For his entire aborted 2024 reelection campaign, no issues threatened to hamstring President Joe Biden quite as much as the economy and immigration.

The economy is almost always voters’ top issue, and views of Biden’s handling of it were routinely way underwater. Immigration is generally less important in voters’ minds, but a border crisis pushed Biden’s numbers on the issue to historically low levels — to the point where three-fourths of independents and large numbers of Democrats disapproved. One poll early this year showed Americans preferred Donald Trump over Biden on immigration by more than 30 points.

Vice President Kamala Harris replacing Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee has significantly blunted those liabilities for Democrats.

A new poll this week piqued more than a few people’s interest. It came from the Financial Times and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, and it showed that about as many Americans preferred Harris on the economy (42 percent) as preferred Trump (41 percent). Such a finding was previously unthinkable, after many months of the economy dogging Biden.

That might overstate how much Harris has mitigated this issue for Democrats. But it’s surely somewhat.

Across three other recent polls to compare the two candidates on the issues — national polls from NPR/PBS/Marist College and Marquette University Law School and a swing-state poll from the New York Times and Siena College — Harris has trimmed between six and nine points off Biden’s previous deficits to Trump on the economy.

On immigration, she has trimmed between four and seven points off Biden’s previous deficits.

That said, she still trails Trump on these issues — by between three and 12 points on the economy, and by between five and 18 points on immigration. And a CNBC poll last week showed that about twice as many voters said they thought they’d be better off financially if Trump wins (40 percent) as said the same of Harris winning (21 percent).

That suggests these key issues remain a liability, just less of one.

Harris has redrawn the issue contrast rapidly on other issues, too. And she has built a bigger lead on some key ones that already favored Democrats.

The key one: Polls suggest she’s much better situated to take advantage of Democrats’ advantage on abortion rights. While Biden led Trump on that issue by around 10 points in previous Times/Siena and Marquette polls, Harris now leads by 19 points in the Times/Siena poll and 23 points in the Marquette poll.

Harris has also gained somewhat in these polls on another issue Democrats have sought to emphasize, democracy, as well as health care and Medicare and Social Security.

Harris now leads by double digits on each of these issues, which Democrats hope will offset their deficits on the economy and immigration.

It’s valid to ask why Harris suddenly over-performs Biden on these issues, particularly given that she has served alongside him for 3½ years. There is little indication thus far that her policies differ markedly from his, and she has yet to detail too many policies — though that is beginning to change this week.

But policy isn’t the only factor; so too is a candidate’s perceived ability to effectuate that policy and be a strong leader. It seems possible that, amid plenty of Democratic fretting about how Biden didn’t seem to get enough credit for strong, non-inflation economic indicators, many voters were dinging Biden because of their belief that he simply wasn’t up to the task — not necessarily because of specific outcomes.

And perhaps there was an opening for them backing off these concerns. Many voters, for instance, perceive their own finances or the economy in their area as being strong, even as they viewed the national economy much more negatively. That suggests this might not be as immediate and lingering an electoral concern as it might seem.

What’s clear is that, for whatever reason, Harris isn’t bogged down on these issues due to her connection with Biden. She might not be the “change” candidate, per se, but she benefits from a perception that she’d be better.

It’s not enough to give her an advantage on those two top-line issues (that Financial Times poll notwithstanding), but it is enough to give her more of a fighting chance — for now.

One month ago, the Republican Party was convening in Milwaukee to anoint Donald Trump as its presidential nominee for the third consecutive election. The convention was energetic and brash; the attempt on Trump’s life had reinforced Republicans’ already robust enthusiasm for their candidate, and Trump skeptics had long ago been rooted out of the inner circle. Polling showed that the former president was on a glide path to election. States that hadn’t been red in decades suddenly looked like they might be in play in 2024.

Then the convention ended. President Joe Biden announced that he would no longer seek the Democratic Party’s nomination, clearing the way for Vice President Kamala Harris. Democrats, suddenly giddy about their chances and about their candidate, threw cash at the revamped candidacy. Harris surged in the polls.

But that wasn’t the only shift the race has undergone in recent months. In addition to Trump suddenly facing an entirely new opponent — to his obvious chagrin — he’s also facing a shifted political landscape. He’d intended to run against Biden and the Biden administration’s track record on crime, immigration and inflation. But none of those attacks is as potent as it was two years ago.

Crime

It goes without saying that the coronavirus pandemic upended the country in numerous ways. What was not clear at the time, though, was how sticky the effects might be. When violent crime surged in 2020 and into 2021, for example, it wasn’t clear whether this was a permanent reversion of the downward trend the country had seen since the early 1990s.

