Opinion | Harris Supporters Are Feeling Pretty Good, but Its Not in the Bag
If you’re a Kamala Harris supporter, you probably felt pretty good about last week.With Donald Trump’s constant bait-taking during the debate and the endorsement by Taylor Swift, with less than two months until Election Day, on the surface, things have started to look like they’re falling into place for a Harris win.
On Friday, I was a guest on “Real Time With Bill Maher,” and Mr.Maher, who has never been one to underestimate Mr.
Trump’s appeal, declared that he thinks it’s finally over politically for the former president.On the show, I disagreed.I still don’t think any of us should feel confident that we know how this will go.
Does Ms.Harris have fund-raising momentum? Yes.
Did she win last week’s debate? According to post-debate polls, yes.Did Ms.
Swift direct a lot of potential voters to research how to register, presumably to vote for Ms.Harris? Yes.
Did J.Ann Selzer, the oracle of Iowa, just release a poll showing Mr.
Trump ahead by only four points in the Hawkeye State? Yes.So why am I holding off on joining the “it’s over” chorus?First, there’s not a lot of evidence that the debate helped Ms.
Harris’s numbers in a meaningful way — at least not yet.ABC News/Ipsos polling showed her with a six-point lead among likely voters before the debate and showed the same result after.
Her margin in several averages of national polls hovers around two points, a margin that makes the possibility of an Electoral College-popular vote split reasonably likely.(The analyst Nate Silver says the odds of such an outcome are around one in four.)And if you look at the polling averages from a variety of different sources, in the seven battleground states that receive the greatest attention, the race is extremely close.
Mr.Trump tends to hold a negligible lead in some of the Sun Belt tossup states, as Ms.
Harris does in Wisconsin and Michigan.Neither candidate leads by more than two points in any of those states.
Pennsylvania, the biggest pri...