The post-convention polling results are starting to trickle in, and so far, it appears that voters were largely immune to the Democrats’ audacious attempt to present Vice President Kamala Harris as the “president of joy.” While it’s impossible to measure, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s dramatic exit from the race and subsequent endorsement of former President Donald Trump the day after the convention ended, likely blunted Harris’s momentum as well.
Whatever the reason, the first polls released after Harris’s “powerful,” “electric,” and “joyous” acceptance speech show it did little to move the needle. The headline from pollster Morning Consult read: “Kamala Harris gets no bounce from Democratic Convention.” Yahoo News/YouGov reported: “No Big Bounce for Harris – After the DNC.”
The Yahoo News/YouGov national head-to-head poll, released on Tuesday, showed Harris ahead of Trump by 1 point. An earlier edition of this poll, conducted over the weekend that President Joe Biden ended his candidacy, found Harris and Trump tied.
Although Harris didn’t receive quite the bounce she had hoped for, the poll showed a “huge surge in Democratic optimism.” Given that their previous candidate was a senile, wizened, octogenarian, any replacement candidate that could walk and talk normally would have increased the party’s enthusiasm.
In the Morning Consult poll, Harris led Trump by 4 points, 48% to 44%. These numbers were unchanged from a pre-convention edition of this poll.
Ahead of the convention, Harris led Trump by 1.5 points in the RealClearPolitics average of head-to-head polls. Her lead has since ticked up to 1.7 points.
Left-leaning polling guru Nate Silver bucked the trend. His model indicated that Harris received an initial 2-point convention bounce. On the morning of Aug. 19, Harris was ahead of Trump by 2.3 points. The margin was 47 to 44.7. By Friday morning, Aug. 23, prior to Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump, Harris’s lead stood at 4.3 points. The margin was 48 to 43.7. Her lead has since pulled back to 3.5 points, a margin of 49 to 45.5, leaving Harris’s numbers 1.2 points higher than they were ahead of the convention.
But a few words about Silver’s model, which even he describes as “a little fancy,” are in order. According to Silver, his “polling averages adjust for whether polls are conducted among registered or likely voters, the presence or absence of RFK Jr., and house effects. They weight more reliable polls more heavily. And they use national polls to make inferences about state polls and vice versa. It requires a few extra CPU cycles — but the reward is a more stable average that doesn’t get psyched out by outliers.”
Got it?
Additionally, please bear in mind that Silver’s model predicted a Hillary Clinton victory in 2016.
Data website FiveThirtyEight (founded by Silver although he has since left the site) reported a 0.7-point convention bounce for Harris. On Aug. 19, the site’s average of 2024 national polls showed Harris leading Trump by a margin of 46.7 to 43.8, or 2.9 points. Harris currently leads by a margin of 47.2 to 43.6, or 3.6 points. Although FiveThirtyEight is a reputable site, its media bias is rated as “skews left.”
Curious about FiveThirtyEight’s polling results, PJ Media’s Matt Margolis spoke to Mark Mitchell, the head pollster at the right-leaning polling firm Rasmussen Reports. Mitchell agreed that national polls had “tightened by about one or two points” over the course of the DNC.
But, Mitchell told Margolis:
The trends that FiveThirtyEight report are ‘much more pronounced’ than what Rasmussen is seeing. Mitchell urged skepticism towards FiveThirtyEight’s model, pointing out that ‘there is a lot about the model that doesn’t appear to be disclosed.’ He also mentioned that Rasmussen was excluded from FiveThirtyEight’s aggregate, which he attributed to ‘ideological reasons and who we associate with.’
Margolis noted that since Harris became the nominee, it seemed that “pollsters have been dragging their feet and not polling as often, or delaying the release of polls.” (I’ve noticed the same thing.) He asked Mitchell to shed some light on this.
“People are holding data or not releasing polls to leave Harris-favorable polling alive in the aggregate,” Mitchell said. “Why put a new poll out if you like the results you got last time?” Why indeed?
Historically, convention bounces have ranged in size from -1%, as John Kerry and Mitt Romney experienced in 2004 and 2012, respectively, to Bill Clinton’s spectacular 16% surge in 1992.
So, what, if anything, can we conclude from these numbers? Is it possible that Harris’s meteoric rise in the polls since being installed as the Democratic nominee has reached a peak? Is her “honeymoon” coming to an end?
Pollster Frank Luntz thinks so. He said: “Even though they had a pretty strong convention last week, it looks like the Harris boomlet has reached its peak — with her having roughly a three-point advantage. I remind you that that was the advantage that Hillary Clinton had over Donald Trump on Election Day 2016, and he still beat her in the electoral college. This election is way too close to call.”
Finally, it should be noted that Trump has taken a 2-point lead in the latest national poll from the widely watched prediction platform Polymarket.
According to Polymarket, Trump’s odds of winning the battleground states of Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania have increased. However, he still has work to do in Wisconsin and Michigan.
Now that the conventions are behind us, all eyes turn to the ABC debate on Sept. 10, an event that is likely to reset the race – one way or the other. Although The Washington Post tells readers that “Harris can put Trump away” during this debate, many of us believe the opposite will happen. It will provide voters with a one-time opportunity to see Harris operate without the aide of a teleprompter, a script, or notes. Bring it on.
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY