s but vastly inferior to how Obama did in 2012. Kornacki adds:

“What’s striking…is how different the Walz and Biden numbers are from Obama’s. When Obama won his two elections, he joined strong metro-area support with respectable showings (and sometimes better) among small-town and blue-collar voters. A primary feature of American politics since Obama has been the virtual disappearance of that kind of demographic and geographic balance from the Democratic coalition.

In his ’22 campaign, Walz didn’t restore that old balance. His coalition, instead, looked just like what has become the standard post-Obama coalition for Democrats. He rolled up massive margins in metro areas and took a beating practically everywhere else.

This is consistent of course with my analysis from last week, “The Harris Coalition Is *Not* the Second Coming of the Obama Coalition.” It’s also consistent with a fascinating new piece by the New York Times’s Jess Bidgood on Walz campaigning in Wisconsin, which suggests what the Harris-Walz campaign in the Midwest may really be about:

Eau Claire is a deep blue college town, and it’s far from clear that the appeal of the governor from the other side of the St. Croix will translate beyond liberal bastions like this one and expand his ticket’s competitive terrain. But as I wound my way through the crowd today, it occurred to me that the Eau Claires of the world might be the main point.

In recent years, Wisconsin Democrats have notched major victories by running up their numbers in strongholds like Madison, La Crosse and Milwaukee. That means Walz was here not simply to sound folksy, talk about hunting and reach out to rural voters. His purpose, electorally speaking, is to fire up Wisconsin progressives who wish their state was just a little more like his….

The Harris campaign is betting that leaning into Walz’s unabashed progressivism might work—and, given Wisconsin’s famous swinginess, that comes with some risk. But Dane County, the Democratic stronghold that contains Madison, is growing rapidly….

Tim McCarthy, 60, a teacher from the college town of Ripon, said he was thrilled both to see Walz and to be at a rally with “like-minded people.”

“There’s a lot of conservatism in northern Wisconsin that you’re not going to shake loose,” McCarthy said. “They’ll support Trump no matter what.”

But he thought that Walz would catch on in his town—and suggested that the campaign might not even need to bother with more conservative parts of the state.

Hmm. Very interesting, if questionable as a political strategy. In the end, an attempt to move to the center that does not involve actively embracing centrist, moderate positions—as appears to be the current Harris campaign strategy—may fall short of its political goals. Jonathan Chait makes the case well:

Rather than move to the center on policy, they [the left] hope nominating candidates with a reassuring personal affect and personal biography can reassure moderate voters.

Walz generates so much enthusiasm on the left in part because he represents the apotheosis of this strategy….

But at the end of the day, issue positioning matters a lot. There is a reason Walz is less popular in a light-blue state than Josh Shapiro is in a purple state—indeed, when Walz shared a ballot in his own state with the moderate Amy Klobuchar [2018], her victory margin (24 points) was more than double his (11.4 points). It’s not because Walz is less likable than Shapiro or Klobuchar. It’s because he’s less moderate.

Walz had a fairly conservative voting record in Congress, where he represented a red district. He used that record to win the governorship, and then moved sharply left. The lesson he seems to have taken from this experience is that there is no cost in adopting progressive positions across the board. “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values,” Walz said on a recent call. “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”

I can’t emphasize enough what a bad idea this is. On issues where progressive values are unpopular, and there are several, Democrats should definitely shy away from progressive values. For example, their stance on socialism, which is an extremely unpopular concept, should not be to liken it to neighborliness, but to say it’s bad and promise not to do it….

What the selection does…is forfeit her best opportunity to send a message that she is a moderate. She needs to take every possible opportunity between now and November to make up for that. Harris needs to adopt positions that will upset progressive activists. She needs to specifically understand that the likelihood a given action or statement will create complaints on the left is a reason to do something, rather than a reason not to.

That is an approach to moving to the center the Harris campaign has apparently ruled out. If that is the case, Donald Trump, with all his unattractive qualities and unforced political errors, is likely to remain competitive through November and, let’s face it, could easily win. As Chait puts it, somewhat wistfully, “I don’t want to bet the future of this country on a coin toss. I want to build a political coalition with a clear majority.” Unfortunately, it looks far more likely he’ll get the former than the latter.

