Democratic Party embraced Vice President Kamala Harris

— Our Electoral College ratings are going to remain the same for the time being. Donald Trump is closer to 270 electoral votes in those ratings than Harris is, but it’s worth taking some time to let things settle.

— Harris addresses the concerns voters had with Biden’s age, but voters also seemed to view Biden as being more liberal than they did four years ago. Harris may have a similar challenge.

A first look at the new race

Immediately after President Biden released a letter withdrawing from the presidential race and then followed that up with a separate announcement endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination, an avalanche of endorsements from prominent Democrats and Democratic Party-adjacent groups flooded in. That included several top Democrats who could have been rivals to Harris in a floor fight at the convention, such as Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania (to name just a couple of the many who got in line behind Harris). Donor pocketbooks that had closed on

Biden reopened for Harris.

Particularly prior to 2016, there was a popular theory of presidential nominations that even in the primary era, the “Party Decides” who gets nominations through using indirect influences (the theory comes from a book of the same name). In this situation, the party, collectively, pressured Biden to drop out and then, having achieved that, quickly coalesced around Harris.

The nominating decision, formally, is in the hands of a little under 4,000 convention delegates elected during the primary season. Roughly 99% of those delegates were pledged to President Biden. One could argue that the delegates were always free agents because being “pledged” to a candidate does not mean being “bound.” Elaine Kamarck, perhaps the top expert on Democratic delegate rules, noted this late last week, a couple of days before Biden got out of the race: “There is no such thing as Joe Biden releasing his delegates. And Joe Biden gets this. I don't know why the rest of the press doesn't get it.

Joe Biden said in his NATO Press conference, he said, quote ‘the delegates can do whatever the hell they want to do’ and that is basically it.” The delegates are real people with agency, and real people who got their delegate positions because Joe Biden dominated the primary season against token opposition, sending them to the convention pledged to his candidacy. One would expect delegates to go where Biden himself and many others in the Democratic Party are leading, and that is indeed what has happened. In order to win the nomination, Harris (or anyone else) would need the support of 1,976 delegates, per the Associated Press’s accounting: Harris already blew through that threshold on Monday night in the AP count, with her support standing at nearly 2,700 on Tuesday morning.  She may not technically be the presumptive nominee because these delegates are not pledged to her, but she might as well be.

The Democratic National Committee reiterated Monday night that the party still plans to select its presidential nominee through a virtual roll call, to be completed by Aug. 7 (about two weeks from now). No one notable has emerged as a rival to Harris; outgoing West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who recently became an independent, was mooted as a possibility on Sunday, but he said he wouldn’t do it on Monday morning. In order for someone to be placed in nomination, a candidate must have signatures from at least 300 delegates.

At this rate Harris seems to be on a glide path to the nomination; whatever one thinks of her general election chances, she was always the most logical choice to take over if Biden stepped aside after the primary season—that is the case for any vice president replacing a president, and Harris was the only one who could seamlessly take over the Biden-Harris campaign operation.

The last time we updated our Electoral College ratings, back on July 3, our new topline showed 251 electoral votes at least leaning toward Donald Trump, 226 at least leaning toward the Democratic nominee (Biden at the time), and 61 electoral votes in the Toss-up category (Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin).

We concluded that piece by noting that the updated ratings “would serve as a decent starting point for a reset race.” Well, here we are. We are going to maintain those ratings for now

Map 1: Crystal Bal

l Electoral College ratings

Last week, we painted a grim picture for Democrats of where the election could be headed with Biden remaining at the helm, based on current polling and other factors. Biden seemed like he was clearly losing in all of the key swing states, with some states that were several notches bluer than the nation as a whole in 2020 (like Minnesota, New Hampshire, Virginia, and others) potentially heading toward Toss-up territory.

The new race probably does not start as a 50-50 proposition—Trump remains favored to a small but hardly overwhelming degree, and there’s a lot of uncertainty (and no useful recent historical precedent) for the presidential race changing in such a dramatic way this late in the political calendar. We had become very skeptical of Biden’s ability to pull this race back into true Toss-up status; Harris likely has a better chance to do so, though she’s not guaranteed to.

The argument for Harris’s upside is that she helps restore lagging Democratic enthusiasm and gives voters a new option in a race where many have long desired one, and we completely understand why so many Democrats urged Biden to step aside. Democrats seem thrilled and invigorated by having a more active candidate. But there are of course unknowns and obstacles too. Speaking of which: As Biden sought to shore up his position in his own party before dropping out, he announced or appeared ready to announce proposals on rent control and placing limits on the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, among other things. The move toward the left—probably out of desperation and as a way to keep left-wing leaders like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY-14) in his corner following the debate—reminded us of a notable poll finding that came out before that debate.

