POLITICO Nightly: Harris reset the presidential race. New polls show how.

By Calder McHugh Merchandise is seen prior to a campaign event for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, in Philadelphia, on Aug. 6, 2024. | Jamie Kelter Davis for POLITICO THE 100-DAY CAMPAIGN — When President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race in late July, polling showed that his path to retaining the White House looked rocky. Vice President Kamala Harris, who replaced Biden atop the Democratic ticket, appeared to inject a dose of new energy into her party and reset the presidential race, but there was no way of knowing for sure in the absence of any data. Now, a little over three weeks after Biden’s withdrawal, there’s a body of high-quality polling about the newly reconfigured race. Harris narrowly leads Donald Trump in some national polls and has cut into Trump’s lead in others. In a few key battleground states, she has outright overtaken Trump. But what else does the post-Biden polling tell us about the state of the presidential race? And what do the granular details reveal about the nominees’ strengths and weaknesses with various demographic groups? To better understand the polling environment and what it tells us about how the next three months will play out, Nightly spoke with Steve Shepard , POLITICO’s senior campaigns and elections editor and chief polling analyst. This conversation has been edited. The most recent New York Times/Siena polling showed some notable movement toward Kamala Harris, particularly in the so-called Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where it shows the vice president with a slight lead. The Trump campaign contends that polling is tainted. What is the gist of their objection? Other than that the polls show Trump trailing Harris? Their main argument is that the polls don’t include enough Trump voters — and by that measurement, they aren’t wrong. Among likely voters across the three states, 47 percent say they voted for President Joe Biden in 2020, while only 41 percent voted for Trump. Averaged across the three states, Biden actually won 50 percent of the vote in the 2020 election, to Trump’s 48 percent. So the Trump camp is arguing that Harris’ 4-point lead would evaporate if the poll were adjusted from the Biden +6 self-reported advantage among poll respondents, to the Biden +2 election result. But the Trump campaign’s accusation that the polls were conducted and weighted “with the clear intent and purpose of depressing support” for Trump is off-base. A lot of pollsters do weight — or adjust their samples — to respondents’ recalled vote in the previous presidential election. It’s become an increasingly popular way to address polls’ struggles in reaching enough Trump voters in 2016 and 2020. But the Times doesn’t , finding that it would have made their past data less accurate. Joe Biden was struggling with voters of color. How is Kamala Harris doing? Better, but still shy of where Democrats have been in recent elections. Biden won about 90 percent of Black voters and more than 60 percent of Latino voters in the 2020 election, but polls before his dropout put his numbers in the 60s among Black voters and sometimes even tied with Trump among Latinos. Harris, by contrast, was at 77 percent among Black voters and 58 percent among Hispanic voters in a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist College poll . What are some constituencies that Harris needs to worry about, based on the spate of new surveys? So far, Harris has improved upon Biden’s margins among most demographics. But Biden had been more durable with white voters and seniors than his overall margins would have suggested — and it’s worth monitoring to see if Harris can keep these voters in the fold as she claws back the younger voters and voters of color. Where has Harris approved the most on Biden’s margins? What does Sun Belt polling tell us about different routes to victory available to both candidates? Biden’s slippage with Black and Latino voters, in particular, had all but cut off any path to an Electoral College majority through the two Sun Belt states he flipped in 2020: Arizona and Georgia. Harris has, for now, brought many (though not quite all) of those voters back into the fold. And while Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are still central to any strategy for 270 electoral votes, Harris’ numbers with voters of color give her multiple paths to get there. That also includes North Carolina, which Trump won by 1 point in 2020. Both candidates will campaign there this week — Trump in Asheville on Wednesday, Harris in Raleigh on Friday — and both Trump and the top super PAC backing his campaign recently launched their first ads in the state. As Biden’s position in the polls deteriorated earlier this summer, we saw signs — or heard chatter — that some traditionally blue or purple states like Minnesota and Virginia were in danger of voting Republican. Is there any evidence that the campaign reset changed that? Is there any evidence of traditionally red states that might be in danger of voting Democratic? When Trump was leading Biden by a mid-single-digit margin — multiple polls showed him ahead by 6 points — it opened up states like Minnesota, New Hampshire and Virginia. But those states are not going to be particularly competitive if Harris is ahead nationally by 3 points, as the current FiveThirtyEight polling average suggests. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @calder_mchugh .   DON’T MISS OUR AI & TECH SUMMIT: Join POLITICO’s AI & Tech Summit for exclusive interviews and conversations with senior tech leaders, lawmakers, officials and stakeholders about where the rising energy around global competition — and the sense of potential around AI and restoring American tech knowhow — is driving tech policy and investment. REGISTER HERE .     