Is Kamala Harris Really Fading?
What FiveThirtyEight Got Wrong, And What It Means for the Next Democratic Debates
Nate Silver, who remains pound-for-pound one of the best public analysts of Presidential polling data, is not lying. When he tells you Kamala Harris’s debate bounce is fading, there’s a shred of truth there. But it’s certainly misleading — when looking at both the headline as well as the substance of the argument laid out in his piece. More important, it misses the bigger takeaway about Harris’s numbers, as well as those of Joe Biden, going into this week’s debate rematch.
Let’s look at the RealClearPolitics averages, which Nate uses in his own analysis:
- Biden has rebounded to 28.4 percentage points from a low of 26.0 percentage points just after the debate. He was at 32.1 percent before the debate.
- Harris has fallen to 12.2 percentage points from a peak of 15.2 percentage points. She was at 7.0 percent before the debate, so she’s lost about a third of what she’d gained.
According to Silver, this can be summarized as “reverting to the mean.” But is that really true? Biden has only regained 1/3 of what he lost in the debate: 2/3 of his drop in the polls still lingers after the initial pulse. And Harris remains way up from her pre-debate numbers: a 75% (!) increase in her overall support is not a fading bounce. FiveThirtyEight’s claim that “Kamala Harris’s standing has reverted back to roughly where it was before” is simply inaccurate.
Think of it this way: if someone stole $1000 from you, and you managed to get $300 back, you would not shrug and call that “reverting to the mean.” Nor would you say they have roughly the same as they did before the robbery. They still have the lion’s share of what they took from you. And put plainly, Kamala Harris still holds the lion’s share of what she took from Joe Biden in the first debate.
It’s also telling to look at the change in absolute terms, which demonstrates how Harris really did take it away from Biden. Since his post-debate nadir of 26.0% support, Biden has clawed back just 2.4% of total voters, while in the same interval Harris has dropped off a similar amount (3.0%): overall Harris grabbed an additional 8.2% of voters in the debate, and she has retained 5.2% of that. Broadly speaking, Harris took possession of everything and everyone that Biden lost in the first debate, and after the immediate pulse Biden only managed to get back a third of it.
That evolution is all the more significant with the next debate coming up this week: it’s another inflection point in the campaign, the next chance to dramatically alter the playing field. And there’s no doubt the pressure is on Vice President Biden. That’s an odd thing to say about the clear frontrunner who retains a double-digit lead in polls, but it’s the truth.
