With 42 Days to Go, Harris Has the Edge - Rob Horowitz

With 42 Days to Go, Harris Has the Edge - Rob Horowitz

With only six weeks until election day and early voting already underway in several states, Kamala Harris has built a small, but meaningful lead over Donald Trump nationally and is ahead in most of the key battlegrounds.  More importantly, as voters have learned more about the vice president and watched her in action, she has dramatically boosted the percentage of the electorate that views her positively. More likely voters now rate her favorably than unfavorably.  In contrast, the former president remains unpopular with a majority  of likely voters still viewing him unfavorably. While the race remains highly competitive, Kamala Harris enters the stretch run in a better position to capture the presidency than Donald Trump.

 

Undergirding the positive movement in the electorate toward the vice president is that she has passed the commander-in-chief test. Most voters now believe that she is better than Donald Trump on key attributes people look for in a president.  Substantial majorities of likely voters, for example, view Harris as more honest and trustworthy, more temperamentally suited, and more mentally and physically fit to be president than Trump, according to a new NBC News Poll, jointly conducted by a leading Democratic and Republican polling firm. Harris has a narrower 5%-point advantage on who would be more competent and effective. Strikingly, she even leads the former president on who best represents change.

GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST

These positives perceptions of the vice president were solidified and reinforced by her debate performance-the defining moment of the campaign so far.  By a margin of about 2 to 1, likely voters believe she won the debate, according to a series of polls. Harris performed exceptionally well with a consistent presidential tone, succeeding in continually putting Trump on the defensive. 

 

Skillfully baited by Harris, the former president reminded the majority of the electorate--who did not like him before the debate started--of exactly why.   He refused to accept any responsibility for January 6, nearly celebrating the rioters, continued in the face of all the evidence to insist that he won the 2020 presidential election, and proudly cited the Hungarian authoritarian and Putin ally Viktor Orban’s effusive praise as a positive reference for his foreign policy. Most bizarrely, Donald Trump falsely claimed migrants in Springfield, Ohio were kidnapping and eating people’s cats and dogs.  Despite the fact that the mayor of Springfield, the congressman who represents Springfield, and the governor of Ohio--all fellow Republicans-- have said there is no truth to the claim and urged Mr. Trump and JD Vance to stop spreading this falsehood, post-debate they doubled and tripled down on it.

 

Kamala Harris has opened up a lead with independents and is picking up soft Republicans.  The Harris campaign has done a skillful job of creating a permission structure for that subset of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents that have strong doubts about Mr. Trump to vote for the vice president, rolling out a series of endorsements from hundreds of former officials who served in previous Republican presidential administrations, as well as from 700 former national security and military officials.

 

Most prominent was former vice president and staunch conservative Dick Cheney. The former vice president minced no words. Calling on Americans to put country above partisanship, he said, “In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again."

 

Ms. Harris goes into the final weeks of the campaign, having out-fundraised and out-organized the former president. She has a $100 million dollar cash on hand advantage over Mr. Trump and is substantially outspending him on television and digital advertising in the key battlegrounds. This cash advantage is a key component of her ability to expand the electoral map, giving her multiple paths to the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the Oval Office. She is also far better organized on the ground in the key states. In a close race, these advantages usually pay dividends on election day. 

 

It is the case that Donald Trump maintains some important strengths and is still very much in the fight.  While Harris has gained ground on the perceptions that the former president would be better on the major issues of the economy and immigration, Mr. Trump still has the advantage. Additionally, his persistent strength among non-college white voters is keeping him highly competitive in the blue wall states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, both of which contain a disproportionately high share of that subset of the electorate. Perhaps most importantly, most Americans still believe that our nation is “pretty seriously off on the wrong track.” If the former president can become more focused and disciplined--admittedly a big if--he should be able to better connect the incumbent vice president to that dissatisfaction.

 

As we move into the home stretch, however, I would much rather be Kamala Harris than Donald Trump.