One more time on the Walz veep selection, before other campaign topics dominate the presidential debate – Check out “Walz unifies the party, will bring working class voters back into the fold” by The Hill’s Max Burns, who writes that “Harris’ choice also did the impossible, uniting progressive and conservative lawmakers in Washington. Progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) hailed Walz as an “excellent decision” and a leader who “won’t back down under tight odds.” Meanwhile, Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) — no friend of the left — wrote on X that he could “think of no one better than Governor Walz to help bring our country closer together.”

That’s an impressive ideological range. Burns adds that “in selecting Walz, Harris has done more than just unify her party ahead of a major election. She’s found a running mate Republicans can’t seem to hit.” Of course, they will continue to attack Walz and they will score a few hits, which will resonate mostly with their hard-core supporters. It is hard to imagine cheap shots from the GOP ticket winning over many swing voters.

Burns explains further, “In a time when many Midwestern and Rust Belt voters are abandoning their ancestral loyalty to the Democratic Party in favor of Trumpian populism, Walz represents a vision of the Democratic Party that harkens back to its core farmer-labor progressivism. He’s built a political legacy by winning over exactly the voters Trump needs in November. That’s a nightmare for a GOP that has wrapped itself in working class rhetoric while coddling the world’s richest and most powerful business tycoons.”

Also, “As governor, Walz has also been strategic in his progressive priorities. He championed broadly popular proposals that often received bipartisan legislative support, including enacting universal free school meals, expanding paid family and medical leave, and passing universal background checks for gun purchases. A hunter and gun owner himself, Walz found a path to enacting serious gun safety reforms by reminding gun-owning Minnesotans that the NRA has left them behind in its quest to value firearms over human lives….“We can’t turn on the TV and have these things happen,” Walz said in 2017. “The NRA you see now is not the NRA when they were teaching us gun safety classes when we were growing up. It’s been a clear change from their position for advocating for responsible gun ownership to a position that is extreme and unhelpful to the conversation.”

In addition, “As a former high school football coach, a teacher and later a member of Congress, Walz has actually served the kinds of rural communities Vance pretends to be from. He speaks the language and understands the values in a way that can’t be faked. No wonder Trump and Vance are working overtime to try and minimize Walz’s down-home bona fides.”

Burns concludes, “The bigger question is whether Vance will risk his delicately-assembled public persona in a head-to-head debate with Walz. Trump’s campaign has in theory committed to a vice presidential debate, but quickly cast doubt on those plans when Joe Biden exited the race last month. Since then, Trump has repeatedly ducked calls for a debate anywhere except on friendly Fox News, likely reasoning that his campaign can hardly afford a major fumble this close to Election Day. It doesn’t sound like Trump is very confident in his running mate’s debating prowess.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

These are heady days for Democrats. After a near-death experience with the fading Biden candidacy they have been revived by the Biden-Harris switcheroo. The presidential race has tightened considerably and, though Trump is still favored to win, they’re feeling mighty good about themselves. Inspired by their historic standard bearer, exuberant partisans proclaim the second coming of the Obama coalition, which will decisively sweep away Trump and his deplorable legions. They’re getting the band back together!

Or are they? In truth, the Harris coalition bears more resemblance to the Biden coalition…but without as many working-class voters. Or to the Hillary Clinton coalition…but with far fewer white working-class voters. Indeed, that people would analogize Harris’ emerging coalition to Obama’s shows how much they’ve forgotten (or perhaps never knew) about the Obama coalition and how little they understand about how the party has changed in the last 12 years.

Here are some facts about the Obama coalition (based on 2012 election data from Catalist):

1. In 2012, Obama carried both college-educated and working-class (noncollege) voters. And there wasn’t much difference in the margins; he carried the college-educated by 6 points and the working class by 4 points.

2. Obama carried the nonwhite working class by 67 points; overall he carried nonwhites by 64 points.

3. Obama lost both the white working class and college-educated whites, the former by a comparatively modest 20 points and the latter by 8 points.

All this is very far from the Harris coalition today and how it seems to be evolving. The following data illustrate this. I use the post-switcheroo New York Times/Siena poll (one of only four pollsters rated “A+” by Nate Silver) for comparison. I also provide intermediate figures—Clinton, 2016 and Biden, 2020—so that the political evolution from the Obama coalition to today can be clearly discerned.

