The Daily - Harris Takes the Lead in Key States

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

New polls by The New York Times and Siena College find that Vice President Kamala Harris has transformed the 2024 presidential race and is now leading former President Donald J. Trump in three crucial battleground states.Nate Cohn, the chief political analyst for The Times, explains why Ms. Harris is benefiting so much.Guest: Nate Cohn, the chief political analyst for The New York Times. Background reading: Ms. Harris leads Mr. Trump in three key states, according to new surveys by The Times and Siena CollegeThe polls show that the vice president has fundamentally changed the race.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. A major new poll from the Times finds that Vice President Kamala Harris has transformed the 2024 presidential race and is now leading President Trump in three of the most crucial battleground states. Today, my colleague Nate Cohn explains why Harris is benefiting so much from being a new face in an election that so many Americans had dreaded. It's Tuesday, August 13th. Nate, the Times has just completed our first poll that seeks to understand the state of

this presidential race since Biden dropped out and Kamala Harris took his place as the Democratic nominee. Everyone understands that that has changed this race. But this poll attempted to measure by just how much it changed the race in three of the most essential swing states. So tell us about the results. Well, we found that the entry of Kamala Harris into the race has fundamentally upended this contest.

We pulled Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, arguably the three most important battleground states. These are three states that voted for Obama in 2012, Trump in 2016, and then flip back to Biden in 2020. But that Trump had generally been leading in the polling so far this cycle. And if Kamala Harris won all three states, she would almost certainly win the presidential election. And the poll found Harris leading Donald Trump in all three states by a four point margin, 50 to 46%. A huge swing in favor of the Democrats in a very short period of time.

Basically what this poll found was that she was a game changer in those three states. That's right. And it is worth saying it's all on the Harris side of things. Donald Trump's ratings are essentially unchanged since the last time he pulled these states. In fact, his favorability rating ticked up a little bit. Wow. But by replacing Joe Biden, who was really unpopular,

with Kamala Harris, who in this poll is viewed favorably by 49% or 50% of voters in every state. They have completely changed what had been the basic dynamic of this election. Until now, voters had been agonizing between two candidates they didn't like. And we don't know what would have happened if we had played the Biden-Trump match up to the end, but we do know that as of July, when voters were choosing between those two unpalatable options, more of them were choosing Trump.

Now they don't have to, at least for now. They like Harris more than they like Trump. And so she has the lead. So let's talk about who has rallied around Harris once Biden got out of the race and how that helps explain why she's suddenly in the lead in these three states. Harris's biggest gains are coming from the demographic groups that traditionally vote Democratic but that Joe Biden had struggled to consolidate throughout much of the year. Take black voters. The poll finds her up 81 to 13 among black voters across these three states.

That's a lot better than Biden had been in polls this year. And we had done some polls that found Joe Biden in the 60s among black voters at times. That feels really important to me because black voters are a group that helped power Biden to victory in 2020 in states like Georgia. It's a group of voters that Trump has been very heavily focused on and one of the groups that appeared most open to defecting from the Democratic side to the Republican side because of Trump. So those kinds of gains feel very meaningful. That's right.

And another group that sort of has those same characteristics, young voters, the poll found Harris had by 15 points among 18 to 29 year olds in these three states. It's not the best number of Democrats that ever produced among young voters to be frank, but it's a lot better than Joe Biden for much of the year. And these are two groups where it's easy to see why she would do a little bit better than Joe Biden. She's much younger than he is. She's black. He's white. She's also a woman and it's worth noting that she's doing better among women than Joe Biden had been doing in our previous surveys. What's maybe more surprising though, she's still at least holding her own among older voters, among men, among white voters. She's

not doing better than Biden was in these polls, but she's not doing worse. So she's adding a lot of strength among traditionally democratic constituencies without giving up much if any ground among the groups that you might expect to be relative weak points for her. You said that a lot of this seemingly across the board improvement in the numbers for Harris seems to be driven by the fact that both Trump and Biden are not especially popular candidates. And of course, now Biden's out of the race. So I guess my question is, how much are Harris's gains reflective,

not just of Biden or Trump's problems, but of her own popularity? It's definitely a reflection of her own popularity and standing. On every question that we asked, people say that they like Harris. They say she's intelligent. They say she's intelligent. They say she's honest. They say she cares about you. I think the more interesting question is why? I mean, just as recently as a few weeks ago, a majority of Americans said they had an unfavorable

view of Kamala Harris. Right. They even came on the show and we talked about all of her different political liabilities and challenges and how bad her 2019 campaign was. We did. And now all of a sudden, Kamabilities and challenges and how bad her 2019 campaign was. We did. And now all of a sudden, Kamala Harris is broadly liked and popular. And it's happened extremely quickly.

