Kamala Harris’ surge in recent national polls is a stunning political turnaround. The story behind her burst of momentum, as told by the polling crosstabs, is even more remarkable.
Less than a month ago, Democrats faced a grim election landscape. President Joe Biden faced trouble with independents and his base, and former President Donald Trump looked set to return to the White House. The ticket switch that saw Biden withdraw and Harris ascend to the Democratic nomination has reset the race by every campaign measure.
In an attempt to understand how widespread and sharp the Democratic rebound has been since Biden dropped out of the race, we dug into the crosstabs of what the highest-rated pollsters have found during this extraordinary period in American politics. With each demographic group, we measured the swing between pollsters’ final, pre-dropout survey with Biden in the race and their most recent, post-dropout survey featuring Harris.
While Harris has closed the gap at the topline level — in national polls, the race is essentially a dead heat — Harris has made eye-popping gains with traditional, core Democratic base voters while also appealing to independents, which is an incredibly difficult needle to thread, especially for a candidate whose favorability ratings were 15 points underwater before replacing.
Harris has registered gains across a wide range of demographic categories, but the improvement has been especially pronounced among young voters, non-white voters and women voters. Taken together, the numbers suggest that the Harris swap has largely repaired a fraying Democratic coalition, has repaired the party’s image presidentially among independents, and has dragged the election back to a tossup, at the minimum. In short,she has managed to do something that every candidate can only dream of: appeal to her base without turning off swing voters.
To map her improvement, we looked at ten high-quality polls and examined the changes in the crosstabs both before and after Biden dropped out of the race.
A spike among non-white voters
Biden had held up surprisingly well with white voters given his diminished position overall. But his standing with non-white voters of all stripes was at an all-time low among modern Democratic presidential candidates. Biden was only winning Black voters by 50 points; had this held, it would comfortably have set records for the worst presidential performance by any Democratic nominee in recent history and would have marked a rightward swing of nearly 30 points from his 2020 margins. Numbers like this would have made Georgia and North Carolina, two swing states with relatively high Black populations, completely unwinnable for Democrats.
