Can Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump?

For months — years, even — the 2024 presidential election seemed like a wholly known quantity: two high-profile candidates, each with a set of baked-in campaign assets and liabilities, facing off in their second head-to-head contest in half a decade. For as much as each campaign tested new lines of attack and intensified the purported stakes this time around, the fundamentals of the race remained largely unchanged. 

Until they weren’t. 

Following his disastrous performance in the first debate of this cycle, President Joe Biden stunned observers by stepping back from his campaign and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris in his stead. Suddenly, with just months to go before election day, the entire dynamic had changed, and the political calculus of the race was upended. In that upending came a new question — perhaps the question, and the only one that matters: Can Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump to become the next President of the United States? 

Harris “can defeat Donald Trump” by serving as an “even sharper, clearer choice in this election” than Biden did, said former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at The New York Times. The sense of “renewed energy in the base” coupled with the fact that “Donald Trump and his outriders appear rattled” is “not just vibes,” the Financial Times said. “The turnaround shows up in hard data” as well, with three new polls from The Economist/YouGov,  Ipsos and NPR/PBS/Marist giving Harris higher approval ratings than Trump — something which “had not happened for President Joe Biden in months.”

Aggregate data of 11 polls analyzed by The Washington Post immediately before Biden ended his campaign showed Harris trailing Trump “by a small, but not insurmountable margin of 1.5 percentage points on average,” Time said. But Harris is “expected to win,” said longtime presidential prognosticator Allan Lichtman, who has successfully predicted 9/10 of the past presidential elections. Lichtman made his preliminary assessment using “13 keys, or criteria, to judge the party that controls the White House’s ability to maintain control in an election year,” USA Today said. A candidate who meets at least 8 of those measures — as Harris does, per Lichtman’s analysis — is accordingly expected to win.

Broad indicators and national sentiment aside, Harris has “a clearer path to victory than Biden,” Bloomberg said, citing its new Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll. Not only has the vice president “wiped out Donald Trump’s lead across seven battleground states,” but she is “backed by 48% of voters to 47% for Trump — a statistical dead heat — in the swing states that will likely decide November’s election,” plus she has “more than doubled Biden’s lead over Trump in Michigan.”

This is not to say that Harris is a shoo-in. Her recent improvements over Biden among younger voters and voters of color is in part because there was “nowhere to go but up with these segments of the electorate,” CNN said. And she remains behind Biden’s 2020 numbers among those same groups, which “may seem like bad news for the Harris campaign, and, in one clear way, it is,” CNN added, because without making serious gains across those demographics, “Harris likely cannot win against the former president.” 

What next?

Among the crucial early-campaign decisions that could shake up Harris’ standing in the race is her impending vice presidential candidate pick. “40% of Americans said Harris would have a better chance of winning the presidency if she were to pick a white man as her running mate, compared with only 11%  who said that picking a white man would worsen her chances,” said The 19th News following a joint poll with Survey Monkey. “Running-mate choices also favor Harris,” the Financial Times said. While Trump’s pick of Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance was “more for his ideology and loyalty than for electoral strategy,” Harris has an opportunity to choose someone who will “boost the Democrats in their home states.” 

With Harris’ “honeymoon period” potentially coming to a close, watch how she works to “differentiate herself from Biden” — and see if she can “blunt attacks over her previous positions,” The Hill said. As she campaigns, Harris “wears two hats” as both a candidate and an “incumbent vice president to a president with mediocre approval ratings.”