It’ll probably be a few days before many of the leading polling outlets release new data on the 2024 presidential race, but in the wake of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal announcement — which was just three days ago — there are some preliminary survey numbers to kick around from polls conducted after Sunday’s news.
The latest national Reuters/Ipsos poll, for example, found Vice President Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by 4 points, 42% to 38%, with third-party candidates in the mix, and by 2 points, 44% to 42%, in a head-to-head match-up with the former Republican president. (Click the link for information on the survey’s methodology and margins of error.)
The latest national NPR/PBS News/Marist poll, meanwhile, showed the Democratic VP tied with Trump in a multicandidate field, and in a head-to-head match-up, the GOP nominee was ahead by the narrowest of margins, 46% to 45%.(Click the link for information on the survey’s methodology and margins of error.)
It was against this backdrop that one of the former president’s pollsters thought it’d be a good idea to issue a memo on where things currently stand. HuffPost reported:
Pollster Tony Fabrizio has issued a memo to the Trump campaign that warns of a “honeymoon” for Vice President Kamala Harris, the newly declared presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. In the memo, which was shared with reporters, Fabrizio points out that the wall-to-wall media coverage of Harris that has occurred since President Joe Biden announced on Sunday he wouldn’t be running for reelection would likely result in a “Harris Honeymoon” in public polling.
“The coverage will be largely positive and will certainly energize Democrats and some other parts of their coalition at least in the short term,” Fabrizio wrote in his memo. “That means we will start to see public polling — particularly national public polls — where Harris is gaining on or even leading President Trump.”
The document added that Harris is seeing a “bump” in the polls now, and this is likely to “last a while until the race settles back down.”
At face value, there’s nothing especially wrong with Fabrizio’s analysis. There’s also no great mystery about the pollster’s motivation: With Biden out of the race and Trump’s advantage in national surveys slipping away, it stands to reason that the Republican’s top polling expert would issue a document that, for all intents and purposes, tells his party — and his client — “Don’t panic. This is temporary.”
There is, however, a relevant detail that the memo downplayed: where Team Trump expected to be at this point.
Ahead of the recent presidential debate, the GOP nominee was already well positioned in the 2024 race. After the debate, his advantage grew. Then Trump was shot, the former president named his running mate and the Republican National Convention soon followed.
Right about now, in other words, most political observers — in both parties — would expect to see Trump’s lead reaching new heights.
But it’s not, thanks in part to Biden’s willingness to put the country’s needs first, and in part to Democrats rallying behind Harris with great enthusiasm.
The fact that the vice president is getting a “bump” isn’t a huge problem for the Republican ticket and its allies; the fact that Team Trump expected to be riding high as July came to an end, however, is far more significant.
