The Memo: Where the White House race stands with fewer than 50 days left

Election Day is less than seven weeks away and the race for the White House is balanced on a knife-edge.

Vice President Harris appears to have slightly improved her position after last week’s first, and perhaps only, debate with former President Trump.

But current polling does not yet incorporate any effect on public opinion of a second apparent attempt on Trump’s life. 

On Sunday, a Secret Service agent noticed the barrel of a gun poking through the undergrowth toward the course at Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Fla., as the president was only about 400 yards away. The suspect, Ryan Routh, was later apprehended and charged with firearms offenses.

It is possible that the alleged planned shooting might win Trump some measure of sympathy and strengthen the determination of GOP voters to come out for him. 

On the other hand, Trump has struck a more combative tone in the wake of the weekend’s events than he did following the first attempt on his life, when a bullet grazed his ear as he spoke at a rally in Butler, Pa., in July.

Trump briefly called for unity after the Butler shooting before returning to his more characteristic, heated rhetoric. Following the weekend’s events, Trump instead almost immediately cast Harris and President Biden as culpable, telling Fox News Digital, “their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at.”

Such claims could plausibly backfire with voters in the center-ground.

In any event, there is no mistaking how much the race has changed since Biden in July abandoned his quest for a second term amid sinking poll ratings.

Harris now leads Trump by 3.7 points in the nationwide polling average maintained by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ). That’s roughly half a percentage point higher than her standing on Sept. 10, the day of her debate with Trump.

Furthermore, some of the most recent polls show Harris with an even larger lead. One postdebate survey from Morning Consult put her up 6 points, while separate surveys from Big Village and Monmouth University each showed her ahead by 5 points. 

It bears emphasizing that, since the debate, there have been markedly few reputable polls from the key battleground states that will decide the election. 

There have been slight exceptions in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, a USA Today/Suffolk University poll this week put Harris up by 3 points — a hopeful sign for her in the biggest battleground, which holds 19 Electoral College votes. But, complicating the picture, a postdebate poll from Insider Advantage poll in the Keystone State put Trump up by 2 points.

In Wisconsin, meanwhile, an Insider Advantage poll showed Harris up by 2 points, having previously had Trump ahead by 1 point.

The conclusions that can be drawn are mixed.

Harris’s debate performance may have helped her around the edges, and it is fairly clear that she is in the lead nationally.

But there are significant caveats.

First, the dynamics of the Electoral College mean that, in effect, a Democratic presidential nominee has to win the popular vote by a significant amount in order to actually win the White House. Twice this century, Democrats have won the popular vote but lost the election: Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Nate Silver, the well-known polling and data analyst, wrote Tuesday in his Silver Bulletin newsletter that Harris “is pretty clearly getting a bounce in national polls” following the debate. 

But Silver also cautioned that, according to his projections, “there’s now almost a 25 percent chance that Harris wins the popular vote while losing the Electoral College (and only a 0.2 percent chance of the other way around).”

Second, Trump has outperformed his poll ratings in both of his previous presidential campaigns. There are several theories to explain why this occurs, including the possibility that Trump supporters are more reluctant to respond to pollsters or are simply lying about their voting intentions.

Whatever the reason, the effect has been bad polling misses, including in some crucial states. In Wisconsin, for example, the final RealClearPolitics polling average underestimated Trump’s actual vote by around 7 points in 2016 and by around 5 points in 2020.

Third, even though there is some subtle polling movement in Harris’s direction in the wake of the Sept. 10 debate, it seems unlikely to fundamentally change the close nature of the race in the key states.

There are seven states that together will likely decide the election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. 

In five of the seven, the margin between the candidates is less than a single percentage point in The Hill/DDHQ polling averages. The two exceptions are Nevada, where Harris leads by 1.5 points, and Wisconsin, where she leads by 3 points.

Trump has said he will not participate in any further debates with Harris. A vice presidential debate between Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) is set for Oct. 1. 

Debates between running mates have delivered some memorable moments in the past but have almost never had a real impact on the outcome of the presidential race.

Instead, any big shift in the polls between now and Election Day could come from the TV “air war.” 

The Harris campaign and its affiliates began September with about $404 million cash on hand, while their Trump counterparts had about $295 million.

A significant share of that cash will be spent on TV advertising, with Harris painting Trump as an agent of chaos and Trump blasting the vice president as a radical with policies outside the mainstream.

Meanwhile, in an election year that has already witnessed enormous drama, there could yet be some more unexpected twists in the tale.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.