The numbers were important because they were so unexpected. Blasted on the front page of the Des Moines Sunday Register, “New Candidates New Ballgame. Trump 47 Harris 43.”
It was a turnaround of nearly miraculous proportion. The same poll, conducted in June with Joe Biden in the race had Donald Trump at 50 and Joe Biden at 32. In the two months she’s been a candidate, Kamala Harris has erased most of Donald Trump’s lead in Iowa. That doesn’t mean the Harris campaign will now be spending money to win the state. It’s nice to be within striking distance but Iowa is a red state with two Republican senators and unlikely to break faith with the GOP.
So why did fellow pollsters and analysts get so excited about the Iowa poll results? It was conducted by J. Ann Selzer, a nationally known pollster who cemented her reputation by being one of the few, maybe even the only one among her peers to recognize Trump’s strength in 2016 when he won and 2020 when he lost to Biden but by a significantly smaller margin than what other name brand pollsters predicted.
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If she’s finding Trump’s strength in Iowa has diminished, maybe she’s on to something that extends beyond Iowa.
There are other indicators too that Harris is doing a whole lot better than anyone imagined. She was not an impressive vice president. Her prosecutorial style made some Democrats wish Biden could appoint her to the Supreme Court and make room for another more congenial running mate.
Yet from the moment she was liberated to be the candidate, she has been pitch-perfect, vaulting the Democrats back into contention for the White House and meeting every test. How can this be given the early read on her as having one of the worst ratings for a vice president in modern history?
An NBC news poll in July of 2023 found her positive rating was 32 percent; negative was 49 percent, giving her -17 rating, the lowest for a vice president in the poll’s history.
She’s turned this around not entirely on her own, and for very good reasons, starting with the stakes of this race. Democrats understood from the moment Biden turned over the reins to Harris that she is the one thing standing between us and a second Trump presidency. Quibbles about this or that vanished. Harris too understood the stakes, and she rose to the occasion.
Secondly, Harris is still enough of a blank slate that unaligned voters are willing to look at her. She doesn’t come across as a partisan warrior, and she is able to make her points and take positions without creating rancor.
More importantly, especially for a woman, she is proving to be likable, a tough test in today’s misogynistic climate.
Kamala Harris at a campaign event at West Allis Central High School, in West Allis, Wisconsin, U.S., July 23, 2024.
Vincent Alban/ReutersHarris is a better candidate and a better person than Trump. Voters were yearning for an articulate candidate to represent the country, and Biden and Trump for differing reasons could not answer that need. Harris speaks to a younger generation, women, and minority groups far more than Trump or Biden.
The shortened campaign benefits Harris. Critics regard it as a form of cheating that she gets to evade the year-long battle that other candidates go through, that she doesn’t get her turn in the barrel where she is pummeled for some real or imagined policy or character flaw.
Kamala Harris, center, takes a selfie with Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), left, and his wife Gisele Barreto Fetterman, right, after greeting supporters at John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria Airport on September 13, 2024 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
Andrew Harnik/Getty ImagesShe’s still new and exciting to many voters who are only now catching up with her candidacy. Can she sustain the enthusiasm in the less-than-50 days remaining. She can’t do it alone. Taylor Swift can help as can the droves of Republicans, famous and not-so-famous, stepping up to cast their vote for Harris.
She’ll continue to drive her critics crazy on the Republican side by so far refusing to sit down for a grilling with the major newspapers and networks and charting a media path through podcasters and influencers and daytime shows with specific audiences she needs to reach. The goal is not to make news, but to get the voters to know her and what she’s about, and to get more specific only where it matters, like on how she would address the high cost of living. Otherwise, what she’s doing is working, and she just needs to keep doing it.