Start with the working class. While Obama carried them by 4 points, four years later Clinton lost them by 3 points. Four years after that, Biden lost them by 4 points and, four years later, Harris in the Timespoll is losing them by 15 points.

Contrast this with the trajectory of the college-educated vote. As noted, Obama carried these voters by 6 points. In 2016, Clinton carried them by 13 points and four years later Biden carried them by 18 points. Today, Harris’ lead over Trump among the college-educated is 20 points. This takes the college-educated/working class margin gap from +2 under Obama to +35 today—that is, from doing barely better among college voters in 2012 to a massive class gap today. That’s because Democratic support in the two groups has gone in completely different directions. You miss this and you can’t possibly understand the Obama coalition and why it is so different from the Democratic coalition we see today.

Similarly, consider the class trajectories within the white vote. In 2012, Obama lost the white working-class vote by 20 points, a bounce back performance after the Democrats’ catastrophic performance with this demographic in the 2010 election. Gaining back some of Democrats’ lost white working-class support was a widely-ignored key to his re-election, particularly his success in Midwest/Rustbelt states. But famously Clinton in 2016 did much less well, losing these voters by 27 points (and the election in the process because of these voters’ defection in three key Rustbelt states). Then in 2020, Biden lost this demographic nationally by a slightly lower 26 points, which included slight improvements in those key Rustbelt states—an underrated factor in his victory. But today in the Times poll, Harris is losing these voters by a whopping 38 points.

The trajectory of the white college vote has gone in the completely opposite direction. Obama lost these voters by 8 points. Then Clinton moved this demographic to the break-even point, followed by Biden’s solid 9-point lead among these voters in 2020. Now Harris has a 15-point lead over Trump among white college graduates. That’s quite a trend. And it’s taken the class gap among white voters from 12 points in the Obama coalition to 53 points (!) today.

The trajectory of the nonwhite working class also highlights another key difference between the Harris coalition and the Obama coalition. Recall Obama’s massive 67-point margin with these voters in 2012. That margin dropped to 60 points for Clinton in 2016 and further to 48 points for Biden in 2020. Now Harris, despite her progress relative to this year’s fading Biden campaign has only a 29-point margin among these very same voters. Moreover, this reverses the class gap among nonwhites that had existed under Obama—he did 11 points betteramong the nonwhite working class than among the nonwhite college-educated. Now Harris is doing 11 points worse among the nonwhite working class than among nonwhite college voters.

Finally, when looking at the nonwhite voting pool as a whole, we see the following trend in Democratic margin: Obama 2012, +64 points; Clinton 2016, +58; Biden 2020, +48; Harris today, +34.

It is difficult to look at these data and not see profound differences between the Obama coalition and the emerging Harris coalition. These differences reflect how much the party has evolved in 12 short years.

Of course, none of this means Harris can’t win. But no one should kid themselves that, even if successful, Harris’ coalition will represent the second coming of the Obama coalition. Instead it is likely to be a more class-polarized version of the post-Obama Democratic coalition with even more reliance on the college-educated vote, particularly the whitecollege-educated vote.

This seems consistent with how the nascent Harris campaign has been unfolding. Layering on top of Biden’s themes before he dropped out—”saving democracy” and abortion rights (particularly the latter)—we have seen a great deal of emphasis on social media and the production of memes that capture the “vibes” of the Kamala! campaign. The latter has certainly garnered a lot of attention but, as Freddie DeBoer acerbically remarks, Harris is not running for President of Online America but rather America as a whole. He detects, not without reason, a whiff of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and their misplaced faith in online success.

Related to this, we have seen a rather strange online manifestation of the identitarian politics that still dominates the Democratic Party and is certainly alive and well in the Harris campaign. This is the raft of sex- and race-segregated zoom fundraisers for Harris. This has included the “White Women for Kamala Harris” fundraiser and the just plain embarrassing “White Dudes for Kamala Harris” extravaganza.

On the white women call, the following wisdom was imparted by social media influencer Arielle Fodor:

As white women we need to use our privilege to make positive changes…If you find yourself talking over or speaking for BIPOC individuals, or God forbid, correcting them, just take a beat, and instead we can take our listening ears on…So, do learn from and amplify the voices of those who have been historically marginalized and use the privilege you have in order to push for systemic change. As white people we have a lot to learn and unlearn, so do check your blind spots.