Fox News has been consistently insistent that crime is surging under Biden, making fearmongering about crime a central component of its coverage before the 2022 midterms. Since that point, though, data has repeatedly indicated that crime — and violent crime in particular — has declined over the past few years.

As we’ve noted, measuring national crime trends in real time is tricky. Data are available in some cities, but consistent national data is gathered only well after the fact. Even then, it’s often incomplete. But the data that are available and outside analyses of city-level trends suggest a noteworthy decline.

Last week, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, an organization of law enforcement leaders, released data showing sharp drops in violent crime in a number of large American cities between the first half of 2023 and the first half of 2024. Biden hailed the data, crediting the American Rescue Plan.

This is not the only such data. FBI data released in June showed a similar year-over-year decline, as did data the bureau released in December. When the agency released its data for 2022, it showed a decrease in crime that year — contrary to Fox News’s coverage.

Immigration

Mirroring his 2016 campaign for president, Trump has focused heavily on immigration in his bid to regain the presidency. He’s fond of amplifying data about the number of apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border to suggest that the country is overrun with new arrivals, particularly those who entered the country illegally.

This rhetoric is enabled by the complexity of the subject (like that those entering the country to seek asylum are often granted permission to remain and that a large percentage of those apprehended have been quickly removed from the country). But Trump’s assertions about an “open border” are also hobbled by the striking decrease in apprehensions in recent months.

In December, nearly 250,000 people were apprehended between border checkpoints on the border with Mexico. In January, though, the number was half as large. From February to March, the monthly figure dropped by 2 percent. From March to April, it was down 6 percent. Then 9 percent the next month and, in June, down 29 percent over May — the month in which the Biden administration unveiled new rules governing asylum applications. The result is that apprehensions in June were a third of those seen in December.

The figure is still high, certainly, more in line with levels of apprehensions seen during the administration of George W. Bush than that of Barack Obama. Apprehensions were low under Obama in part because the U.S. economy was still recovering from the recession; they were unusually low in 2020 because of the pandemic.

Another way to look at it: There were fewer apprehensions between border checkpoints in June 2024 than there were in June 2019 under Donald Trump.

Prices

The central argument Trump has been using for his candidacy, of course, is that the country has been wracked by inflation. And that’s true; after the initial restrictions linked to the pandemic were eased, prices surged along with demand.

Trump points to various products to emphasize those price increases. He often claims that gasoline jumped from $1.87 during his administration to somewhere north of $5 under Biden. Speaking to Elon Musk on Monday, he offered another example: Bacon now costs “4 or 5 times more than it did a few years ago.”

The reason gasoline was cheap during the Trump administration, of course, is that demand crashed as people were staying home to avoid the coronavirus. Nor are national prices north of $5; they’ve leveled off in recent months in the $3.50 range, according to the Energy Information Administration. Bacon did surge in cost in 2021, but has since stabilized (well below four times what it cost a few years ago).

It’s worth noting, by the way, that the national average price of gas in recent months is somewhat lower than it was under Obama. It was during the Obama administration that prices dropped to the levels that Trump now exaggerates.

What’s important about the gas and bacon prices, though, is that, after the initial surge, prices didn’t keep climbing higher and higher. Prices of those products jumped — and then remained at those new higher levels.

This isn’t great, and these are just two products. It is also true, as the administration argues, that average wages have increased more rapidly since 2021 and that the increase in the rate of inflation has slowed. (You can see it on the graph at right below, that little inflection point marked with the vertical dotted line.) The rate of increase in wages has in recent months consistently been larger than the rate of increase of inflation, in fact.

On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new data on inflation showing that the annual increase last month was lower than at any point since March 2021. Again, this isn’t deflation, a decrease in prices. But it does suggest that the valid concerns about the rate at which prices were increasing have been significantly addressed.

This is an esoteric evaluation of the economy, certainly, but polling data suggests that Trump’s advantage on the economy has narrowed, in part thanks to the change at the top of the Democratic ticket.

These shifts also are not likely to change Trump’s rhetoric. He is no more interested in presenting accurate information about crime, immigration and inflation than he ever was, so he highlights things like the unmeasured-and-exaggerated concept of “migrant crime” to stoke fears about the direction of the country.

Still, the current numbers are a reflection of how the ground under Trump’s feet has shifted. He’s running against the first half of Biden’s administration, when Biden was his opponent and crime, inflation and immigration were acute problems. But now, to his chagrin, it’s 2024. The landscape is very different.

The messaging in presidential political advertisements has dramatically shifted in the weeks since President Joe Biden abandoned his bid for a second term and Vice President Kamala Harris united the Democratic Party to seize the nomination.