And I think that there are really a mix of two basic reasons that this can happen. One is that she's really changed people's views about them because she's made this brand new impression with the help of great media coverage, or she's benefiting from this new contrast, this comparison with Joe Biden and the burst of pent up democratic energy from people who have been yearning for something different. I think it's probably a little bit of both. I mean, I was just explained to a friend recently that it's sort of like

the country just had a breakup with Joe Biden. They've been in this relationship for years that they weren't happy with, and maybe they didn't even know how unhappy they were with this relationship. But now that they've had this breakup, they're newly liberated. There's this incredible sense of new opportunity and now comes along Kamala Harris. And after their first few dates with Kamala, the country is thrilled. This is quite a metaphor. And to indulge it a little bit further when such a date between Americans and Kamala Harris was hypothetical because she wasn't the nominee when she was just vice president, voters views of her were less generous but once this breakup with Biden happens all that pent-up desire

for change, that feeling of liberation you just mentioned, it overwhelms any previous doubts a lot of voters had about her. Right and you know we'll find desire for change, that feeling of liberation you just mentioned, it overwhelms any previous doubts a lot of voters had about her. Right. And you know, we'll find out whether this is real and whether the country is going to marry her in a few months. But for the moment, I think that Harris is enjoying this really coveted place in American politics, where voters are able to invest most of their hopes and their wishes for what they want to see in a candidate in this new figure.

In polling, it's a little bit like something called a generic candidate or a generic Democrat. Can you just explain that? Yeah, it might sound a little insulting to compare Kamala Harris to a generic Democrat, but it's really not. In a poll, a pollster might ask, would you rather vote for the Democrat or Donald Trump? The Democrat is unnamed, not a real person. And the unnamed generic candidate, and this is true for both parties, almost always fares better than a named candidate. And that's because they're not burdened with all of the real world imperfections that actual real

candidates have. And I think that's sort of what's happened for Kamala Harris over the last few weeks is she's running as a broadly appealing mainstream democratic candidate. And there are a bunch of good feelings around her and she hasn't really been defined either way. And so voters are piling their hopes to support someone other than Donald Trump into their idea of her right now, and it's giving her a clear lead. So we should think of Kamala Harris, especially in the context of a very short election in

which she's suddenly the surprise replacement Democratic nominee, as basically the platonic ideal of a Democrat in this moment, who almost in a real sense does occupy that spot you just described of the generic Democrat. It's an unusual position, and even though the word generic might sound bad, it sounds like a pretty ideal one. It is, and that's how she's been running her campaign for the last few weeks. Oh, it's so good to be back. Good evening.

And you can see that if you watch her stump speech. Across our nation, we are witnessing a full on assault on hard fought, hard won freedoms and rights. She really sounds like a pretty typical mainstream boilerplate Democrat. And the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government telling her what to do. She talks about abortion. She talks about building up the middle class. A future with affordable health care, affordable child care, and paid leave.

She talks about how we need to go into the future. We're not going to go back. She talks about freedom. And we're not going back because Nevada, we fight for the future. Some of the stuff is linked to her biography, right, that she's a prosecutor, but most of what she says could be said by just about any Democrat. So Georgia, today I ask you. So Nevada, today I ask you. So Arizona, I ask, are you ready to make your voices heard? And when we fight, and when we fight, and when we fight, we win.

