Over the past week, Donald Trump went from facing a candidate he was all but assured of defeating in November to suddenly having to face a whole new opponent. Trump is still favored to win at this point, but things have definitely tightened since Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee. We've been treated to countless stories about Kamala's surge in enthusiasm and fundraising, but missing from most of the headlines is the fact this was actually a good week for Donald Trump.
Earlier this week, CNN's polling expert Harry Enten noted that Donald Trump's numbers are higher than ever.
"The fact is Donald Trump is more popular now than he ever has been before," Enten said. "So yes, Democrats can make this switch-a-roo, but they're still going to have to beat Donald Trump—a Donald Trump who is stronger ... than he has ever been before."
On top of that, Kamala Harris, who is in the honeymoon phase of her campaign, hasn't moved the numbers enough.
"Kamala Harris is going to have to do better than this if she wants to win the popular vote, but more than that, if she wants to win the Electoral College, which she'll likely have to outperform how she's done nationally because the fact is, if you've got a tie in the national popular vote, that is probably not good enough if you are Kamala Harris, and you want to win the election against Donald Trump," he said
Enten had even more bad news for Harris late Thursday evening.
"I think there's all this talk of all this Harris momentum. Maybe there's a slight bit of momentum, but I would argue it's actually a little bit smaller than folks think," he explained. "So, pre-Biden dropping out, look, Trump was up by two over Harris. We look at the polls now this week, what do we see? We see Trump is up by one over Harris. The massive change is actually the change of candidates because prior to Biden dropping out, he trailed by six points among these — in these exact same polls that we look at here, where Harris was only trailing by two points. So, the movement is actually from Biden to Harris, not actually Harris herself necessarily moving."
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He continued, "More than that, there's a bit of a warning side in the polling data for Democrats. All this talk of Harris coming in and the Harris momentum, perhaps ignores a little bit that Trump has a little bit of momentum of his own." Enten went on to point to recent polls showing Trump at his highest favorability ratings ever measured.
If you really want to see visually what Enten is talking about, the latest graph from RealClearPolitics makes it quite clear.
RCP has updated their graph to show Trump vs. Harris alongside the previous Trump vs. Biden trends. pic.twitter.com/HqkP7KXrIU
— Matt Margolis (@mattmargolis) July 27, 2024
The above graph makes it clear that, while Harris has tightened the race up a bit, she's not so much hurting Trump as she's just outperforming Joe Biden. Trump still leads in the average, and his latest average rating, 47.9%, is actually his highest of the campaign. Harris's current average, 46,2%, doesn't even beat Joe Biden's highest average of 46.7% at the end of May. Will she likely hit that soon? Probably. But, as veteran Democratic strategist James Carville noted earlier this week, "This is the best day that she’s going to have for the rest of the campaign."
