What polling tells us about a Kamala Harris candidacy

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There’s rarely a perfect time to be a pollster, but on Sunday afternoon, as my latest national survey of voters was wrapping up, President Joe Biden announced that he was withdrawing from the 2024 race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.

Suddenly, the 2024 race has been turned on its head. And to get a full read on the effect of the change-up at the top of the Democratic ticket, we’ll need two things:

• Clarity on the “who”: Democratic leaders seem to be coalescing quickly around Harris, and Democratic voters, so far, seem to be largely OK with this, though some may still pine for an alternative or a more deliberative process.

• Time: The idea of Harris as the presumptive Democratic nominee will take a few days to ripple through the public consciousness. Even then, it will take a few days for pollsters to go back out, ask people their views and then crunch the numbers.

We’ll get clarity on those things in the next week or so. But I think we can already start assessing what new challenges and opportunities Democrats have by moving on from Biden to an alternative candidate, particularly Harris; and since she’s the likely nominee — and Republicans are already rewriting at least parts of their playbook with her in mind — let’s assess her and the political landscape.

The upsides

• Voters aren’t looking for instability. Handing the reins quickly to Harris has already drawn howls of unfairness from Republicans, but it likely won’t fracture Democrats, who want to bear down and focus on beating Donald Trump. Plus, in Harris, they’ll have a nominee who clears the low bar that many voters feared Biden couldn’t: “will be able to serve for four years.”

• Harris could give the “double haters” what they wanted. A quarter of voters are “double haters” — those who were seemingly begging the two major parties to give them choices other than Trump and Biden. Now, one party has answered the call, and one question becomes: Is Harris that longed-for alternative, or is she seen as simply a continuation of the much-maligned Biden candidacy? Early indications are that she gets a two-point bump relative to Biden among these voters.

• Harris will drive abortion messaging more sharply. During the June debate, when asked about the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Biden’s answer was meandering. Abortion, though, is one of the few issues where voters consistently say they trust Democrats more than Republicans, and Harris has already indicated that she’ll make this issue a centerpiece of her message.

• Against Harris, Republicans could fall into the “very online” trap. It’s hard to overstate the extent to which Republicans view Harris as unappealing. If you only learn about her from conservative media, you’re most likely steeped in “unburdened by what has been” video montages and criticism of her laugh. Assume this is how most voters think of her — or that they will care about this slight awkwardness — at your own risk.

The downsides

• Harris might be more “burdened by what has been” than other alternative candidates. If Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom, let’s say, became the Democratic nominee, it’s very likely that either of them would face far fewer questions about what they knew and when they knew it with regard to Biden’s apparent decline. Furthermore, Biden’s poor approval rating wasn’t all about his age; on an array of issues, voters say they don’t think his policies made them better off — and his policies are also, in effect, her policies.

• Harris, especially, will run into problems on immigration and crime. Trump was favored over Biden on those two issues and, as was widely reported early in their administration, Harris was initially designated “to lead the White House effort” around border policy. Republicans will also, no doubt, point to Harris’ support for things like a controversial Minnesota bail fund to undercut any tough-on-crime-prosecutor messaging.

• Harris’ past efforts have also fallen into the “very online” trap. Harris is apparently the “meme candidate.” All well and good, and Biden struggled mightily with many younger voters, but in 2020, Harris’ campaign during the Democratic presidential primary season went fairly disastrously, reportedly in part because of young staffers who made the mistake of thinking that Twitter, now named X, was real life. (Most Americans do not use the platform.)

Odds and ends

• The veep’s veepstakes: There’s almost no data right now to indicate which running-mate choice Harris could make to maximize her chances of victory, assuming she becomes the nominee. Choosing a popular swing-state leader like Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, who has high job approval overall — in part because he has earned the approval of a fair number of Trump voters — might not move the national numbers but could nudge things in individual key states.

• Political violence worries: Voters think political violence is a growing problem and that incivility is getting worse, according to the latest CBS News/YouGov polling. At the same time, slim majorities of Americans say that Trump and Biden “encouraged more unity” after the assassination attempt.

Kristen Soltis Anderson is a contributing Opinion writer for the New York Times. She is a Republican pollster, a speaker, a commentator and the author of “The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (and How Republicans Can Keep Up).”