Kamala Harris Has Transformed the Race to Control Congress

A month ago, downballot Democrats looked like dead meat. No longer.
By David Faris
Aug 13, 20241:49 PM
Donald Trump, the Capitol dome, and Kamala Harris
It�s a real race to control both houses now. Photo illustration by Slate.
Photos by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images, Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images, and
eurobanks/Getty Images Plus.
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Just a few weeks ago, Democrats were justifiably in a mortal panic about
the 2024 election. Reeling from President Joe Biden�s career-ending debate
fiasco against former President Donald Trump, they watched in horror as
their elderly nominee�s already-grim polling further deteriorated and began
to fear that his wake would take downballot Democrats to the bottom with
him. And then, in one of the wildest and fastest political reversals in
living memory, the president ended his reelection campaign, and Democrats
rallied instantaneously around a suddenly ebullient Vice President Kamala
Harris, who has been barnstorming with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim
Walz, in front of massive and amped-up crowds that are making her opponents
sad and conspiratorial. And as unthinkable as this was in June, Democrats
now have an increasingly plausible path to another governing trifecta.

The evidence is clear and growing by the day. In just over two weeks,
Harris has not only erased Trump�s lead in polling averages but built one
of her own. As of this writing, Harris has led 24 of the last 25 national
polls (with one tie in the mix) in the FiveThirtyEight database and leads
its national average by 2.8 points. The only firm still showing a Trump
lead is Rasmussen, which FiveThirtyEight controversially excludes from its
averages because it has become a strenuously partisan operation. Even with
Rasmussen in the mix, Harris now leads in the RealClearPolitics averages of
both the two-way contest with Trump and the five-person race that includes
third-party contenders Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornel West.

The turnaround has also been manifest in the handful of battleground states
that will decide the election. According to FiveThirtyEight averages,
Harris has opened up small leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and
Wisconsin�the so-called Blue Wall that Trump swept in 2016 in his unlikely
path to the presidency. Even more ominously for the Trump campaign, the
former president�s substantial leads in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada have
all but vanished. FiveThirtyEight averages now have Harris up by a hair in
Arizona and tied in Georgia. Nate Silver has anointed Harris a narrow
favorite on the basis of this data, giving her close to a 55 percent chance
to win the Electoral College as of last Wednesday morning. Silver gave
Biden just a 25.8 percent of winning reelection on July 19, so if his model
is accurate, Harris has already more than doubled Democrats� odds of
holding the White House.

The downballot implications of this tectonic shift are also significant.
Since Biden�s departure on July 21, Democratic Senate candidates in Nevada,
Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Ohio, and Pennsylvania have led all of the
(admittedly quite limited) public polling, often substantially. While
Republicans can still flip the Senate, even if they get swept in those
races, by capturing seats in West Virginia and Montana and protecting all
of their incumbents, it�s a much narrower path than it was a month ago. And
with a floundering Trump facing an ascendant Harris, Republicans might want
to check in on some races that Democrats had written off as unwinnable. A
recent University of North Florida survey, for example, had Democrat
Deborah Murcarsel-Powell within 4 points of incumbent Republican Rick Scott
just two years after Sen. Marco Rubio drubbed his well-funded Democratic
opponent by 16. Democrats also now lead narrowly in the FiveThirtyEight
average of the �generic ballot� question, which asks voters whether they
will vote for Democrats or Republicans for Congress.

It was the deterioration in downballot polling that really lit a fire under
elected Democrats to push Biden from the race in July. Senate Democrats
continued to run well ahead of Biden even at the height of Democrats�
public freakout last month, but it has been nearly 200 years since a party
flipped a chamber of Congress while losing the presidency, and Democrats
were spooked by apocalyptic internal polling that showed them slipping even
in once safe states like Virginia and Minnesota. Now that dynamic is almost
totally reversed. Are Democrats favored to win a trifecta at this moment?
With that Senate map, almost certainly not, but rank-and-file volunteers
can now work with renewed hope that a President Harris might actually get
to govern rather than engage in two painful years of budget standoffs with
a hostile Republican Congress.

Vice President Harris and her team deserve enormous credit for the
smoothness of her campaign rollout and the way that they quietly worked
party elites to shore up her support and head off the possibility of a
contested convention. And Harris has clearly grown as a national candidate
since her brief and uneven campaign in 2020. Those who thought that she
would fall flat out of the gate and fail to change the basic dynamic of the
campaign against Trump have been proved pretty conclusively wrong. And
while her selection of Tim Walz over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as a
running mate was a huge, calculated risk, the response among Democrats has
been extremely positive. Both elected Democrats and rank-and-file
supporters feel liberated from a doomed campaign, and their relief and
enthusiasm are palpable.

But Harris has also had the enormous good fortune of facing a hopelessly
inept and toxic Republican nominee whose party has clearly learned nothing
from underperforming in four consecutive national elections. Just four
years ago, incumbent Republican President Donald Trump was pink-slipped by
more than 7 million votes in the midst of the once-in-a-lifetime exogenous
shock of the COVID-19 pandemic. Kicking away the White House under what
should have been slam-dunk rally-around-the-president circumstances was an
extraordinary feat of political malpractice that the party didn�t even try
to learn from. The GOP also became the first party in 130 years to lose the
presidency and both chambers of Congress just four years after a change in
party control of the White House. Instead of conducting an autopsy as any
halfway competent political party would do, they claimed that the election
was stolen from them and then swiftly executed a partywide capitulation to
the sordid hallucinations of the preening narcissist who was responsible
for the disaster in the first place.
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In the weeks following Biden�s departure from the 2024 race, Republicans
have proved conclusively that their problems go well beyond Donald Trump.
Gifted with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reverse the GOP�s two-
decade-long slide with young voters and to make real inroads with Black
voters, Republicans have reverted instead to the party�s losing 21st
century script of repellent, increasingly open racism and tone-deaf
culture-warring that has thoroughly alienated a large and growing swath of
the electorate. The presence of Joe Biden in the race, it turns out, was
the only thing propping up the fortunes of a political movement that cannot
seem to figure out a way to increase its appeal.

Even before Biden exited, Trump anointed the odious Sen. J.D. Vance over
the strenuous objections of other party strategists only to realize in
horror that the handpicked prince of MAGAstan has been running around
giving unfathomably damaging quotes to right-wing podcasters and audiences
for years, including some real gems about how Americans who don�t have kids
are spiritually empty freeloaders who should pay higher taxes and an
ongoing determination to code single, childless women as miserable cat
ladies. Less than a month after his selection, Vance has become the least
popular running mate in the history of the polling era.
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Trump himself couldn�t keep it together for five minutes after Harris
emerged as the likely nominee, calling her a �DEI hire� and speculating
that Harris had decided to �turn Black� in his disastrous interview two
weeks ago with the National Association of Black Journalists. He has
whinged incessantly and embarrassingly about how much money he spent
running against Biden and how unfair it all is, and almost immediately
backed out of the scheduled general election debate on Sept. 10. His social
media posts speculating about how Harris is using A.I. to create the
impression of adoring crowds are pitiful and bizarre even by his standards.
Instead of working together to push back on this calamitous �strategy,� or
better, trying to force their 78-year-old albatross of a nominee from the
race altogether, Republican elites have lined up to go on cable news and
repeat or explain away his deranged talking points for public consumption
and to defend the escalating series of baffling comments and decisions.