Shades of 2020! It is hard to see a persuadable white working-class woman—a type of voter where Harris desperately needs help—responding positively to talk of her “privilege” etc. Really, the call should more properly have been labelled “White Liberal College-Educated Women for Kamala Harris.”

The same could be said of the “White Dudes for Kamala Harris” call. The call’s organizer averred that when white men organize “it’s usually with pointed hats on” and that the call and supporting Harris was a way for the trope (?) of masculinity to be properly channeled. This is how to be one of the good white men. I can’t imagine white working-class men of practically any flavor responding positively to this sort of appeal. Again, the call should really have been billed as “White Liberal College-Educated Men for Kamala Harris.”

And there were many other and more finely-grained identity group fundraising calls for Harris. This aggregation of identity and interest groups approach to organizing and coalition-building is exactly what Obama wanted to get away from. As Obama memorably put it 20 years ago:

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America. There is not a black America, a white America, a Latino America, an Asian America. There’s the United States of America.

We need to get back there….and fast. And that includes the Harris campaign. Right now, they’re on a narrow, polarized path to November and their reckoning with Donald Trump. They can do better, starting with remembering what the Obama coalition really was and  really was about.

There’s always plenty of jabber about swing states the summer before a presidential election. But, really, “swing states” are often made by the trends in swing counties. Steve Kornacki explains at msnbc.com, highlighting the critical importance of two of them in Georgia and Pennsylvania:

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Democrats are nothing short of giddy. Biden, who looked like a sure loser, bowed out of the presidential race and was seamlessly replaced by Kamala Harris through deft and lightning-fast intraparty maneuvering. The race is reset! All is possible!

Who can blame Democrats for being a bit slap happy? They were staring into the abyss and now have a reprieve. They have a younger candidate and a more enthusiastic, unified party. Those are important and positive differences. But there are also similarities to their previous situation that are highly negative and can’t be wished away. Here’s one that I wrote about back in January:

Here is a simple truth: how working-class (noncollege) voters move will likely determine the outcome of the 2024 election. They will be the overwhelming majority of eligible voters (around two-thirds) and, even allowing for turnout patterns, only slightly less dominant among actual voters (around three-fifths). Moreover, in all six key swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—the working-class share of the electorate, both as eligible voters and as projected 2024 voters, will be higher than the national average.

It follows that significant deterioration in working-class support could put Biden [now Harris] in a very deep hole nationally and key states. Conversely, a burgeoning advantage among working-class voters would likely put Trump in a dominant position.

This is very important to keep in mind as we are swamped by a tsunami of favorable Harris coverage in legacy and other center-left media. Where once her retail political skills were disparaged, we are told that she is now (or always has been) a consummately effective, charismatic retail politician.

Polls of course will be scrutinized for signs that the race is shifting in the Democrats’ favor and even small changes will be interpreted as signs that Trump is on the run. But in truth it will take a few weeks for the race to settle out and one should be cautious about interpreting initial results.

That said, what we have seen so far does not suggest a fundamentally altered race. Trump was ahead and is still ahead. Democrats still badly trail among working-class voters and have compressed margins among nonwhite and young voters relative to 2020. Of course, that may change in coming weeks but that is what we see now.

Looking at the running poll averages, we have the following for Trump-Harris matchups: RCP has Trump over Harris by 1.7 points (2.8 pointswith the full ballot including Kennedy/West/Stein). New York Times has Trump over Harris by 2 points and DDHQ/The Hill has Trump by 2 points. Pretty consistent.

Another approach is to compare averages of Biden vs. Trump and Harris vs. Trump. Naturally, these only overlap when Biden was the actual candidate and Harris was a notional candidate. But the data are still of interest.

Split Ticket has the most recent data on this, covering the month of July, and they do not show much difference between the candidates. Harris does slightly worse overall, with a margin against Trump .4 points worse than Biden. She does worse among men, a bit better among women; worse among seniors, better among those under 30; worse among whites and Hispanics and better among blacks and, significantly, worse among working-class voters and better among the college-educated. But the differences are generally quite small.

If you confine one’s sample of polls to those that were entirely in the field after Biden dropped out (i.e., after July 20), rather than just partially—a tiny group–there are some signs of a tightening race. But Trump is still ahead.

