Kamala Harris’s Ascent Shows How Political Hardball—And Smart Polling—Pays Off

Kamala Harris’s Ascent Shows How Political Hardball—And Smart Polling—Pays Off

By Brianna Zichettella & Josh Pasek

Waves of political pundits called for Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential election, following his much-derided June debate performance. Despite the chorus, the Biden team justified him staying in the ring by pointing to public opinion polls, which showed that voting intentions remained essentially unchanged after the debate. A growing pressure campaign from donors and party leaders eventually led Biden to exit the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris as the new Democratic nominee.

Did polling data really indicate that Biden should drop out? Or was his decision not to seek reelection solely based on a bunch of spooked “elites”? The answer tells us what we should watch for in the polls as November nears.

In hindsight, it is easy to point to the improvement in Democrats’ polling after Harris became the nominee to assert that party leaders made the right decision in July. But whether a decision happens to be the right one is fundamentally different from whether such an outcome could be reliably foreseen. Indeed, before Biden withdrew, Harris and Biden were performing similarly in head-to-head polling against Donald Trump. Hence there was no guarantee that changing nominees would improve those numbers. And concern about a bitter intraparty nominating contest was sizable.

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Yet the gambit appears to have paid off. At the outset, Harris performed far better in polling than anything Biden had achieved during this election cycle. Within two days of Biden dropping out, Democrats had consolidated around Harris and her fledgling campaign, garnering enough support from delegates—and $81 million in grassroots campaign cash—to make her the party’s presumptive nominee. The move also upended the media narrative surrounding the presidential race. Before Biden dropped out, Democrats feared losing decisively. Now Harris seems to have given them a fighting chance.

Data before July did suggest that shedding Biden would improve Democrats’ performance. But the question wasn’t who people were planning to support but rather what their enthusiasm for voting was. Voting intention measures matter more than enthusiasm ones. But enthusiasm makes a great deal of difference at the margins, because it keeps those voting intentions from getting waylaid. That’s a hidden lesson behind the polling stories ahead in this year’s election.

Biden stayed in the race for as long as he did based on polling numbers that said that few people had changed who they intended to vote for, post debate. Those numbers were correct. They were also not particularly relevant. Voting coalitions in the U.S. are remarkably stable, which means that the majority of Biden’s supporters were never going to shift their support to a Republican. But in 2016 Democrats learned the hard way that winning an election is about more than where you are in the polls. Your party cannot win if your voters do not actually show up on Election Day, and much of that is determined by the willingness of supporters to put effort into voting. Enthusiasm plays a notable role in bridging the gap between intention to vote and voting.

Unfortunately for Biden, polls had shown decreasing enthusiasm for his reelection campaign among Democratic voters since 2022. By July only two in 10 Democrats said they were satisfied with him in a matchup against Trump. After his debate performance at the end of June, a majority of Democrats said that he should drop out of the race. His campaign’s attempts to revitalize his image largely fell flat, and a July 13 assassination attempt against Trump raised Democratic fears of a surge in enthusiasm among Republicans.

This was the context in which the pressure campaign from Democratic elites gained a surge in momentum. The Biden campaign may have argued that the push for him to drop out was based on nothing more than a narrative spun by a few critics and news outlets, but his viewpoint did not reflect the reality of ordinary Democrats’ opinions. They really did want him to leave the race. The party leaders who pushed Biden to drop out had to make a difficult decision, but based on the available evidence, their choice was well informed.

Since Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic Party’s candidate, her campaign has received a boost in enthusiasm that the Biden campaign could have only dreamed about. Black and younger voters—two key Democratic voting coalitions that Biden was strugglingwith—are more onboard with Harris. This also extends to the party as a whole. In early August six in 10 Democrats said they were satisfied with their new candidate in a matchup against Trump. And by later that month, almost eight in 10 Democrats said they were more enthusiastic about voting than usual.

And yet Democratic Party leaders are not ignorant of how quickly this could turn on them. To minimize blowback from the switch and keep their voters enthused, Democratic elites quickly shifted to lionizing the contributions of Biden’s presidency after he dropped out. This carried forward into the Democratic National Convention (DNC), where he received a warm welcome from a sea of delegates holding “We Love Joe” signs. But whether this actually smoothed over any interpersonal rifts or hard feelings from Biden is a topic that the party will likely leave unaddressed. Instead the focus has turned to a party emerging from the DNC feeling reenergized and more enthusiastic about voting than Republicans, despite a race that is still incredibly close.

This outcome did not just fall out of a coconut tree. There were good data showing that it was foreseeable. But those data are only as useful as political analysts’ willingness to use them. Democratic elites appear to have used them to make an informed choice that traded conventional wisdom about incumbent candidates for an incredibly enthusiastic start to the Harris campaign.

Democrats, however, can no longer congratulate themselves for making the smart political decision. As Tuesday’s debate nears, they have to face the next major hurdle: Will putting Harris and Trump in the same room help or hurt the chances of their candidate generating enough enthusiasm—and voter turnout—for her to win a very tight election? The answer may decide the race for the White House.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.