We Dug Into the 2024 Polling Crosstabs. What We Found Was Stunning.

Kamala Harris’ surge in recent national polls is a stunning political turnaround. The story behind her burst of momentum, as told by the polling crosstabs, is even more remarkable.

Less than a month ago, Democrats faced a grim election landscape. President Joe Biden faced trouble with independents and his base, and former President Donald Trump looked set to return to the White House. The ticket switch that saw Biden withdraw and Harris ascend to the Democratic nomination has reset the race by every campaign measure.

In an attempt to understand how widespread and sharp the Democratic rebound has been since Biden dropped out of the race, we dug into the crosstabs of what the highest-rated pollsters have found during this extraordinary period in American politics. With each demographic group, we measured the swing between pollsters’ final, pre-dropout survey with Biden in the race and their most recent, post-dropout survey featuring Harris.

While Harris has closed the gap at the topline level — in national polls, the race is essentially a dead heat — Harris has made eye-popping gains with traditional, core Democratic base voters while also appealing to independents, which is an incredibly difficult needle to thread, especially for a candidate whose favorability ratings were 15 points underwater before replacing Biden.

Harris has registered gains across a wide range of demographic categories, but the improvement has been especially pronounced among young voters, non-white voters and women voters. Taken together, the numbers suggest that the Harris swap has largely repaired a fraying Democratic coalition, has repaired the party’s image presidentially among independents, and has dragged the election back to a tossup, at the minimum. In short, she has managed to do something that every candidate can only dream of: appeal to her base without turning off swing voters.

To map her improvement, we looked at ten high-quality polls and examined the changes in the crosstabs both before and after Biden dropped out of the race.

A spike among non-white voters

Biden had held up surprisingly well with white voters given his diminished position overall. But his standing with non-white voters of all stripes was at an all-time low among modern Democratic presidential candidates. Biden was only winning Black voters by 50 points; had this held, it would comfortably have set records for the worst presidential performance by any Democratic nominee in recent history and would have marked a rightward swing of nearly 30 points from his 2020 margins. Numbers like this would have made Georgia and North Carolina, two swing states with relatively high Black populations, completely unwinnable for Democrats.

Biden’s performance with Hispanics was similarly abysmal, facing double-digit erosion from his 2020 margins (an especially alarming collapse, given that those margins were already significantly worse than Hillary Clinton’s 2016 numbers with Latinos). This type of collapse meant that Sun Belt states like Arizona and Nevada were almost entirely out of play for him. In fact, The New York Times’ polling aggregator showed Biden down by at least six points in both states, a startling finding given that Biden outright won them in 2020.

By comparison, Harris holds up far, far better. While she has not yet hit Biden’s 2020 benchmarks with those groups, she has still managed to make double-digit gains with Black voters and has notched substantial gains with Hispanics. That explains why the Sun Belt is suddenly back in play for Democrats. Her effect has been to widen the map, opening more paths to 270 electoral votes — polling aggregates suggest that both Georgia and Arizona have become virtual ties, and a good chunk of this has to do with her substantial improvements among minority groups.

Expanding the gender gap

The post-Biden shift also appears to exacerbate the nation’s continuing gender polarization. Like those with non-white voters, Harris’ significant gains with women improve her electoral prospects nationwide. Post-dropout polls suggest that the gap between women and men has only widened since Biden left the race, with Harris gaining significantly with women while holding steady with men.

Harris’ gains with the group could have outsized electoral implications, especially considering that women vote more consistently than men and generally comprise a slightly larger share of the electorate. In any case, Harris’ surge with women is not particularly surprising. Aside from the fact that she stands to become the first woman president, Republican rhetoric on women’s health care and abortion access has repelled many formerly persuadable women voters, leading to some of the largest gender gaps observed in modern history.

Young voters are back

Perhaps the most startling development in Biden’s 2024 polling numbers was his abysmal standing with young voters. Barack Obama, Clinton and even Biden received over 60 percent of the youth vote during their presidential runs. But Biden’s numbers this year were tracking to be the worst of any Democratic candidate since Al Gore (who won young voters by just two points in 2000) , and polls suggested that his advantage with this group had been virtually eradicated.

It wasn’t entirely surprising — Biden was already the oldest president in history, and at the age of 82, would have been the oldest candidate ever fielded by any major political party. With serious questions and concerns about his health and mental acuity, and deep economic dissatisfaction marring much of his tenure, it would follow that young voters would have soured on him.