CNN is one of those polls and it does indeed show Harris doing better against Trump than Biden did prior to dropping out. But Trump is still ahead and, interestingly, Harris is doing no better against Trump than she did before Biden dropped out—in fact, a bit worse (3 point deficit now vs. a 2 point deficit in late June). And the internal demographics are quite similar to the earlier reading and all run far behind how Biden did in the 2020 election. Notably, her working-class deficit to Trump is 15 points, compared to Biden’s 4 point deficit in 2020.

These double digit Democratic deficits among the working class have been a regular feature of this election cycle. These deficits have been driven by worsening performance among the white working class (recall that Biden in 2020 actually did a bit better among these voters relative to Clinton in 2016) and much lower margins among nonwhiteworking-class voters. It is difficult to see how Harris prevails without strong progress on this front.

Can she do it? Sure, anything’s possible. But Democrats would be well-advised to be clear-eyed about the challenge. What Harris has to overcome is illustrated by an early July Pew poll that had a large enough sample size (N=over 9,400) to allow blacks and Hispanics to be broken down by working-class vs. college-educated. Both racial groups show strong educational polarization that is much larger than what was observed in 2020. Hispanic working-class voters in this poll preferred Trump by 3 points over Biden, compared to a 22 point margin for Biden over Trump in 2020. Among black working-class voters, Biden was leading by 47 points over Trump, compared to an 82 point lead for Biden in 2020.

A working class-oriented campaign would appear to be in order. But so far there is little indication that is what the Harris campaign has in mind. A widely-circulated memo from the campaign sees Harris’ candidacy as building on the “Biden-Harris coalition of voters” and mentions black voters, Latino voters, AANHPI voters, women voters and young voters. Working-class voters are conspicuous by their absence. The memo proposes to expand this coalition among, for example, white college-educated voters by taking advantage of the fact that:

…[Harris] has been at the forefront on the very issues that are most important to these voters—restoring women’s reproductive rights and upholding the rule of law following January 6, Donald Trump’s criminal convictions, and the Supreme Court’s immunity decision.

There is little mention of any other issues. This is despite the fact that Harris is rated far below Trump on handling issues like crime, inflation, and immigration. The latter two issues typically top voters’ list of concerns.

To the extent Harris has talked about issues other than abortion, “democracy is on the ballot,” and Trump’s character it has been to emphasize, according to Axios, that:

…she’ll pursue big—and expensive—parts of Joe Biden’s domestic agenda that never made it across the finish line…Harris is signaling that even as Democrats play defense on Biden’s mixed economic record, she’s eager to go on offense for the next four years…Her plans include pushing for nearly $2 trillion to establish universal pre-K education and improve elderly care and child care…

This seems…unwise in light of working-class voters’ inflation fears and how poorly they view Biden administration economic management. Pushing for massively increased spending is highly unlikely to win them over to your side, even if they approve of some of the end goals.

As some of the saner voices on the left have noted, Harris needs to make a serious effort to assure skeptical voters, particularly working-class voters, that she will in fact do things differently from the Biden administration on key issues where Democrats are vulnerable. David Leonhardt mentions crime, immigration, inflation, gender issues, and free speech. As Leonhardt points out:

Democrats often describe Donald Trump and other Republicans as radical….But many voters also see the Democratic Party as radical. In fact, the average American considers the Democratic Party to be further from the political mainstream than the Republican Party…

…[S]uccessful presidential candidates reassure voters that they are more moderate than their party. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Biden all did in their own ways. Even Trump did in 2016, by supporting Social Security, opposing trade deals, and endorsing same-sex marriage. The strategy works because most voters see themselves as less conservative than the Republican Party and less liberal than the Democratic Party….

[These politicians] were sending a larger message. It was the same one Clinton sent when he called himself “a new Democrat” and George W. Bush did with his talk of “compassionate conservatism.” It was also the one Trump recently tried to send by saying he opposed a national abortion ban.

All these politicians were asserting their independence from their own parties. It’s hard to get elected president without doing so.

So far there is little indication that Harris will do anything of the kind. As Politico Playbook noted: “Three sources in Harris’ orbit we spoke to said people expecting Harris to take drastically different positions [to distinguish herself from Biden] are going to end up disappointed.”