A Washington Post analysis of data from the political research firm AdImpact found that Democrats have shifted the primary focus of their ads from Donald Trump’s character and dire warnings about the twice-impeached former president’s threat to democracy to issues such as abortion and the economy.

Republicans also have recalibrated their messaging, heavily focusing on immigration and accusing Harris of mishandling the U.S.-Mexico border among other criticisms.

Harris is set to accept the party’s nomination next Thursday at the Democratic convention in Chicago, a month and a day since Biden dropped his bid. In the weeks since, the two parties have changed the tone and topics of their ads, seeking to capitalize on issues to energize their bases and win over swing voters in what is expected to be a close Nov. 5 election.

Biden forged his 2020 and 2024 campaigns on a message casting Trump as an existential threat to the nation. But since he dropped out and Harris took over as the nominee, the Democratic ad campaign has shifted from that serious forewarning in favor of a sunnier political vision. The move comes as Democrats, including Harris’s choice for vice president, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, adopted a more colloquial criticism, calling Trump and vice-presidential nominee JD Vance “weird.”

With Harris’s shorter-than-usual runway to the general election, the most frequently run Democratic ads since Biden dropped out have been aimed at introducing her to voters by focusing on her biography, depicting her as someone who has fought for everyday Americans.

In one such ad paid for by “Harris for President,” a male narrator calls the vice president “fearless” and recites the arc of her career — from prosecutor to California attorney general to vice president — before talking about how Trump “wants to take our country backward.”

Another ad that aired nationally during the Olympics highlights Harris’s own remarks on abortion and the economy.

“I’m running to fight for an America where the economy works for working people, where you only have to work one job to pay the bills and where hard work is rewarded,” Harris says in the ad from FF PAC. “Where reproductive rights are not just protected by the Constitution of the United States, but guaranteed in every state because that’s our America, and that’s the America I believe in.”

On the airwaves, the data show that abortion, the economy and fighting crime also have been the top issues in the Democratic ads since Biden dropped out, replacing the previous top priorities of Trump’s character and cutting health-care costs.

The Republican ads portray a far different version of Harris, suggesting that she hid that Biden was unfit for office.

“Kamala knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it,” a female narrator says in the ad, which was paid for by the MAGA Inc. super PAC. “Look what she got done. A border invasion, runaway inflation, the American Dream dead. They created this mess.”

The Post reviewed all presidential television political advertisements collected by AdImpact from Super Tuesday, March 5, through Aug. 9. AdImpact classifies up to three issues as the primary focus of each ad based on the narration and videos. The firm also measures how many times each advertisement has been aired. The Post analyzed which issues appeared most frequently before and after Biden dropped out.

The Harris campaign and officials from MAGA Inc., and Future Forward PAC had no immediate comment.

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Harris became the Biden administration’s most vocal advocate for abortion access — an issue that the president, a practicing Catholic, had long struggled to discuss. The issue has proved to be a successful one for Democrats, and it’s expected to emerge as a motivating factor for voters in November.

There were major victories for abortion access last year in conservative-leaning states, and Democrats have seen a wave of election wins tied to their emphasis on protecting reproductive rights since Roe was overturned.

On Tuesday, Missouri and Arizona — the latter a key battleground state — both secured ballot initiatives aimed at enshrining abortion rights in their state constitutions, state officials said. The issue is also set to go before voters this year in Colorado, Florida, Maryland, New York, South Dakota and another battleground state, Nevada.

The GOP’s presidential campaign message has depicted a dark vision of Democratic rule, steeped in grievance about the direction of the country. Since Biden dropped out, Republican ads have focused less on inflation and the economy. Immigration has been emphasized in 98 percent of Republican presidential ads aired since Harris became the likely nominee. Other prevailing themes emphasized in the ads have included crime and illegal drugs.

When asked what drove the Trump campaign’s shift in messaging, national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that the former president and his campaign would “use every tool at” their disposal “to ensure every American knows that Kamala Harris is responsible for the illegal immigration and inflation crises that we face.”

Republicans for years have attacked Harris as a failed “border czar,” deeming her responsible for dealing with the surge of migrants attempting to enter the country. Biden directed her as vice president to tackle the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. She was never put in charge of the border nor designated a “czar.”

Americans’ concerns about immigration have risen sharply this year, according to a poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs released earlier this month. Half of Americans said the large number of immigrants and refugees entering the country is a “critical threat” to U.S. interests, the highest level since 2010. The poll found that most Americans support two proposals laid out by Trump: using U.S. troops to stop migrants from entering the country and expanding the U.S.-Mexico border wall. But a larger majority of Americans oppose Trump’s proposal to put undocumented immigrants in mass-detention camps.