Gallup measured Biden and Trump’s favorability and other traits; neither got great marks but Trump’s favorability was better and respondents also were likelier to agree with Trump on the issues they cared about than Biden. Relatedly, respondents were asked about how they perceived Trump and Biden ideologically.

One of Trump’s strengths in 2016—and weaknesses in 2020—was that he was seen as more ideologically conservative in the latter election than the former, as Crystal Ball Senior Columnist Alan Abramowitz noted after the election, using data from the American National Election Studies. “This shift was significant in that it placed Trump farther from the average voter than Joe Biden, while in 2016 Trump was considerably closer to the average voter than Hillary Clinton was,” Abramowitz wrote.

In Gallup’s June findings, 44% of respondents thought that Trump was “too conservative.”

That’s actually up, marginally, from 39% the last time Gallup asked the question in 2019. But more viewed Biden as “too liberal,” 56% (there is no trend in the Gallup polling on ideological views of Biden, as previous polls did not ask this question about him). So while Biden’s age was clearly a big problem, and one that does not burden Harris (who is 59), age was not Biden’s sole problem. The perception that he was closer to the center than Trump in 2020 likely aided his victory, but the Gallup poll suggested that Biden no longer enjoyed that advantage over Trump.

Harris was not included in this Gallup poll, but it seems quite possible that the public will think of her as being as liberal or even more liberal than Biden, given that she is a California Democrat who tried to run to the left in her unsuccessful 2020 presidential bid. Certainly Republicans are already working to define Harris in such a way, and several of Harris’s previously-expressed issue positions (see this comparison from Politico) are to the left of Biden’s. How Harris navigates these issues will be a big part of the campaign, but she is not the only one who will be trying to blunt attacks that she is too far out of the policy mainstream. As Democrats try to make their case against Trump, they are relying heavily on Project 2025, a series of right-wing policy proposals organized by the Heritage Foundation.

Despite the association of many people who were or are in Trump’s orbit with Project 2025, Trump and his campaign have been distancing themselves from the project. Attention has already turned to Harris’s running mate. That choice is another way through which she can re-introduce herself to the public—and an opportunity to address whatever shortcomings she has, be it moderating a liberal image or other factors.

Democratic presidential candidates have a long track record of picking senators as running mates. Harris herself represented such a choice; Crystal Ball contributor and top vice presidential expert Joel Goldstein has pointed out that 16 of the last 19 Democratic vice presidential picks have been senators. We shared this historical trend on X/Twitter after Biden dropped out, and political scientist Lara Brown offered a smart response: “That’s because since Carter…one of the ways parties/candidates have ‘balanced’ tickets is by picking an ‘insider’ (to go with the ‘outsider’ pres. nominees)—this time, it’s the reverse. Harris needs/wants to tap a Washington ‘outsider.’”

Harris is tied to a president, Biden, who has had a weak approval rating for much of his presidency. Bringing in someone from outside the administration makes some sense, and many of those possibilities appear to be governors. Some of the top names mentioned in recent news coverage are Govs. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, and the aforementioned Shapiro of Pennsylvania.

One possible candidate who strikes us as another top contender and who would come from the Senate is Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona. He’s also a riskier pick than a governor from a federal balance-of-power standpoint because, if elected, he would give up his Senate seat, to which he was just elected to a full term in 2022 (he won a special election in 2020 prior to that). In that scenario, Kelly’s seat would not be in immediate jeopardy—in Arizona, appointed senators must share a party label with the member they are replacing (even if this were not the case, Democrats control the state’s governorship anyway). Gov. Katie Hobbs’s (D-AZ) appointee would only serve until November 2026, however, and there would be yet another special election for the seat (a race that likely would be highly competitive), and then a regular election in 2028.

The last cycle when Arizona did not have a Senate election was 2014; 2026 was slated to give the state a break from a long string of Senate elections, but Kelly ascending to the vice presidency could keep that streak alive—as well as the tendency for Democratic presidential nominees to pick their running mate from the Senate.

We’ll have more to say about the Democratic vice presidential derby—and this remade general election—in due course. For the time being, we would urge some patience. As a hypothetical candidate, Harris did not poll much differently than Biden. That may or may not change in the short term. This is also a topsy-turvy period—what for months had been a fairly stable race between Biden and Trump has been upended by huge events: an early, highly impactful debate; an assassination attempt on Trump; the Republican convention; a vice presidential nomination with another on the horizon; a major-party candidate leaving the race; and another convention coming up in less than a month. The polling may not be all that useful until the dust settles after the Democratic National Convention, around Labor Day. If the numbers do look noticeably different at that time than they do now, Labor Day may represent what it did earlier in American history—the real start of the sprint toward the election. https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/post-biden-harris-the-delegates-the-map-the- vp-and-m

Editado por los Papeles del CREM, 27 de julio del año 2024.

Responsable de la edición: Raúl Ochoa Cuenca.

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