Senate candidates outran Biden, and Harris will help energize voters.

Now, with Biden stepping aside and Vice President Harris taking the mantle as the likely nominee, Democrats will find out whether the president’s struggle with voters this year was something unique to him and his frailty. Polling has been a bit uneven since Biden’s withdrawal on Sunday, but several surveys seem to suggest that the vice president has energized Democrats and pulled back some voters who had preferred a third-party choice rather than Biden. Democrats believe their message and their campaigns were properly structured, but that their messenger had his own unique flaws. Democrats are betting that Harris, 59, can re-energize a liberal coalition that has delivered popular-vote victories in four straight presidential elections and replicate their defeat of Trump four years ago. “I have never seen such a quick reversal of an emotional state. The anti-Trump coalition was just waiting to be reactivated. We are back,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said after Harris and allies raised $250 million in two days. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), an early Biden endorser in 2020, cited the June 27 debate as “the pivot point” from which Democrats could not escape questions about the president’s ability to serve another four years. “We as Democrats have an enormous record to run on,” Houlahan said in an interview, saying those accomplishments got drowned out by voter perceptions of the 81-year-old incumbent’s ability to perform the job. “We were constantly talking about the debate,” she added. With Harris at the top of the ticket, Democrats hope the gloomy issue of Biden’s age will fade or even shift onto the backs of GOP candidates supporting the 78-year-old Trump, with his own questions about fitness to serve into 2029. “We can talk about the future,” Schatz said, accusing Republicans of a social policy agenda that would take America back to “the late 1950s.” Republicans dismiss the argument that Biden was the only thing dragging down Democrats as overly hyped. They argue that overlooks how poorly voters viewed Biden’s handling of key issues such as inflation and the border for several years before his debate debacle last month.

“Obviously, Biden’s age and everything were pulling down his support, but the policies that he embraced are the same policies that Harris has embraced,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) told reporters on Tuesday. Cornyn, who is running to be Senate Republican leader next year, said he would welcome a campaign that was less of a “personality race” and focused more on those policy issues. Yet for almost a year, GOP challengers have pounded away at Democratic candidates in those same battleground states on those issues, with only marginal impact so far. In Pennsylvania, both Casey and McCormick have been airing television ads steadily since the early spring. Their campaigns spent a combined $18 million in the second quarter, with Casey holding an almost 2-to-1 edge, but outside super PACs are also flooding the airwaves. After McCormick won his primary in late April, the race had closed to a narrow 46-41 lead for the Democratic incumbent, according to the Times-Sienna poll. That grew to Casey receiving 50 percent against McCormick’s 39 percent in their poll released last week. Other, less reliable polls showed Casey with leads in a similar range after Biden’s debate flop. Meanwhile, Pennsylvanians have remained sour on Biden almost the entire year, favoring Trump 47 to 44 percent in the early May poll and almost identically 48 to 44 percent after the debate.

Kaine saw a similar development in his race. “After the debate, for some weird reason, I’m going up and [the presidential race] went back to a dead head,” he said Wednesday. In Wisconsin, as Biden’s numbers moved up a bit in the spring into a narrow lead and then down again after the debate, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) has maintained a steady lead over her GOP foe of about 5 percentage points or more. The Marquette poll, considered the state’s most reliable, showed that 41 percent of voters had a favorable view of Baldwin in the fall, versus 43 percent that viewed her unfavorably. By mid-June, after millions had been spent trying to tarnish her image, Baldwin’s favorability ratings had climbed to 45 to 44 percent unfavorable. That poll gave her a nine-point lead among likely voters, as independents favored her by 4 percentage points against banking executive Eric Hovde. Biden trailed Trump by 16 percentage points among independents in a head-to-head match. Democratic advisers working on Senate races said the most competitive races mirrored the relative steadiness of Democratic candidates in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, despite Biden’s own decline in many of these states. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, in a memo about the state of the race for the House majority, said that its top-priority incumbents in competitive districts — called “Frontliners” — had also maintained a political resiliency throughout the tumultuous spring and summer. They held steady leads into mid-July, along with top Democratic challengers to GOP House incumbents, according to the DCCC, which said it had “no poll showing atrophy in their support” after the debate.