(Bloomberg) -- The impact of Joe Biden’s decision to drop his 2024 White House reelection bid and endorse Kamala Harris as his heir apparent had an immediate impact on the race, measured in campaign contributions, prediction markets and endorsements.
The next few days will tell whether the polls will follow.
One early indication is a national Morning Consult poll — the first major survey since Biden’s announcement Sunday — showing the vice president trailing former President Donald Trump by two percentage points, 47% to 45%, within the margin of error. That’s an improvement from the six-point deficit Biden faced before his exit from the race.
There’s reason to believe that putting Harris’ name on the ballot could help Democrats. Recent polls showed her doing better than Biden in head-to-head matchups against Trump.
For months, polls testing an alternate Harris-Trump matchup showed her underperforming Biden by several percentage points. These included the Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll of battleground states, which showed Harris trailing Trump by seven percentage points — as Biden trailed by four.
That dynamic began to change after Biden’s poor debate performance in late June, and by early July Harris was polling better than Biden in head-to-head matchups against Trump — 1.6 percentage points better in the RealClearPolitics average as of Sunday.
At the same time, Trump’s polling bounce after the Republican National Convention last week gave him his largest lead yet against Biden in the FiveThirtyEight average of national polls.
But tested alternatives aren’t the same as actual candidates and the emergence of a 59-year-old, multiracial option could get some people — especially younger voters, women and ethnic minorities — off the sidelines.
“This could change the campaign because it does have some historical significance that you can’t really capture in a hypothetical situation. And now that we’re seeing it for real, it could move the needle,” said Spencer Kimball, a pollster at Emerson College.
Some Democrats might have been reluctant to say they supported Harris because Biden was already the presumptive nominee, Kimball said. Those voters would now be free to say they support Harris unequivocally. No other prominent Democrats have said they would challenge her for the Democratic nomination ahead of the party’s convention in August.
Harris’s bump, if she gets one, might be short-lived, though. The electorate is narrowly divided, and even earth-shattering events like Biden’s debate performance, the assassination attempt on Trump and the Republican convention only moved polling averages by a combined three points.
“We’ll see how things fall now that the race has been shaken up, but I think it’s going to take maybe through the convention for the race to settle itself,” Kimball said.
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