Harris will beat Trump – litany of polls and strategy prove her strength.

Harris backers have plenty to point to in the aftermath of June’s presidential debate.

There’s the obvious stuff: Harris is younger, can actually string sentences together, and has already been campaigning against Trump this year. These points were once again demonstrated this week — while Biden was forced to recover from Covid at his home in Delaware during the week of the Republican National Convention, Harris was on the trail with North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.

What the data says: First, a caveat: comparing polling of reality to a hypothetical match-up is always a bit treacherous.

What we can say from head-to-head polling of Harris is that the general trend has gotten a lot better for her. A year ago she was underperforming Biden in head-to-head polling against Trump in a variety of surveys. Closer to the debate and right after, she began to perform about evenly. And more recently, in July, a few polls comparing Biden and Harris against Trump in battleground states and nationally have shown Harris even with Biden or slightly ahead of him.

The first sign of this change came from CNN’s first post-debate poll, finding the vice president trailing Trump by 2 percentage points (within the margin of error) while Biden trailed by 6 points. And in FiveThirtyEight’s polls-only post-debate comparison of Harris and Biden vs. Trump, Harris performs slightly better than the president in battleground states — though not in all of them.

Recent polling from Pennsylvania and Virginia also shows more positive signs for the vice president: New York Times/Siena College polls this month show that while Harris still trails Trump by 1 point in Pennsylvania, that’s a smaller gap than the 3 points that put Trump ahead of Biden there. Both of these results are within the polling’s margin of error, making the race in the state essentially tied. In Virginia, meanwhile, Harris’s lead over Trump is 2 points larger than the lead Biden has over the former president.

And a post-assassination attempt national poll from Reuters/Ipsos shows a statistically tied presidential contest for either Biden or Harris against Trump.

Under the hood, however, Harris backers can find an additional data point in their column: 69 percent of respondents think Biden is too old; Harris doesn’t face that concern. And Biden is more unpopular than Harris, something that is consistently true: As of July 18, Biden has a net -17.7 approval rating in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate. Harris’s disapproval is at 11.8. And in RealClearPolitics’ average of favorability ratings, Biden (-16.3) is also more unpopular than Harris (-14.9)

What the campaign trail shows: Harris backers can point to the vice president’s performance on the road this year and argue that she has evolved as a politician since her presidential run in 2019, and especially since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 — when she became the White House’s go-to surrogate and messenger on reproductive rights.

She has dominated that issue, both in official visits to states where abortion and reproductive rights have been under threat, and also during campaign swings this year that have seen her become more willing to talk about the personal experiences that pushed her to become a sex crimes prosecutor and be able to connect with voters in a way Biden can’t.

At the same time, she has been playing up that past as a prosecutor — something she was not able to do during her last national campaign against fellow Democrats. “Prosecuting the case against Donald Trump” is now a go-to part of her stump speeches, both in talking about his and his party’s record on abortion and in talking about Trump’s convictions and indictments.

At the top of the ticket, she would be able to zero in on this approach against an unpopular Republican candidate.