Yet these same voters continued to heavily back Democratic candidates on all other levels of the ballot. For instance, in the 2022 midterms, young voters gave Democratic congressional candidates a higher share of the two-way vote (65 percent) than they gave the Democratic nominee in any of the past three presidential elections. Polling also indicated that the weakness with young voters was a Biden-specific phenomenon. So it should come as no surprise that Harris has recovered to the standard Democratic margins with young voters overnight, with surveys showing a massive swing to the left following her ascension.

The flip side of Biden’s age? While it was a vulnerability with young voters, it also helped him hold up relatively well with seniors, many of whom had grown to trust him over his decades in office. In fact, polls suggest that Harris has lost ground with seniors, making this the one group that Biden did better with than Harris.

Bridging the education divide

Educational polarization defined political discourse during the Trump era and remains an important dividing line today as the parties’ electoral bases realign. College-educated voters are far more likely than their low-propensity counterparts to turn out consistently. With Trump-era Democratic gains among college-educated voters — particularly in the suburbs — accelerating post-Dobbs, it’s turned conventional political wisdom on its head. It’s no longer assumed that Republicans benefit from low-turnout elections , where high-propensity, better-educated voters tend to make up a disproportionately larger share of the electorate.

Harris has gained among both college and non-college educated voters, but her gains with the latter actually exceed her gains with the former. Her five-point gain over Biden with non-college voters represents a substantial improvement on the state of play before he withdrew. Among college-educated voters, Harris’ gains are more muted, with the crosstab swings suggesting a three point shift in her direction. Some of this tracks well with her improvement among non-white voters, suggesting that a good chunk of her gains have come from her consolidation of non-white, non-college educated voters.

Threading the needle with independents

Perhaps the most overlooked — and yet critical — factor playing into Harris’ polling boom is that she has been able to achieve what is traditionally the trickiest task for most candidates: Firing up her base while making gains with independents.

The most telling indicator of increased base enthusiasm is that Harris has rapidly consolidated Democrats around her. Previously, Republicans were far more united around Trump’s candidacy than Democrats were around Biden, but Harris’ entrance has fundamentally reshaped the equation. Harris has made 7 points worth of gains with Democrats in a relatively short period of time, a startling figure showing both the disaffection many Democrats felt toward Biden, as well as the newfound energy many of them are feeling with her. New polls suggest that both party nominees are now getting the same margins with their own party’s voters, with Harris winning Democrats by 89 points and Trump winning Republicans by 88 points.

Harris has achieved this without turning off independent voters. In fact, she has simultaneously managed to gain 9 percent with independents. Some of this may just have to do with the fact that she is substantially younger than Biden, which addresses one of the largest gripes voters appear to have had with the president’s candidacy prior to his dropping out. But it likely is also related to Harris' own campaigning and candidacy.

Harris has made sure to take steps to distance herself from previous unpopular views that she voiced during the 2020 campaign, which has helped her redefine her image at the moment as a more moderate candidate. This has helped her resemble a “generic Democrat” in ways that she simply never did pre-dropout; as voters get to know her, they appear to not have major concerns , at least for now. There is time for this to change, but it appears as if her initial rollout has been highly successful.

As a whole , the rapid turnaround in public opinion has been nothing short of unprecedented, especially for a candidate that was broadly seen as very unpopular just one month ago.

Whether this lasts is anyone’s guess — after all, there still remains a good chunk of time in an already jarring election season that has seen a criminal conviction, an assassination attempt and a candidate swap, all before the post-Labor Day homestretch. It’s also critical to note that Biden’s deficit was so acute that even with all of Harris’ recent gains, the presidential race still arguably remains a tossup.

It’s a far cry from where things stood just four weeks ago. And with the unifying effect of the Democratic convention still to come, Harris’ surge may not yet be played out.

Methodological notes: High-quality pollsters were defined as pollsters accredited by FiveThirtyEight, an electoral modeling and analysis site, with a minimum rating of 2.5 out of 3 stars . Importantly, to ensure an apples-to-apples comparison, we measured the “within-pollster” change — that is, the change for each individual pollster between their most recent poll for Biden and most recent poll for Harris, before aggregating the shifts for race, gender, age and education. To control for pollster differences in age category definitions, we defined “young voters” as the youngest demographic measured in the survey, whereas for seniors, we defined it as the oldest demographic measured in the survey. There were ten polls analyzed for the purposes of this exercise.