Kamala Harris’ emergence as the Democratic presidential candidate has turned the race on its head. She is now ahead in most national polls and in many recent polls in the swing states. The momentum is clearly on her side.
What most analysts have overlooked, however, is Where their support comes.
While it has made up ground across all demographics from President Biden’s dismal post-debate performance, it is still well below historic levels of support for Democrats among blacks and Latinos.
That is, she is in the lead because she does historically well among whites, especially college-educated whites, so her already narrow lead is much smaller than it seems.
The Cook Political Report’s polling average makes this clear, showing Harris holding a narrow lead nationally, 47.3% to 46.9%.
It also shows that she has a big lead among blacks (75-19) and Hispanics (53-41).
An average reader would see this data and think she is leading because of these demographics. The political professional immediately draws the opposite conclusion, because these margins, however large, are much smaller than traditional Democrat margins.
Cook helpfully provides some data from 2020 that subtly illustrates this point.
Biden defeated Trump among blacks by 90 to 9 and among Hispanics by 60 to 37.
Trump received around 47 percent of the vote in 2020. He should therefore do even better in the current polls, as he is doing significantly better in these groups, which cast over 20 percent of all votes in 2020.
And despite these impressive successes, he can only run with his 2020 result – because he is losing the white vote.
Polls from Emerson College, Ipsos and Survey USA show that in a head-to-head race with Harris, Trump leads among whites by 13 or 14 points. However, according to the Election Day poll, Trump won among whites by 17 points in 2020.
In other recent presidential elections, Republicans performed even better among white voters.
Among white voters, Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 21 percentage points in 2016; Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama by 20 percentage points in 2012.
Harris’s deficit among whites is only slightly larger than the 12 points that Barack Obama lost to them in 2008.
This year, stock markets collapsed, the world slipped into recession, and on election day the incumbent Republican president’s approval rating was only 28 percent.
It is incredible that Harris could achieve anything close to the same result as Obama, when she is the incumbent vice president of an administration whose approval ratings are itself abysmal.
Trump’s own unpopularity is probably not the reason. He is still disliked by more people than liked, but his current approval rating of 44.3% is over 2 points higher than on election day 2020.
Harris herself is not particularly popular either. More people dislike her than like her, and her approval rating of 45.5% is only slightly higher than Trump’s.
The factors point to a simple reason for her popularity: hype. She has been the subject of massive uncritical attention over the past month.
This has boosted her popularity ratings, but it has also likely helped convince people who dislike both candidates to reluctantly favor her in a confrontation with Trump.
So there is reason to believe Trump can fight back. The campaign has already booked tens of millions of dollars worth of ads in the swing states for the next three weeks.
That alone could cause the hype there to die down somewhat.
Trump can also use personal appearances to argue that Harris is too liberal and too weak to be president.
However, this would require more commitment and discipline than he has shown in recent weeks.
However, if he succeeds, he would quickly be catapulted to the top.
Whites will cast about two-thirds of all votes this year. Winning by 16 percentage points instead of 13 may not seem like a big difference, but this small change shifts the national margin by about two percentage points in Trump’s favor.
It is the difference between victory and defeat.
In the important swing states in the Midwest, whites are even more decisive. In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, they received between 81 and 86 percent of the vote.
Given Trump’s gains among non-white voters, Harris will need to do better among whites than Biden to have a chance of winning any of these states.
There are about 11 weeks until election day. In a race as close as this one, anything can happen.
It would not be a surprise if, after the Democratic convention and Harris’ honeymoon, some white voters defected to Trump again and the poll numbers became even closer.
Henry Olsen, a political analyst and commentator, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
