But Can She Win? - Early polling already indicates that Harris is more competitive with Trump than Biden was

Early polling already indicates that Harris is more competitive with Trump than Biden was, even as Trump is still favored. (At the end of the Harris campaign’s first week, the gold-standard New York Times–Siena College poll had the race effectively tied, a considerable improvement over Biden’s previous six-point deficit.)

- By Gabriel Debenedetti

Early last year, I joined Kamala Harris on a mostly unremarkable day trip to Atlanta, where she talked about climate change and promoted the Biden administration’s tax credits for electric vehicles. It was the day after the president’s third State of the Union address, and Harris was still struggling to earn respect. Some pundits and donors had spent recent months whispering that she’d been a disappointment as far back as her 2020 presidential campaign, and chatter was circulating— not for the first time—as to whether Joe Biden should remove her from his reelection ticket. At the same time, I’d been hearing from Democratic strategists that Harris’s image was far better than Biden’s among Black voters, especially Black women, and that this was being badly underappreciated in the Beltway parlor games. “Younger girls kind of see her in a way that younger African Americans saw Barack Obama: This too can happen; there too can I be,” Cornell Belcher, a pollster who’d worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign, told me that winter. “It’s beyond politics; it’s beyond cultural. It’s a spiritual thing.”

“From a political standpoint,” Belcher added, “that shit is gold.”

Few national outlets were following Harris’s work during that period, and none took notice that her first stop in Atlanta was to record an interview with Steve Harvey, whose radio show reaches millions of mostly Black listeners. At one point in the conversation, Harvey slipped and called Harris “Madam President.” He only half-apologized: “My bad,” he said. “Probably just a hope.” As Harris promoted Biden’s insulin price caps, Harvey sounded impressed, and at the end of the interview, he got earnest. “You mean a lot to so many people,” he told her.