Pelosi flip flops - now endorses Harris rather than a mini-primary

Everything is falling into place for Trump to go up against possibly the worst Presidential candidate since Bob Dole

Just yesterday, Pelosi and others were pushing hard for a mini-primary. Now that Harris has got some momentum with fundraising, I guess that the almighty dollar has changed some minds. If Pelosi is moving towards Harris, that would do a lot of damage to the mini-primary fans. I would now expect a coordinated effort now to rally around Harris and put the mini-primary idea to rest.

It was said that a few months ago that team Trump saw the possibility of Biden stepping down and Harris taking over as the best case scenario for their election chances. Kamala was the dream candidate for them to go up against. This was prior, of course, to the debate, which changed that outlook. Biden's debacle didn't necessarily make Harris stronger as a candidate, just made her better in comparison to Biden. In fact, one could argue that it weakened her candidacy as many will wonder why as Vice President she covered for what was going on with Biden and his senility.

To the degree that Biden and his support melted down post debate is the only reason many of us were hoping the President would stay in the race. Trump against Biden was as close to a sure thing as anything we have seen since Bill Clinton clobbered Bob Dole. I am sure that the Trump campaign recognized that as well. But just because they are no longer up against a drooling dementia patient, doesn't mean that they should not be licking their chops at the idea of facing Kamala Harris. Now that Biden has stepped down, Harris is back to being their dream candidate, with some extra baggage that she didn't have before.

To be clear, even in the internal Democratic polling that they supposedly took to Biden showing how much better other candidates did in the battleground states, Harris was said to be the weakest of the bunch. They listed Mark Kelly, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, and Wes Moore as the candidates who fared the best, supposedly running five points better than the President in the battleground state. On average, they stated that a different candidate would run two or three points better than Biden in those states. But if four of them did five points better and Harris was the weakest, well do the math. My guess was that she was only marginally better, and this was a poll designed to push Biden out of the race, so we don't know to what degree there was built in biased in this poll, looking to prove the point that he needed to bow out.

Based on the available post-debate polling on Trump vs Harris (24 polls) - Harris trails Trump nationally by an average of 3.3 which is about two tenths of a percent better than Biden (who was down by 3.5). Moreover, most of those Trump Harris polls are two way races, not five way races. Trump was running just under a point better when you went from a two way race to a five way race, so in theory it is possible that Harris will actually be polling slightly worse once these pollsters choose to add in Kennedy. Either way, she is either polling just ahead of Biden or just behind Biden. The only benefit is that Democrats believe that a "new" candidate can close the gap, whereas Biden was likely going to keep tumbling further. But I am not so sure that Harris has the ability to "close the gap". We can all look to her uninspired performance in the 2020 Presidential nomination race to judge her past performance and how it might equate to future results. If that axiom holds true, then Democrats are still in big, big trouble.