And when we fight, we win! And you know what? It's a plausibly winning strategy to just be a broadly acceptable mainstream Democratic candidate. I suspect there are going to be some listeners, some Democrats and non Democrats, who listen to this conversation and say, how can you call Kamala Harris generic? She's the first black South Asian woman major party nominating. Yeah, I think it's a fair point. In a lot of respects, Kamala Harris is not a generic Democrat. But that may be part of the reason why it makes sense for her to

run as a relatively mainstream Democrat. She's already distinctive to millions of Americans. She's going to look really different from Joe Biden and Donald Trump and the other people who have dominated our politics for the last eight years. And so already being so distinct, I think that gives her all the more incentive to run as a very mainstream and typical Democrat. If there's any risk for Harris, it's that if she doesn't define herself as anything in particular, the Donald Trump campaign will define her instead. There's no way that Kamala Harris will be a generic candidate come November, right? People

are going to know who Kamala Harris is. And if they do, then she won't be a generic Democrat anymore. She will be a named candidate with all the same liabilities as every other Democrat, and that might be a much more difficult challenge for her in November. We'll be right back. Nate, I'm curious based on this poll, what a not generic or much less generic version of a Harris candidacy is likely to look like over the next 80 or so days of this campaign, either in her hands or in the hands of Donald Trump. Well, I think it's hard to say what it would look like in her hands.

After all, she's a blank slate. She could define herself however she wants. I think it's worth noting that she didn't choose to define herself as a moderate by selecting someone like Josh Shapiro as her vice president. But that doesn't mean that she's not going to move to the center at some point. It doesn't mean she might not stake out bold progressive positions later. I think either way, whatever she chooses to do, the Democratic convention is clearly her opportunity to define herself more clearly in the eyes of the public. However, that may be. In Trump's hands, I think it's pretty easy to see the kinds of directions they might

go. They're either going to define her as too far to the left, or if they think they can't do that because she succeeded in positioning herself in the center, they're going to say she's a phony flip-flopper. And if they do choose to go after her on the issues, the poll suggests that there are some opportunities for them. The poll says that voters trust Trump more than Harris on the economy and on immigration, two issues where Trump has had an advantage for a long time and that rank really highly in the minds of the public. And also she's where Harris has some vulnerabilities, like when she took a role on immigration early in her tenure as

vice president. And the poll also shows that 44% of voters think Harris is too liberal or too progressive. Now, it's not a majority, but it does suggest that this starts out as a area of relative vulnerability for her that the Trump campaign can try and reinforce as the race gets underway. But you know what? It's worth stepping back and just noting they haven't successfully focused on any of these things over the last three weeks. And we can go through all the different themes that the Trump campaign has tried to work through that Donald Trump himself has worked through, but they've been scattershot at best and a lot of them are off topic, like is Kamala Harris black or is she Indian?

Right. This was in fact the focus of Monday's episode of our show. Jonathan Swan was walking through the kind of failures of the Trump campaign to come up with any coherent strategy for challenging Kamala Harris's rise. And I guess the way you would interpret that is that he has failed to make her less generic. Yeah, absolutely. He has passed on the opportunity to define Harris when the public's views of her were most malleable. I mean, when I think back about the biggest things that they've managed to talk about, I think more about what they've said about Tim Walz, not about Kamala Harris.

You remember that day when the stock market fell and they talked about Kamala crash or whatever? Right. You know, there was that, but her being too far to the left, her positions on immigration or the economy, that hasn't broken through. And they can still try, but they've clearly made it much more challenging for themselves. Nate, former President Trump never really struggled to negatively define Joe Biden. Do we suspect it's only a matter of time before he lands on a somewhat effective approach

to Kamala Harris. You know, I don't think it's inevitable that Trump will land on an effective approach here. And I would actually push back a little bit on the idea that Trump found easy to define Joe Biden. In 2020, Trump largely failed to define Joe Biden in a negative light. That's a big part of why Joe Biden managed to win. The public independently reached the view that Joe Biden was too old to be president and was an ineffective president in this campaign. Donald Trump didn't need to do anything in order for the public to reach that conclusion and our polling showed that years ahead of where we are today.

And similarly in 2016, I mean, Donald Trump undoubtedly attacked Hillary Clinton, but there again, was it really Donald Trump succeeding at characterizing Hillary Clinton as being corrupt or a candidate of the elite in the establishment? Or was that something that was already in place at the time Donald Trump ran? I would argue that that was already mostly in place and that Donald Trump wasn't responsible for that. Kamala Harris, it's worth noting, doesn't have those kind of obvious built-in liabilities.

