The number-crunchers over at The Economist confirm what we all suspected: “With the conventions behind us, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s polling bounce is a no-show.”
Empirically, convention bounces have been waning for some time (see chart). Before 2000 the spike was worth an average of 3.7 percentage points in two-party polling. Since then the post-performance high has been smaller — around 1.7 points — and has faded faster. But the absence of a jump in this year’s polls is still striking: Ms Harris’s post-convention gains are smaller than those of 17 of the past 19 Democratic nominees.
The silver lining for Democrats is that Harris already had gotten the equivalent of her polling bounce before the conventions; The Economist gang calculates that in the initial weeks of her campaign, she “gained two percentage points in polls, putting her 4.7 points ahead of the final polls of Mr Biden’s campaign.”
But you can understand why Democrats might be irritable this morning, beyond the neck-and-neck New York Times poll yesterday that Jeff dissected. On paper, the Democratic convention in Chicago went about as well as the party could have possibly hoped — minimal protests and four nights of gushing coverage and well-delivered rah-rah speeches. And after all that, Harris and Tim Walz got bupkis. (Hey, maybe most of the speeches really did run too late to do any good on the East Coast. More likely, the audience watching was overwhelmingly already supportive of Harris.)
Harris still has a good chance of winning, somewhere around 50–50 odds. But Democrats ought to be sweating, swearing, or both, because she’s enjoyed an almost unparalleled run of effusive press, with little or no scrutiny of her record. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has stumbled, rambled, created all kinds of new headaches for himself, and yet . . . all seven key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin look to be within two or so percentage points.
There’s been a lot of discussion — seemingly well-founded — around the notion that Trump has a “hard ceiling” in his polling numbers — that even on his best days, he’s unlikely to ever get beyond 50 percent, and is likely to finish in the mid to upper 40s.
But what’s Harris’s ceiling, and is it comparably “hard”?
What if, for Harris, this is as good as it gets?