What'd I Miss? — UAW files unfair labor practice charge against Trump, Musk: The United Auto Workers filed an unfair labor practice charge against Donald Trump’s campaign and Tesla CEO Elon Musk today after the former president advocated for firing striking employees during an interview on X. “They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone,’” Trump said in the Monday interview with Musk, who also owns the social media platform. “You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.” excerpt:  Firing striking employees or threatening to do so is a violation of the National Labor Relations Act. Trump’s comments came amid his efforts to make inroads with rank-and-file union members despite most major unions — including the UAW — endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race. — California company sues over Florida’s ‘fake meat’ ban: A California company that sells lab-grown meat is asking a federal court to block Florida’s ban on the product , which was the first in the nation. UPSIDE Foods Inc. of Berkeley argued in its lawsuit, filed Monday in Tallahassee, that the law that was signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis on May 1 violates the U.S. Constitution. Paul Sherman — a senior attorney with the libertarian-leaning Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm that filed the lawsuit — told reporters today that UPSIDE Foods will soon request a preliminary injunction so the company can offer lab-grown meat samples at a Miami Beach art festival later this year. ISRAEL HAS BEEN PROVOKING IRAN! KNEE JERK US REACTION GENUFLECTING TO WAR MONGERS! — U.S. eyes Iranian oil exports as threat of Israel attack grows: The U.S. State Department said it is eyeing measures to clamp down on Iran’s oil exports amid rising worries about Tehran’s vow to take revenge against Israel for the killing of a top Hamas leader. Despite the tightening of sanctions on the Islamic Republic’s economy in recent years, the country’s exports of crude have steadily risen. According to data from analytics firm Kpler, its oil sales rose 30 percent in the last quarter alone, taking its fossil fuel shipments to a five-year high. Nightly Road to 2024 VOLUNTEER POWER — Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is intently focused on making sure the burst of enthusiasm after her rapid ascent to the Democratic presidential nomination is organized into a sustained campaign that will mobilize an army of volunteers ahead of November , writes NBC News. In the last week, as Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, crisscrossed the country speaking to packed rallies with thousands of voters, the campaign has also been hard at work signing up volunteers at those events in an effort to ensure victory. Last week in Nevada, 1,000 of the 5,010 volunteer sign-ups were for the next day to join a series of weekly events the campaign holds on Sundays, a campaign official said. The campaign official said the burst of sign-ups made Sunday the biggest day yet for the weekly series. In Wisconsin, the campaign had 13,000 conversations with voters over the weekend, and it got more than 1,100 volunteer sign-ups at a rally in Detroit to volunteer, the official said. AROUND THE WORLD A herd of goats in the village of Novoe Seltso close to the city of Dmitrov, about 60 miles from Moscow. | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images GOAT DIPLOMACY — After a summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June at which the two leaders discussed mutual cooperation, Moscow has delivered a gift to Pyongyang. Russia sent 447 goats to the North Korean city of Rason , the Russian agriculture safety watchdog Rosselkhoznadzor said in a press release. The goats, which were exported from Russia’s Leningrad region, represent a first batch of farm animals that Russia intends to deliver to North Korea. The goats will provide dairy products to local children to relieve North Korea’s food shortages, mainly caused by government-related policies, with the situation getting worse during the Covid-19 pandemic. FORCES REDIRECTED — Russia pulled some troops out of southern Ukraine and back into its own territory to try to fend off an escalating incursion by Kyiv’s forces, a Ukrainian official said today. Ukraine’s ongoing surprise attack has triggered scrambling in Moscow where President Vladimir Putin has expressed anger after Kyiv snatched dozens of settlements and huge areas of territory in the Kursk and Belgorod regions of southern Russia. “Russia has relocated some of its units from both Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions of Ukraine’s south,” Dmytro Lykhoviy, a Ukrainian army spokesman, told POLITICO. POLITICO was unable to independently confirm how many Russian troops have been redeployed back across the border, though Lykhoviy said it was a “relatively small” number of units. ISRAEL HAD ENOUGH INTELLIGENCE TO ASSASSINATE ISMAIL HANIYEH IN IRAN - IT WAS A DELIBERATE PROVOCATION!  TENSIONS RISE — Fears are growing of an imminent Iranian attack on Israel in retaliation for the assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran late last month. In a joint statement issued Monday, leaders of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy expressed their support for Israel in case of aggression from Iran and called on Tehran “to stand down on its ongoing threats of a military attack against Israel.” But Iran today rejected Western calls to back down. “Such a request lacks political logic, flies in the face of the principles and rules of international law, and constitutes public and practical support for Israel,” Nasser Kanaani, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson, said in a statement, according to state news agency IRNA.   SUBSCRIBE TO GLOBAL PLAYBOOK: Don’t miss out on POLITICO’s Global Playbook, our newsletter taking you inside pivotal discussions at the most influential gatherings in the world. Suzanne Lynch delivers the world's elite and influential moments directly to you. Stay in the global loop. SUBSCRIBE NOW .     Nightly Number ****CRYPTO SCAM!**** CHINA BANNED CRYPTO!  At least $12 million The amount of money that Defend American Jobs — one of three affiliated super PACs funded by the cryptocurrency industry — will spend backing Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno in his bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. RADAR SWEEP PUT A TAPE IN — According to the data tracker Luminate, about 430,000 cassette tapes were sold in the United States last year, five times more than were sold a decade ago. And this isn’t old fogies dusting off their boomboxes — it’s largely a Gen-Z and younger market , as younger people have been introduced to cassette players through artists like Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo, who are releasing new music on tape. There’s only one issue — many of the younger buyers don’t know how to use them and don’t have anything to play them with. They’re figuring it out, though, with the help of equipment from their parents’ basements or online tutorials. Joseph Pisani reports on the trend for The Wall Street Journal. Parting Image On this date in 1961: The Berlin Wall begins to be erected overnight, shortly after the border between East and West Berlin was sealed. Pictured is an East German worker lays some of the first stone blocks of the wall. | AP Did someone forward this email to you?  Sign up here .   Follow us on Twitter Charlie Mahtesian @PoliticoCharlie Calder McHugh @calder_mchugh   Follow us

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