Hmm. Just explain that. Well, she's not too old to be president. She's 59, right? She doesn't start the campaign with an FBI investigation or 20 years of personal baggage. And it's worth noting that although the Trump campaign does have some material to work with in terms of some previous left views on the issues, there's very little so far in the way of negative stories about her personally, like the sort of deep character problems that large portions of the public believed about Hillary Clinton in 2016 or about Joe Biden's capacity to be president today.

Kamala Harris doesn't have those kind of liabilities right now. And I think it's really important. A lot of Americans, they don't just vote on the issues. They care about character. They make judgments about whether they think someone is a good person or a bad person. They're drawn to the vibes, as they say. And a lot of those things are being driven by factors other than whether Kamala Harris flip-flopped on fracking.

They're driven by these more basic traits about the candidates. And it could be a serious problem for Donald Trump that there isn't a character or trait-based dimension to the major attack against Kamala Harris. What that tells me, and I'm curious what you think about this, is that Harris has really benefited from being a pretty low profile vice president under Biden, even with the favorability problems she had as VP, they weren't deeply grounded in much exposure to the public.

And on top of that, she's then tossed into this presidential race at the very last minute without a long campaign to define her. And I think a lot of people wondered, was that going to be a disadvantage for her, make it really impossible for her to mount a serious campaign in such a short period of time? And it's turning out to be all of it an advantage. Absolutely. I mean, as soon as she got into the race and as soon as Democrats decided that they were going to get behind her and move past Joe Biden, this tidal wave of enthusiasm has swept her up. And it's been enough to completely change the public's view of her.

Now, I think it is worth cautioning, of course, that if the public's views of her can change greatly in three weeks, they could change back the other way. I don't think we should be sure that the public's view of her now is somehow set in stone. I think that the overarching lesson here is that this is a candidate who's still in the early phases of being defined. But to this point, it couldn't have gone too much better for her. And I'm curious, should we assume that if Kamala Harris is now leading Trump in the three swing states that this poll covered, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, that she might be leading Trump as well in the key swing states in the Sun Belt that the Times

hasn't yet pulled since she became the nominee. And I'm thinking about states like Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina. Yeah, it's entirely possible. Now, Joe Biden was trailing Donald Trump by a lot in those Sunbelt states because he was so weak among young and non-white voters. But those are exactly the groups that the poll shows Kamala Harris is making her biggest gains. Mm-hmm.

So it seems entirely possible that she's made disproportionate gains in those Sunbelt states. Whether that's enough for her to lead versus it just being a dead heat or slightly behind I don't know, but I would expect the race in those states to be very close if she has any discernible advantage in the Northern battlegrounds. Right. And it kind of feels that what this poll tells us is that there has been a transformation of this race and that where Trump was once winning, he's at the very least now in a very competitive toss-up race for president. Is that how you see it?

That's basically how I view it. And if anything, Harris has an edge in the polling today. Whether that'll last until November is obviously a completely different question, but to the extent the Trump campaign had crafted strategy around trying to defeat Joe Biden among young voters and black voters, and by capitalizing on a deep dissatisfaction with a candidate who seemed incapable of winning the presidency, that strategy is now out the window. They have a completely different race against a candidate who seemed incapable of winning the presidency, that strategy is now out the window. They have a completely different race against a candidate who right now is pretty popular

with voters, who represents change in her own right, and who now has the lead in the most important battleground states. So this is absolutely a winnable race for Democrats now, and it's a completely different picture than the one we had a month ago. Well, Nate, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The independent presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was dealt a major blow on Monday when a judge ruled that his petition to get on New York's ballot was invalid because

Kennedy had used a sham address to maintain his New York residency. If it stands, the ruling would kick Kennedy off New York's ballot and could endanger his efforts to get on the ballot in all 50 states. Kennedy has vowed to appeal the ruling. And after an audacious incursion into Russian territory, Ukraine's army now claims to control two dozen communities there, covering nearly 400 square miles. The incursion is an embarrassing setback for Russia that could benefit Ukraine in two ways. First, by drawing Russian forces away from Ukraine, and second, by serving as a bargaining chip for Ukraine in future

peace negotiations with Russia. Today's episode was produced by Shannon Lin, Carlos Prieto, and Claire Tennesgetter. It was edited by Lisa Chow and Devon Taylor, contains original music by Dan Powell and Rowan Niemesto, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Boboto. See you tomorrow.