Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to contest the US Presidency, is expected to be nominated as the Democratic Party’s candidate

Opinion polls conducted by reputed agencies in the United States indicate a neck and neck race between the presumptive Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, and her Republican rival Donald Trump in the US Presidential election to be held in November.

In a field of fluctuating fortunes, Harris is currently ahead of Trump.

However, it should be borne in mind that at the end of the day, the winner will be decided by a few competitive States. 

According to Forbes, the ABC News/Ipsos poll (American Broadcasting Company news/ International Public de Sandange d’ Opinion Secteur), which sampled 1,200 adults last Friday and Saturday, found Harris’ overall favourability rising from 35% to 43% while Trump’s saw a drop from 40% to 36% compared to the week before.

Interestingly, this count was taken after Trump was targeted by an assassin at a Pennsylvania rally and during the Republican National Convention. This raises the question as to whether the assassination attempt will make a noticeable difference to Trump’s prospects.

No-Partisan Voters

Both Harris and Trump saw a significant movement among independent voters: 44% of independents had a favourable view of Harris last week (“up” from 28%) and Trump’s favourability in the group “fell” from 35% to 27%.

Some 48% of Americans said they would be enthusiastic if Harris wins the Democratic nomination for President, while 39% say they are enthusiastic about Trump being the Republican nominee.

A Wall Street Journal poll showed on Friday that Harris was trailing Trump 47% to 49% and a HarrisX/Forbes online survey found 44% of voters had a favourable view of each candidate.

In key swing states, Harris is trailing Trump by single-digit margins, new polls by Emerson College show. Trump leads Harris in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania with a virtual tie in Wisconsin.

Harris had a marginal two-percentage-point lead over Trump as per the Reuters/Ipsos poll, results of which were out on July 23. In this poll, Harris got 44% support, and Trump 42%.

Reuters further said that 56% of registered voters agreed with the statement that Harris was “mentally sharp and able to deal with challenges,” compared to 49% who said the same of Trump. In an earlier poll on July 15-16, both Harris and Trump got 44%. In a July 1-2 poll, Trump had led by one percent.

The CNN/SSRS poll, reported on July 24, Harris was trailing by 3 percentage points, with 46% support while Trump had 49% support.
Adding a word of caution about going by these opinion polls, Reuters said that nationwide surveys do give important signals of peoples’ support for candidates, but in the final analysis, a handful of competitive states typically tilt the balance in the US Electoral College, which ultimately decides who wins a Presidential election.

Be that as it may, the inescapable take away from the opinion surveys on the present election is that underdog Harris has a fighting chance of beating veteran Trump in the November election.

Harris, the first black woman to contest the US Presidency, is expected to be nominated as the Democratic Party’s candidate in the Party’s convention in the first week of August.  

Democrats’ Views

The poll found that Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters are broadly enthusiastic about Harris and willing to coalesce around her as the presumptive nominee.

Democratic Party voters expressed broadly positive views about Harris, with 75% or more saying that she is someone they’d be “proud to have as President (86%)”. These agree with her on issues that matter most (84%).

According to them Harris represents the future of the Democratic Party (83%) and will unite the country and not divide it (77%). She has a good chance of beating Trump (75%), the respondents say.

In a sign of the current intra-party unity around Harris, there are relatively few sharp demographic divides in Democratic-aligned voters’ assessments.

Ideological divisions within the Democratic Party are also relatively muted, with both 88% of self-described liberals and 81% of self-described moderates or conservatives saying that they think Harris agrees with them on the most important issues.

Harris also hangs on to 95% of those who earlier said they supported Biden. She has emerged as a uniting force among Democrats.

The survey found voters widely supportive of both President Biden’s decision to step aside from the context and also his decision to remain in office through the end of his term.

However, Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters are closely split over whether the next nominee should continue Biden’s policies (53%) or take the country in a new direction (47%).

A desire for a new direction is largely concentrated among younger voters and voters of colour among Democrats and Democratic-leaning people. Voters older than 65 (72%), White voters (62%) and those with college degrees (58%) largely want Harris to follow in Biden’s footsteps.

But six in 10 voters of colour and voters younger than 45 say they’re looking for a new direction on policy.

Harris’ Strengths/Weaknesses

Kamala Harris’s biggest strengths and her biggest weaknesses have their roots in her background as a California prosecutor, says David Leonhardt in New York Times.

“Harris spent more than a quarter-century as a local and state prosecutor, and she compiled an accomplished record — on crime reduction, consumer protection and more. Prosecutors succeed by making more persuasive arguments than their opponents in a combative setting. So it makes sense that Harris’s signature moments as a national figure have occurred in similar settings,” Leonhardt observes.

“In the Senate, she developed a reputation as a sharp questioner of witnesses, including Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. During the 2020 presidential campaign, she won her debate against Vice President Mike Pence, polls showed.”

In fact, Harris had told the public that the Presidential battle is going to be a “law upholder and a convicted felon.”

But Harris’s shortcoming is that she has repeatedly struggled to lay out her vision for the country and explain to voters how she would improve their lives. This is evident in her 2019 book “The Truths We Hold,” Leonhardt says.

According to him, there were platitudes aplenty, and actual proposals for the betterment of the people precious little, he comments.Perhaps it was the paucity of concrete proposals in her presentation which resulted in her withdrawal from the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination contest.  

Jared Mondschein from the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney outlines the potential challenges that lay ahead for Harris in an article in Conversation.

Points in support of her are: To this day, Harris has never lost a general election, including her Senate run in 2017. She was the second-ever Black woman elected to the US Senate. 

“In the Senate, she was appointed to the homeland security and intelligence committees and later the Senate Judiciary Committee, which gave her a platform to grill Trump’s judicial nominees. Whether it be questioning then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on whether the government had ever made laws related to the male body, or the Mueller investigations of the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia, Harris became known for using her prosecutorial experience to advance Democratic priorities,” Mondschein recalled.

Harris’s tough talking to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the atrocities in Gaza, when he was on a visit to Washington last week, should go down well with the non-Whites and educated youth across the ethnic divide.

Trump’s latest remark that Christians should vote for him en masse because this may be the last election in the US, has been widely criticised. Liberal Americans have also come down heavily on the sexist and personal attacks on Harris and her mannerisms, especially her tendency to be vague and repetitive and the habit of breaking into a cackle at the end of a sentence.

Liberals contend that personal matters such as these should not count when the office of President is about policies and programmes and not personal angularities. Harris’s view on ethnic justice, inequality, and the continuing massacre in Gaza deserve more attention.