The year of America's next presidential election is here, which can only mean one thing: speculation will continue to ramp up about who will be the next person to occupy the White House.
A long race originally whittled down to two competitors: President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. However, shockwaves were sent throughout the United States when Biden announced on July 21 that he was suspending his campaign and endorsing his vice president, Kamala Harris, to be the Democratic nominee. Biden's withdrawal from the race made him the first sitting president not to seek reelection since 1968, and allowed Democratic politicians and campaign contributors to throw their support behind Harris, who locked up the required delegates to become the presumptive Democratic nominee just one day after Biden dropped out. She will face Trump in the general election after the former president officially became the GOP nominee at the Republican National Convention in mid-July.
With the election now just three months away, pollsters and political scientists are working to figure out how Biden's exit from the race — and Harris' entrance — shakes up the fight over who will win the 270 electoral votes needed for a seat in the Oval Office. Who do the experts believe will be the next president of the United States?
Who do the polls say will win the election?
Donald Trump consistently led in the polls throughout his time facing off against Biden, who, despite a disastrous debate performance against Trump that led to calls for him to step aside as the Democratic candidate, insisted that he was staying in the race. However, the president "came grudgingly to accept that he could not sustain his campaign with poll numbers slipping, donors fleeing and party luminaries pushing him to exit," said NBC News. In the end, Biden's poll numbers made for a "no-win situation, a self-fulfilling prophecy," former White House official Cedric Richmond said to NBC.
But how do Harris' poll numbers against Trump compare to Biden's? Overall, better — though not by much. Trump consistently led Biden in battleground state polls, and in 10 matchups in FiveThirtyEight's polling aggregate following the debate, Trump led Biden in all of them except for one, with anywhere from a two-to-four point gap. However, Harris is being assisted by polls showing that there is more enthusiasm among Democrats for her candidacy than Biden's.
A July 23 Reuters/Ipsos poll of 1,241 adults showed Harris leading Trump 44% to 42% in a head-to-head matchup. When independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was added to the mix, Harris' lead increased from two points to four points. That same poll found that 56% of voters thought Harris was "mentally sharp and able to deal with challenges," compared to only 49% who felt the same way about Trump. Beyond this, a July 23 YouGov/Yahoo News poll of 1,178 voters found Harris and Trump tied at 46%, and a July 23 NPR/PBS News/Marist poll of 1,117 voters also found Harris and Trump tied at 42% in a multicandidate field.
However, while the polls are clearly biding better for Harris against Trump than Biden, the Republican nominee still appears to be maintaining his polling advantage. The same NPR/PBS poll found that in a head-to-head matchup without other candidates, Trump led Harris 46% to 45%. A July 23 YouGov/Economist poll of 1,435 voters also found Trump leading Harris by three points, 44% to 41%, while a July 22 Morning Consult poll of 4,001 voters found Trump leading Harris by two points, 47% to 45%. Overall, in the nine most recent polls surveyed in FiveThirtyEight's polling aggregate, Harris is leading Trump in three, Trump is leading Harris in four and they are tied in two.
Notably, these polls were conducted just days after Biden dropped out, so it is possible that the figures could remain fluid. "Harris' stronger showing in these later polls is more about her having made up distance on Trump than Biden losing ground," said ABC News, and the vice president "also improved her showing across the swing states, based on a very limited sampling of polls." But this "doesn't mean that Harris will run notably stronger than Biden, only that she could," and these polls also show that the possibility of Trump being reelected remains high.
Who do the pundits say will win the election?
Some pundits believed Trump, who gained even more notoriety among his base after surviving an attempted assassination on July 13, would retake the White House against Biden. Others believed Biden would be able to win the election despite low approval ratings — and this mixed bag seems to be translating similarly now that Harris has entered the race. Harris' "elevation to the top of ticket would bring new strengths for the Democrats, but it also exposes weaknesses that were less of a concern with Mr. Biden," Anthony Zurcher said for the BBC.
Harris' "record as vice-president has been mixed. Early in the administration, she was set the task of addressing the root causes of the migration crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border," said Zurcher. A number of missteps on this front "damaged her standing and opened her to conservative attacks." Republicans are "already condemning her as the president's 'border czar,' attempting to make her the face of what public opinion polls have found is the Biden administration's unpopular immigration policies."
Additionally, as the polls show, Harris' "favorability ratings are even worse than Trump's," and this is a "reminder that the evident Democratic enthusiasm for Harris is not all replicated with voters in the center ground," Niall Stanage said for The Hill. There is also the large looming question of "whether the nation will elect a Black woman as president," as while the country elected its first Black man president in 2008, "major female figures — most famously Hillary Clinton in 2016 — have fallen short of expectations, raising questions about the degree to which misogyny remains an electoral burden."
These factors, combined with Trump's lead in the polls, means that the former president "will work hard to reap maximum advantage," said Stanage. It is important to remember, though, that even with his polling numbers, Trump remains "quite unpopular with the nation at large." The former president "lost the popular vote both in 2016 and 2020. Events since then include the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021; a civil trial in which Trump was found liable for the sexual abuse of writer E. Jean Carroll; and a criminal trial at which he was convicted of 34 felonies." Democrats could "make November’s election a referendum on Trump."
Despite the recent changes in the competition, there is a "good chance that the new matchup will look strangely familiar, even typical. In fact, it might look much more typical than the old Joe Biden-Donald Trump race," said Nate Cohn for The New York Times. The Biden-Trump matchup "stopped following the usual script long before what proved to be a fateful debate," especially since "incumbency is usually an asset to a president seeking reelection. For Mr. Biden, incumbency was a burden." But "even once we do see a new set of Harris-Trump polls — and we're in the field already — the race still won't be especially clear," Cohn said. A "strong set of polls for Mr. Trump could simply reflect lasting good will in the wake of the assassination attempt and his party's convention," and that could eventually disappear, while if Harris takes the lead, one "could say it's only because she's benefiting from a wave of endorsements that will soon give way to renewed scrutiny and Republican attacks."
Who else is in play?
There are other independent candidates who remain in the race, including the aforementioned RFK Jr., as well as Cornel West and Jill Stein. But they are unlikely to prove a real challenge to either Trump or Harris (though most polls previously showed that Trump would likely have more voters siphoned away as a result of RFK Jr.'s candidacy than the Democratic candidate). Questions remain as to how accurate any of the polls will be — and whether they will truly serve as a preview of November.
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