I’m about a week late on putting this out due to various work/life reasons, but this past Monday was three months to Election Day. And what a difference the five weeks since our last update has made! The Rematch of the Century is no more. But, with Joe Biden withdrawing his name from consideration, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, and the Democratic establishment and the grassroots swiftly and enthusiastically consolidating around her, a new tagline has been born: Prosecutor vs. Felon!

A big, in fact, unprecedented shakeup, but has it had an effect on the dynamics of the race? As we’ll see shortly, it definitely has!

Looking at the Real Clear Politics and 538 national polling averages, what immediately jumps out is that, for the first time since we started looking at this three months ago, Trump is no longer in the lead. RCP’s average now has a small lead for Harris. 538 (which weights things according to pollster track record and history of partisan lean, and adjusts for state polling) has an even clearer margin in Harris’s favor:

Polls of the swing states are showing the same effect. While for months Trump was at 7 for 7, RCP now shows Harris leading in 2 of 7, and 538 with its more robust methodology has her ahead in 3 of 3, with another one even. All of these leads are within the margin of error, but that’s kind of the point- they all are, even the Sunbelt states where Trump had enjoyed leads outside the margin of error in prior months. Here are the current 538 numbers by state:

538’s map would already have Harris with enough electoral votes to win, and even the more Republican-tilted RCP map shows her gaining ground:

Approval ratings are now a little trickier to gauge. We used to be able to compare Biden to previous Presidents at the same point in their first terms, but that no longer works. What we can do is compare Harris’s approval rating to Trump’s, and when we do so we can see that Harris’s net approval rating has surged since Biden’s withdrawal, and is now pretty much a wash with Trump’s (these averages are from 538):

Moving on, Democrats retain their lead in the Generic Congressional ballot:

Even more hopefully for Democrats, through the end of July they continue to outperform in special elections over the past year+, running an average of 6% ahead of the partisan lean of the races in question (per a spreadsheet compiled by Nathaniel Rakich of 538):

Our previous hypothesis about Biden’s percentage in Democratic primaries being ahead of Trump’s in Republican primaries, was that Trump had more wavering partisan supporters to bring home than Biden:

Finally, in line with many of the indicators above, Presidential betting markets now show Harris ahead of Trump:

So what does all this add up to?

Harris is clearly outperforming Trump at this point, having taken the lead in several key indicators and drawn even in others. Crucially, the 538 average shows Kennedy’s numbers cut in half at 5.1%, and undecided down from 8% a month ago to 5.8%. I’d speculated before that the nearly 20% sitting on the sidelines between Kennedy and undecided indicated that there was a significant block of voters who were saying they didn’t like their choices, but would eventually sort out for Biden or Trump. Currently, they appear to be sorting toward the Democrats.

This is not to say Harris will win, but one could certainly look at these numbers and conclude she very well might. One would have been hard pressed to make that case for Biden in the last three months based on data alone. We’ll check in again in September, but for the moment the campaign’s momentum is clearly toward Harris: