Two new polls released today show Trump ahead

Even with all of the hype and help from the media, Harris is not pulling away

The problem for Harris is the same problem that Hillary had and the same problem that almost cost Biden victory in 2020. Harris cannot hope to win the popular vote by a smallish margin and expect to win the Electoral College.

Today, JL Partners and Beacon/FOX both came out with polls showing Trump with a small lead. In the past week alone, we have seen nine polls where the two candidates are within two points of each other. Three of those were exactly even.

Now nobody knows right now where Harris is at with her obvious "I am not Biden" bump in the polls. As it stands, she has moved some polls as much as eight or nine points from where they were just prior to Biden stepping down. Overall, she was down (based on my polling average) by 3.5% on the day Biden informed the country of his plan to drop out of the race. Harris is now up in the vicinity of one, two, or even three points depending on where you look. Either way, this is a considerable bump for a historically unpopular candidate who has no platform, no candidate website to speak of, has not given any interviews, or even held a press conference. At some point this bump will cease, and things will likely move in Trump's direction again, at least to some degree.

I am also not convinced that she will get much more help from the convention. They used to be huge, somethings pushing a candidate out by double digits. But in recent times, they have not had the same effect. People watch these things and read about them from lens of their favorite partisan news sources, so in the end, they have simply reinforced the opinions of the voters more than anything else. The GOP convention by all accounts was a hit, but did not help much short term in the polls and had no effect long term. Of course, Biden dropping out three days later sort of changed the news cycle, making the GOP convention almost moot.

What I believe we are seeing is Democrats simply coming home after being completely disillusioned by Joe Biden and his cognitive melt down. They likely hold a popular vote edge in a perfectly even election, even as the GOP probably holds an Electoral College edge. So, even with Harris being a bad candidate, she looks good enough against Joe Biden to get many Democrats excited again. Democrats won the popular vote in the past two elections by 2.1% in 2016 and 4.4% in 2020. They lost the ECV in 2016 and came within 40K votes of losing it again in 2020. While odds have moved in the past week or so to make Harris a small favorite, I would still not bet against Trump right now.