Thus, instead of a “different kind of Democrat” what voters will likely get is a younger, nonwhite, female version of the same kind of Democrat. Put another way, the Democrats seem content to remain a Brahmin Left party and see how things work out. Gulp.

Not to rain on the big parade, but if Kamala Harris is to have even a shred of a chance to win in November, she needs some tough criticism as soon as possible to help prepare her campaign for  attacks. Michael Baharaeen steps up to meet this challenge in his post, “The Kamala Gamble” at The Liberal Patriot. As Baharaeen writes:

Joe Biden rocked American politics over the weekend with the news that he will be the first incumbent president since Lyndon Johnson in 1968 not to seek a second term. The obstacles against him—stubbornly weak polling numbers, a hostile media, defections from his own party, dried-up fundraising—ultimately proved to be too much to overcome. In his announcement, he endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to be his successor.

Harris is not expected to face much serious competition for the nomination from other prominent Democrats, meaning she will likely lead the party’s ticket heading into November. But while shaking things up may offer Democrats a new lease on life, it’s far from clear that Harris is the strongest candidate to take on Trump. Democrats should consider her many vulnerabilities carefully before coronating her at their convention next month.

First, Harris has popularity issues of her own. Part of the argument for Democrats moving on from Biden was his dreary poll numbers—his approval rating had been underwater for nearly three years with no sign that it would ever bounce back. He has also consistently trailed Trump in head-to-head match-ups, which signifies a severe change from 2020, when he never trailed at all.

But Harris hasn’t fared any better than Biden. Not only has her own approval tracked very closely with Biden’s, sinking into negative territory in mid-2021, but she has also never cracked 50 percent (while Biden at least sat in the mid-50s for the first several months of his presidency). This is a good indication that Harris has been less popular than Biden from the start. And, at least in initial surveys, Harris doesn’t appear to do much better against Trump than Biden did, though there is still time for that to change. Suffice it to say, she will have to work to endear herself more to a skeptical public if she becomes the Democratic nominee.

Second, Harris has a concerning electoral track record. Her first election to a major office came in 2010. That cycle, she won a close race for California’s open attorney general seat, defeating her Republican opponent by less than one point, 46.1–45.3. Though some might be tempted to attribute this to running in a difficult midterm election, except every other California Democrat in a statewide contest significantly outperformed Harris, earning at least 50 percent of the vote and winning their races by double digits.

However, her presidential campaign was perhaps an even bigger disappointment. Despite being a media darling for much of the primary race, her campaign flamed out before the first voters had the chance to cast their ballots in the Iowa caucuses. Some observers attributed this to the lack of a coherent message or reason for her candidacy—and the fact that her campaign became beset by infighting.

Another likely reason was her desire to placate her party’s activist base. For example, rather than touting her accomplishments as a prosecutor and explaining her pragmatic vision for criminal justice, Harris ran from her record, which some on the left viewed as too punitive. She also endorsed some deeply unpopular proposals, including the decriminalization of border crossings and the Green New Deal. All this may have stemmed from the fact that Harris surrounded herself with campaign staffers who seemed to embrace the idea that “Twitter is real life,” and that what progressive voices on the platform espoused was representative of the broader public’s views.¹

If Harris wants to shed any part of her past as she looks for ways to appeal to median voters in swing states, she might consider rebuking these lefty fads in favor of a message that highlights her track record of prosecuting criminals—something that could set up a favorable contrast against Trump.

Third, although Biden will no longer be on the ticket, Harris will be forced to defend his administration, including its less popular facets. In 2021, Biden tasked Harris with the thankless job of trying to help resolve the crisis at the southern border. But far from successfully addressing the “root causes” of the problems there, they grew exponentially worse in the following years, with migrant encounters hitting a record high by the end of 2023. Recent polling has shown that voters trusted Trump over Biden to handle issues related to immigration and inflation, which are top-of-mind for many of them. Switching to that president’s second-in-command isn’t likely to immediately assuage voters’ concerns about Democrats’ ability to handle either one.

