A Quick Presidential Update Before the Weekend

Earlier this week, the team at Trendency pulled its initial look at the presidential horserace with presumed Democratic nominee and current Vice President Kamala Harris following President Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he would not be seeking a second term. If you missed that, you can find it here. The TLDR; version? Harris absolutely invigorated the Democratic voter base, but she’s still got work to do in major swing states like Arizona and Michigan.

Before we head out for the weekend, we wanted to give you a quick update on where the numbers stand.

Harris has maintained her initial increase in support; in fact, her overall average level of support has increased slightly since our update earlier this week. When American voters are given 100 points to allocate between the candidate options, Harris now receives 44.55 points on average, while Trump receives an average of 39.11 points. His overall support has dropped slightly since President Biden announced he was not going to run, dropping about 2 points in the average.

Looking at the trendlines for averages of each answer option - asking voters to allocate those 100 points between Harris, Trump, RFK, Jr., and the nameless “Other” option - shows that most of Harris’ bump is likely coming from those two additional options, as averages for both RFK, Jr. and “Other” have declined by 3-4 points over the past week.

Lastly, the distribution of opinion (which highlights the percentage of panelists, or voters in this case, that allocate their points a certain way on the 0-100 scale) shows that Harris is maintaining a higher number of voters allocating 80 or more points towards saying they will vote for her, including those who say they are 100% going to vote for her. Trump’s base is basically an immovable force, but the question is: can he add to that base of support to get him to where he needs to be? Currently, 55% of voters say there is zero chance they will vote for the former President. Harris has a slightly larger room for growth, with 48% of voters saying there is zero percent chance they would vote for her. However, a majority of voters rank the chances as very low to zero (51% allocate 19 or fewer points).

It’s the understatement of the year to say that more newsworthy stories are bound to happen between now and November, and they’ll likely affect these numbers. In order to win, both candidates have work to do; Trump needs to solidify and energize his base while attempting to rein moderate Republicans back in, and Harris needs to capitalize on this new excitement and pick a VP candidate who’s going to push her numbers upwards in key swing states.

More to come!