2:10
Harris also does slightly better than Biden in our forecast of the national popular vote. The model forecasts that Trump would outpace Harris nationally by 1.5 points, while he would outrun Biden by 2.1 points. However, this could be an artifact of our model not having any Harris-versus-Trump polls that include independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who tends to take slightly more votes away from Democrats than Republicans when included in a poll.
However, Harris’s popular-vote edge is almost entirely negated by the bigger Electoral College bias against her. In our polls-only forecast pairing Biden against Trump, the Democratic candidate needs to win the popular vote by just 1.1 points to win the presidency. That’s thanks to Biden doing better in Pennsylvania, the likeliest tipping-point state in our model. Harris, by contrast, would need to win the popular vote by 3.5-4 points to win Pennsylvania and, with it, the Electoral College.
However, whether Harris would truly be a stronger candidate than Biden also depends on information besides the polls. In our full forecast model — which includes a variety of non-polling economic and political variables, which we call the “fundamentals” — Harris does much worse than Biden across the board. Whereas Biden has a 48-in-100 chance to win the Electoral College, Harris has only a 31-in-100 chance.
This is thanks in large part to the boost our model confers on Biden as the incumbent president, which is worth an extra point for Biden over Harris in our fundamentals-only forecast of the national popular vote. However, one factor our model does not consider is whether presidents’ approval rating and economic growth impact incumbents running for reelection more than non-incumbents running from the same party, and that may actually push Harris’s numbers over Biden’s. In other words, your mileage may vary depending on how much you believe that Biden should get a boost because he’s the sitting president. There is no objectively correct answer here; one of the reasons election forecasting is hard is that it requires judgment calls like these.
Biden’s core problem may not be captured in current polls, however. As his critics said after the debate, concerns about age and competency do not go away with time; in fact, they tend to get worse. Our forecast for Biden today depends on many known knowns and known unknowns, and, unfortunately for Democrats, the known downsides for Biden currently outweigh the known upsides. Another way of saying this is that Biden’s chief risk is a “hard” risk (as opposed to a soft one) — a product of an immutable trait that voters are unlikely to overlook by November.
Replacing Biden with Harris, by contrast, would introduce more uncertainty into the election; in other words, Democrats would be betting that her “soft” risks aren’t as bad as Biden’s. For example, Harris had one of the most left-leaning voting records during her time in the U.S. Senate, which could hurt her among moderate voters. Yet Biden already does poorly with moderates — and at current levels of political polarization, a cross-cutting issue like Biden’s age may make more of a difference with swing voters, anyway, than any narrow disagreements about policy.
At the end of the day, any decisions about whom the Democratic Party nominates for president will — or should — take more than just the polls into account. Right now, there is a lot of uncertainty around the alternatives for Biden. We have few polls for Harris, for example, and other alternatives are less well known and have not been vetted at the level a president or vice president is scrutinized at (just ask South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem). Until recently, that uncertainty was enough to hold calls for a new Democratic nominee at bay. But just as uncertainty creates more downside for a party, it also creates more upside. Given what Democrats have now realized about Biden, they may be willing to take that risk.
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