Fourth, while the latest polls have shown Harris mirroring Biden’s statistical tie against Trump nationally, this alone doesn’t leave Democrats in a particularly strong position. Consider: in 2020, when Biden defeated Trump, his national polling heading into the election was 8.4 points. Ultimately, Biden won by a more modest 4.5 points. As we know, though, presidential elections are decided not by national popular vote but the Electoral College, and Biden’s win at that level was actually extremely narrow. So simply tying Trump in the national polls still reflects a massive shift relative to 2020 and puts an Electoral College win very much within reach for him. To overcome that, Harris would need to move the needle back in the other direction and probably build a lead of at least a couple points to have a chance of winning.

Finally, in addition to issues related to herself and the Biden administration, Harris will be contending with broader problems that the Democratic Party has not fully reckoned with. For instance, survey data indicates that they have experienced substantial attrition among black and Hispanic voters, which may at least partially explain why important swing states like Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada have shifted in Trump’s favor this time around. Trump has also made more overt overtures to union voters, a longtime Democratic constituency that has shown cracks in recent years—and that could put other battlegrounds like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in play.

Democrats have also lost ground with rural voters, working-class voters, and even some young voters, a group that hasn’t been competitive in a generation. While Biden appeared to be attracting higher levels of support among seniors, a higher-turnout bloc that has historically leaned Republican, it’s not clear that those voters would stick with another Democratic nominee.

Some of these are longer-term issues that the party has been contending with since at least the start of the Trump era. Some may be specific to this cycle: third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for example, are disproportionately attracting younger and non-white voters. There is also early evidence that Harris may perform better than Biden with some of these groups and have more success pulling them back into the fold. Still, she’ll be confronting these bigger coalitional issues with less than four months to go in the campaign.

Democrats’ best case for Harris is that she is a wild card: neither they nor Trump’s campaign know how her candidacy would shake up the race. If voters’ views of her aren’t as entrenched as they are for Biden, she might have a slightly higher ceiling. Given the opportunity to prosecute the case against Trump, she is also likely to be far stronger and more effective than Biden, which could level the playing field more in Democrats’ favor. And polls show that many Americans want someone, anyone, who isn’t Biden or Trump. Maybe all that is enough for someone like Harris to succeed.

Even so, a simple swap of candidates isn’t guaranteed to immediately put Democrats in a stronger position than they’re in today. Harris will need to distance herself from the perceived setbacks of the Biden administration, come into her own as a candidate, and develop a campaign pitch that will appeal to the handful of voters in swing states who will decide this election—all in the next three months (or less). It will still be an uphill fight, but if she can achieve these things, she might yet be able to pull out the win.

From “What do the polls say about a Harris vs. Trump matchup?” by Geoffrey Skelley and G. Elliot Morris at 538, via abcnews.com:

“While Harris consistently polled worse than Biden did against Trump before the debate, since then she’s sometimes polled ahead of Biden. In fact, Harris fared the same as or better than Biden in close to half of the post-debate polls: A near-bell curvedistribution in the differences between their margins in these polls is centered close to 0, suggesting little to no meaningful difference between how Harris and Biden performed.”

“And it seems that Harris’s stronger showing in these later polls is more about her having made up distance on Trump than Biden losing ground. Across nine national surveys before the debate, Harris did about 3 points worse than Biden on average, but in 25 post-debate polls, she’s only performed about 1 point worse than Biden on average — even as Biden’s margin in the same set of post-debate surveys also got slightly better.* Harris also improved her showing across the swing states, based on a very limited sampling of polls.

“To be clear, this doesn’t mean that Harris will run notably stronger than Biden, only that she could. Her post-debate polls against Trump relative to Biden have a great deal of variance, ranging from around 8 points worse to 4 points better than how Biden performed. Based on an average of 26 national polls conducted over the past month, Harris trailed Trump by 4.5 points nationally compared with a smaller 3-point deficit for Biden.

“Polling at the state level is limited at this point, with no more than four polls conducted in the past month in any battleground state. But based on the state-level polls we do have, things don’t look any more rosy for Harris there, as she lags behind Biden’s margin against Trump in the key battleground states for which we have data. In our aggregate of this limited set of polls, Harris trailed Trump by around 3 points in Wisconsin (Biden trailed by about 2 points), by almost 5 in Pennsylvania (Biden was down around 4) and by 5 in Michigan (Biden was behind by about 2). This raises the possibility that she could have a harder time than Biden winning the Electoral College and thus the election.

