Thomas Edsall surveys political scientists on the state of the presidential race

The always interesting Thomas Edsall has an article (gift link) on the current state of the presidential race.

I would summarize it as follows:

(1) Harris is now in a far better position than Biden was in late July. For a number of reasons, Biden was very likely to lose; Harris, by contrast, is probably a slight favorite at this time.

(2) The biggest reason that Biden’s position was so dire is that Harris’s improved position has essentially nothing to do with peeling off persuadable Trump voters — there really aren’t any. Trump’s support has remained unchanged since Harris entered the race. What has changed is that people who would vote for the Democratic candidate if they were to vote at all are now much more likely to vote than they were when Biden was the candidate. This is reflected in the responses of potential voters in key Democratic constituencies — especially young people, and blacks and Latinos — to Harris’s into the race.

(3) In other words, all of the academics Edsall interviews agree that motivating soft supporters to actually vote is going to be far more important than persuading swing voters, in the sense of voters who might vote for either candidate. Swing voters remain important to the extent they do because the race is so close, and likely to remain so: such voters might represent only one or two percent of the electorate in the seven states that will almost certainly decide the election — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — but one or two percent could easily be the decisive margin in all these places. Nevertheless, motivating turnout in these states is, all of Edsall’s informants agree, going to be more important. This is where the enthusiasm for Harris in the Democratic base has proven to be so critical to this point.

I have to admit I’m a little surprised and sobered by how apparently immovable Trump’s electoral floor is turning out to be. Perhaps the debate next week will make it possible to knock that floor down a couple of critical percentage points. But for now, this race remains far closer to a true tossup than I was expecting it to be after the waves of enthusiasm that characterized the week of the DNC.

Still, looking at the available evidence, it seems clear that replacing Biden with Harris gives the Democrats (and the future of democracy) a far better chance than they would have had otherwise. That that chance appears at the moment to be not much better than coin flip is a dire comment on the state of America in 2024, but also a decisive argument against any complacency regarding where things stand today, and will go over the next nine weeks.