The Kamala Effect: More Black People Plan To Vote Compared To When Biden Was Nominee, New Poll Finds
Vice President Kamala Harris greets the crowd during her presidential campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 30, 2024. | Source: Anadolu / Getty
Vice President Kamala Harris‘ campaign for the White House is increasingly having a positive and tangible effect on democracy as well as the overall voting populace, new data shows.
Not only has Harris’ candidacy invigorated a Democratic voting base that was on the fence when President Joe Biden was the Party’s presumptive nominee, but it also has made a noticeable difference among Black voters, in particular, according to a new national poll.
MORE: How Kamala Harris’ Candidacy Is Inspiring Young Black Voters In Texas
When broken down along Party lines, those results seem to fare better for Harris than they do for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Since Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris to replace him at the top of the Party’s presidential ticket, the percentage of Black voters who are Democrats rose by four points, a new CBS News poll released on Sunday found.
On July 18, three days before Biden stepped aside from the presidential race, 81% of Black voters who are registered Democrats said they planned to vote. Now, just a little more than two weeks later, the percentage of Black voters who say they definitely will vote in the 2024 election has risen to 85% in a trend that will likely continue on an upward trajectory.
Conversely, the percentage of Black voters who are registered Republicans and say they plan to vote in the 2024 election fell two points — from 90% to 88% — suggesting Harris’ candidacy has had the opposite effect among that demographic participating in the democratic process in November.
On a broader level, the percentage of all Black voters who say they will definitely vote in the general election has risen a whopping 16 percentage points since Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee.
On July 18, just 58% of Black voters said they were guaranteed to cast ballots in the presidential election.
Now, that number has skyrocketed to 74%, and counting.
Notably, the polling support among Black voters enjoyed by Harris exceeds the levels of Black voter support Biden experienced in 2020 when he beat Trump.
Back in the same time period four years ago, 73% of Black Democratic voters said Biden was their choice for president. Now, that percentage as of Sunday stood at 81%, the CBS News poll found.
While all of the above is good news for Harris, the poll still found that she was only clinging to a lead over Trump of just 1 percentage point — 50% to Trump’s 49%.
Still, another way to look at that slim lead is that Biden was down five percentage points when he dropped out of the race, further suggesting that Harris’ candidacy has invigorated Democrats as well as its most faithful bloc of supporters — Black voters.
The race gets even tighter when looking at swing battleground states, as the candidates are statistically tied at 50%.
However, with Harris expected to pick her vice presidential running mate this week before embarking on a seven-state campaign blitz, such an announcement could serve to further fuel her campaign and put more polling space in between her and Trump’s respective campaigns.
Likely because of the inroads Harris has shown since becoming a presidential candidate, Republicans have ramped up the racist rhetoric about her, including birther attacks that falsely question her eligibility for the White House because of her Indian heritage.
But as we saw back in 2008, when Trump tried the same tactics to no avail against Barack Obama, playing up racism could backfire for Republicans and end up helping to elect the first woman president of the United States.
This is America.
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Kamala Harris Can’t Just Defeat Trump, She Also Needs To Defeat Trumpism
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