“Still, if Harris does end up as her party’s nominee, Democrats will hope that her polling improves as she mounts an active campaign against Trump. For one thing, Harris could experience something of a quasi-convention bounce in the wake of the coverage of Biden’s departure and her now-active candidacy. Moreover, until Sunday, any poll that tested Harris (or any other possible Democratic candidate) had been hypothetical for survey respondents. That is not the case anymore, which could at least partially reset the race and shift how some voters are thinking about it moving forward. For Democrats, Harris could represent an escape hatch from the doom spiral of negative media coverage that had hounded Biden following the June debate, as well as the heightened concerns about his capacity to serve at 81 years old and fears that he could not recover the momentum against Trump.

Skelley and Morris conclude: “If nominated, Harris could absolutely end up losing to Trump — after all, the same post-debate polling that suggested she could do better than Biden also pointed to a potentially lower floor of support. But for Democrats who felt like they were slouching toward defeat in November behind a candidate whom voters were increasingly unenthused by, a Biden alternative could shake up the race, excite the party and give Democrats a chance of rebuilding an anti-Trump coalition that could win.”

There is no telling how long the Republicans’ post-convention bump will last. Nor is there any way to peg the shelf-life of their re-branding as a ‘populist,’ pro-working-class party, which the Vance veep pick is supposed to symbolize.

Republicans appear unified, but only if we choose to ignore the reality that a large group of anti-Trump Republicans still hope to reclaim their party as a legitimate conservative force, instead of a personality cult. One anti-Trump Republican, George Conway, has produced a hard-hitting video. featuring Trump’s own appointees warning about his mental health issues. Here it is:

In “Get a Grip, Democrats. You Can Still Win This: Biden’s not far behind, the economic conditions remain excellent, and a vile assassination attempt in July doesn’t determine November’s outcome,” Bill; Scher writes at Washington Monthly:

It is trite but true to note that a lot can happen over the next three months. We can’t be clairvoyant, but optimism is warranted. Israel and Hamas may soon agree to a ceasefire. Biden’s border crackdown may continue to drive down the number of illegal crossings and relieve pressure on municipalities. Perhaps most importantly, the Federal Reserve may cut interest rates and buoy public perception of the growing economy.

Many Democrats are understandably nervous about how Biden will perform in the campaign’s final weeks, but let’s not forget that Trump may do plenty to rankle swing voters, as he has throughout his political career. It’s not true that Trump always “gets away with it.” If he did, Republicans would have had better electoral performances in 2018, 2020, and 2022.

The brazen attempt by Republicans to deify Trump and claim God intervened to save him from the assassination attempt could well be viewed by swing voters as crass opportunism, especially if the Trump campaign tries to milk the tragedy for months.

Scher is not a ‘Biden only’ supporter, as he explains:

I’ve already made my case that Biden should not only withdraw from the 2024 presidential race but also resign and give President Kamala Harris the best chance to win in November. I stand by it, and I worry that Biden will have more episodes raising questions about his neurological health. There is still time for Biden to withdraw, and any Democrat concerned about his ability to campaign and govern effectively should continue to press the case.

But Scher sees a significant edge for Democrats in terms of campaign muscle:

If the contours of the race remained fixed, its outcome may hinge upon the quality of their two parties’ get-out-the-vote operations. And on this front, Democrats should retain their optimism. As I recently wrote, the Trump campaign has made a reckless bet on the far-right Turning Point network to shoulder much of its GOTV effort despite its nonexistent track record of successful electioneering and its reputation for financial mismanagement.

Biden and the Democrats have a good record to run on, Scher writes:

The fundamentals of the 2024 election remain favorable to Democrats. Gross Domestic Product is growing. Unemployment is low. Wages have been beating inflation for more than a year. American soldiers aren’t fighting and dying in an unpopular ground war. For over a century, incumbent parties in power have won American elections under these conditions.

Scher concludes:

Yes, we are facing an unusual set of X-factors that could render the lessons of history inoperative. But defeatism guarantees defeat. The Democrats may need to fight more of an uphill battle than necessary, but uphill battles can still be won.

Anything can happen in this crazy political year. There is still time to persuade a critical mass of swing voters in battleground states to honestly compare Biden’s record to that of his opponent. If that happens, all of the bad news of the last month could look like old news in November.