Driver’s seat
If you’re trying to figure out how a candidate is doing, you look at three things: enthusiasm, money, and polls. Any one of those three indicators can be faulty on its own. But if you’ve got all three in your favor, you probably have a winner.
From literally day one, Kamala Harris has had overwhelming popular enthusiasm and huge financial support for her 2024 campaign. Earlier this week I wrote that if she completed the trifecta by also pulling ahead in the polls – by say three points – by the end of the week, she’d be firmly in the driver’s seat.
As it turns out, the first major poll was released yesterday (Reuters-IPSOS) and it showed Kamala Harris either two or four points ahead of Donald Trump, depending on third-party scenarios. This is exactly what you want to see. And given that Trump’s own campaign has leaked a memo essentially admitting that Harris is likely to pull ahead in the overall polling averages, we can probably expect more good polling numbers for Harris as the week goes on.
If Kamala can indeed complete the trifecta – enthusiasm, money, and polls – by the end of the week, she’ll be in the kind of position that every candidate dreams of being in. She’ll benefit from positive media coverage of her prospects, which becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. She’ll have the money to spend on making sure she stays ahead. And being ahead in the polling will mean that she has all the leverage when it comes to things like negotiating the remaining debates, because Trump won’t be able to afford skipping them.
All that said, this is not going to be an easy election. We can’t just sit on our hands and expect Kamala Harris to win automatically. Nothing works that way. We have to dive in and make sure Kamala Harris wins, and wins big, because we can’t afford to leave it to chance. But for the first time in awhile, it feels like we’re in the driver’s seat. Now let’s go win this. Donate $20 to Palmer report
