This is part one of a three-part series looking at how various factors in the presidential race could lead to Kamala Harris winning big this year. You can read parts and three here.
Kamala Harris’ campaign “leaked” the state of their internal polling to CNN last Friday.
“Pennsylvania looks rough, though very possible, by their internal numbers before the debate,” CNN reported. “North Carolina, disappointing Democrats every election for the last 15 years, is feeling better to them this time around than Arizona, which [President Joe] Biden narrowly won four years ago. Nevada and Georgia both seem possible, though depending on the poll, can take a lot of squinting. Michigan and Wisconsin are looking like the best of the bunch for Harris, according to the campaign’s internal numbers.”
To be clear, the Harris campaign isn’t saying it’s losing. It’s what we already knew: Polling is extremely tight, but Harris has a slight edge in the swing states she needs to get to the winning 270 electoral votes—plus a real shot to score a few other states.
Ideally, we wouldn’t have a close election. However, conditions are also forming that could—assuming we all do our part, of course—mean Harris wins big this November.
The polls
Harris leads Donald Trump by 2.7 points in 538’s polling average, as of 2:30 PM ET on Monday. That’s an extremely tight race.
However, only two national polls fielded in September—one from AtlasIntel and the other from The New York Times/Siena College—show Trump with a lead. Better yet, among polls fielded primarily after the presidential debate, Harris leads Trump in most polls by 4 to 5 points, suggesting that her margin could grow (though we’ll have to see how resilient her post-debate bounce is).
And while this isn’t a national election, the battleground states aren’t special snowflakes with their own trends. If Harris moves up a couple of points nationally, we should generally see the battlegrounds move in concert.
Over the last few days, a slew of state-level polls have offered encouraging news to Harris. In Iowa, the Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll, conducted by famously accurate pollster J. Ann Selzer, showed Trump with a meager 47%-to-43% lead among likely voters. That’s a much, much tighter margin than in June, when the same poll showed him with a 50%-to-32% lead over President Joe Biden.
In Arkansas, a poll showed Trump leading Harris by 15 points—almost half the margin of Trump’s 28-point victory there in 2020. (This pollster is admittedly much less reliable.) And in Alaska, a good pollster found Trump leading Harris by only 5 points—again, roughly half his 2020 margin of victory there.
Does that mean Harris will win those states? Probably not. She’s still down in all three polls. And it’s worth noting that, in 2020, the September edition of the Iowa poll showed Trump and Biden tied, and Trump went on to win the state by about 8 points. (The poll released its final 2020 survey in late October, showing Trump leading Biden by 7 points.)
However, these results do suggest that Harris is competing unexpectedly in red areas of the country.
So much money
The Trump campaign was so pleased to announce its August fundraising haul of $130 million, with one senior adviser saying, “These fundraising numbers from August are a reflection of that movement and will propel President Trump’s America First movement back to the White House.”
But just a few days later—bam!—the Harris campaign announced that during the same month, it had raked in $361 million, or nearly three times what Trump raised. And you know what’s crazy? Trump’s fundraising numbers were down from July, when he raised just over $138 million. So much for momentum.
But that wasn’t it for Harris. In the 24 hours after last Tuesday’s debate, Harris raised an unbelievable $47 million, or a third of what Trump raised in all of August.
Money isn’t everything, of course. Hillary Clinton had a lot more money than Trump in 2016. But money is still important, as we’ve seen in Trump’s inability to place big ad buys in key battleground states or build a field operation. And fundraising is a proxy for voter enthusiasm.
Indeed, Harris has so much money that her campaign pledged to transfer nearly $25 million to downballot Democrats. This isn’t just about electing more Democrats to pass her agenda, but also helps Democratic committees strengthen their own get-out-the-vote efforts, which will, in turn, benefit her. It’s a crazy smart move, and it’s possibly only because of the size of her war chest.
Continue reading with part two, which looks at how different things look on the ground.
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