Leaving Trump behind
By 
A new NYT/Siena poll indicates a dramatic shift in the critical Midwestern swing states, with Harris leading Trump by identical 50-46 margins in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Sometimes, it can be hard to explain why polls shift from week to week or month to month. In today’s polarized politics, it can even be hard to explain why voters ever shift at all. In this case, it’s easy: Ms. Harris’s entry into the race has upended the fundamentals of this election.
Until now, the basic dynamic of the race was driven by Mr. Biden’s unpopularity. It prevented Democrats from running their usual strategy against Mr. Trump and his MAGA allies: Make an election a referendum on Mr. Trump by running a broadly acceptable candidate. Millions of voters were left with an agonizing choice between two candidates they disliked. . . .
One way to think about her position is that she has become something like a “generic” Democrat. This might sound like an insult, but it’s really not. In fact, nothing is more coveted. An unnamed generic candidate — whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican — almost always fares better in the polls than named candidates, who are inevitably burdened by all the imperfections voters learn about in the process of a campaign.
When we polled these three states last October, an unnamed Democrat led Mr. Trump by around 10 points, even as Mr. Trump led Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris by about one point each. The upside of a different, broadly acceptable Democrat was purely hypothetical, of course. There was no guarantee that any real-world Democrat could avoid alienating many of the voters who would prefer to vote for someone other than Mr. Trump. And there was certainly no reason to think Ms. Harris would be such a Democrat, as she was viewed unfavorably by a majority of voters and brought plenty of political baggage from her tenure as vice president and her failed 2020 presidential campaign.
But today, Ms. Harris polls a lot more like that generic, unnamed Democratic presidential nominee. On question after question, the poll finds that voters don’t seem to have any major reservations about her. A majority say that she’s honest and intelligent; that she brings the right kind of change and has the temperament to be president; and that she has a clear vision for the country. A majority doesn’t think she’s too far to the left, either: Only 44 percent of likely voters say she’s too liberal or progressive, compared with 44 percent who say she’s not too far either way and another 6 percent who say she isn’t progressive enough. We didn’t need to ask whether voters thought she was too old to be an effective president.
Voters in general and swing voters in particular didn’t like Biden for two reasons: he was old, in an increasingly visible and disturbing way, and he was the incumbent, in a political context where all across the world there’s been a massive backlash against current governmental leaders.
Now one may think both of these responses are terribly unfair. That’s simply not relevant, given that:
(1) Neither of these factors could be altered; and
(2) Whether voter sentiments are fair or reasonable or defensible has nothing to do with the extent they can be managed for the purposes of getting a president re-elected.
What the Harris campaign seems to be doing is to run against Trump as if he were the incumbent, which, as a practical matter, he basically is. One of the main arguments for Biden running for re-election was always the purported incumbency advantage, but, in the context of the specific political conditions of 2024, a national political leader is more likely to face an incumbency disadvantage. That, I think, is one of the main factors that has produced the remarkable shift in the presidential race we’ve seen in the less than three weeks since Biden stepped aside for Harris.
Harris as the Democratic candidate can make this election about another Donald Trump presidency, and Donald Trump’s age. Both of those are losing issues for Trump against Harris, in a way that they weren’t against Biden. Again, whatever unfairness to Biden that may involve is simply not relevant to the task at hand.