Kamala Harris is beating Trump in ratings, polling, donations & volunteers

Kamala Harris got an incredible polling bounce from the Democratic National Convention. You do have to remember three things though. One, every candidate gets a polling bounce from their convention. Two, national polls don’t mean much because of the electoral college. Three, Democrats should behave as if we’re in a dogfight until November. Now, all that being said, the polls are great, and the latest poll has Harris up seven points over Donald Trump. As in, Harris is now polling at 50%, with Trump at 43%. Which… makes me wonder if that 7% just doesn’t want to admit that they’re voting for Trump. Meanwhile, there’s been a huge surge of enthusiasm and volunteer sign-ups since Harris became the nominee:

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign says it has now raised $540 million for its election battle against Republican nominee former President Donald Trump. The campaign has had no problems getting supporters to open their wallets since President Joe Biden announced on July 21 he was ending his campaign and quickly endorsed Harris. The campaign said it saw a surge of donations during last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago where Harris and her vice presidential running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, accepted their nominations.

“Just before Vice President Harris’ acceptance speech Thursday night, we officially crossed the $500 million mark,” campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in a memo released by the campaign on Sunday. “Immediately after her speech, we saw our best fundraising hour since launch day.”

O’Malley Dillon said that nearly a third of contributions during convention week came from first-time contributors. About one-fifth of those first-time contributors were young voters and two-thirds were women, groups that the campaign sees as critical constituencies that Harris needs to turn out to win in November.

The Harris campaign says it has also seen a surge in volunteer support for the vice president. During convention week, supporters signed up for nearly 200,000 volunteer shifts to help the campaign.

[From PBS]

The surge in volunteer sign-ups is so important – it matters to voters that someone contacts them personally and reminds them to vote. It’s important to voters to get those phone calls or texts from a campaign volunteer. And of course the money is important too – ad buys, an expensive campaign apparatus, and honestly, the Harris campaign is going to need money for lawyers in many states, as the MAGA people will try to ratf–k the election anyway they can.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris is winning in yet another metric: viewership. The DNC beat the RNC in ratings every night, and 28.9 million people watched Kamala Harris’s speech on Thursday, which beat the ratings for Trump’s weird RNC speech in July (not by much, but still).

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.