Immigration has not exactly been a great winning play for Trump since his 2016 run for president. Ahead of the 2018 midterm election, Trump leaned into the issue, repeatedly warning about the threat of a migrant caravan crossing into the United States. Although immigration was a top issue of concern for voters that cycle, Democrats were still able to take control of the House, largely on fears about the GOP effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Crime has also become a flash point of both campaigns. Democrats’ ads have focused on Harris’s record combating crime as a prosecutor. Republican ads assert that Harris was a progressive prosecutor who let dangerous criminals go free, and that she is responsible for the crimes committed by immigrants in the United States while she has been vice president.

Data released by the FBI in June showed drops in crime across the United States over the last year. Violent crime was down nationally in the first quarter of 2024 by more than 15 percent relative to the prior year, according to the data. And the drop in the number of murders reported by the FBI was also the largest in the country’s biggest cities. But not every law enforcement agency reports its data to the FBI on time, and the accuracy of reports provided by individual agencies varies.

Emily Guskin contributed to this report.

President Joe Biden reiterated his call Wednesday for the release of freelance journalist Austin Tice, saying that his administration has “repeatedly pressed” Syria to work with the United States to secure his return.

Biden’s comments came in a statement marking 12 years since Tice was abducted in Syria.

“We have repeatedly pressed the government of Syria to work with us so that we can, at last, bring Austin home,” Biden said in the statement. “Today, I once again call for his immediate release.”

Tice, a Marine veteran and Texas native, was abducted on Aug. 14, 2012, while reporting on the civil war in Syria. He disappeared at a checkpoint outside Damascus, and video surfaced months later showing him blindfolded and being held by a group of armed men.

U.S. officials have long insisted the Syrian government is holding Tice, which the country has denied. Biden said in 2022 his administration knows “with certainty” that Syria has had Tice in captivity.

Earlier this month, Biden helped bring home two American journalists held abroad, Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, as part of the largest prisoner exchange since the Cold War. They were freed along with a third American who had been imprisoned in Russia, Marine veteran Paul Whelan.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken also released a statement on the 12-year anniversary of Tice’s abduction.

“This has gone on for far too long,” Blinken said. “We call on the Syrian government to work with the United States to end Austin’s captivity and to provide an accounting for the fate of other Americans who went missing in Syria.”

Echoing Biden, Blinken said the United States has “repeatedly offered to find a way to bring him home.”

The FBI has posted a reward of up to $1 million for any “information leading directly to the safe location, recovery, and return” of Tice.

Tice worked for a number of news organizations, including CBS, The Washington Post and McClatchy. In a statement on the recent prisoner swap, The Post’s leaders called for the “safe return of American journalist Austin Tice and all wrongfully detained journalists and hostages.”

“Independent journalism is a critical function of democracy,” the statement said. “The U.S. government must make it a priority to bring them all home safely and champion the importance of press freedom worldwide.”

The 2020 presidential election coincided with the Census Bureau’s decennial tally of the number of people living in the United States. You know this; every year ending in a zero has a census. But perhaps you don’t recognize the importance of this count.

For one thing, it meant a reallocation of House seats — and, by extension, a rejiggering of electoral vote distribution. If the two-party results of the 2024 election were precisely the same as those of the 2020 election, Kamala Harris would see an electoral vote margin that is six votes smaller than the one Joe Biden enjoyed, thanks to the shift of House seats (and electoral votes) from states that voted blue to states that voted red.

And that’s even before you consider the demographic changes that have taken place. On Monday, the New York Times reported that there has been an uptick in the rate at which new citizens are being naturalized. It’s not uncommon for citizenship applications to increase as an election approaches, but the government has increased resources to grant citizenship to qualified applicants on an expedited timeline.

This approach is “potentially reshaping the electorate, merely months before a pivotal election,” Xiao Wang, head of a company that analyzes immigration data, told the paper. “Every citizenship application could be a vote that decides Senate seats or even the presidency.”

This exclamation lands differently depending on one’s view of immigration and, in this political moment, one’s view of the idea that the political left is seeking to deliberately flood the country with new immigrant voters. This false belief is stoked by Republicans because it casts the left’s support for immigration as nefarious or self-serving, and because it offers a new way to frame immigration as dangerous to the right.

But while Wang is correct — every eligible voter might be the one to swing a close election — it is important to consider the relatively modest number of naturalized citizens in context.

Demographic data necessarily lags the state of the population in any given moment, since counting people and reporting on the results takes time. But we have data on the population in each state, including the number of naturalized citizens and the number of deaths in recent years that allows us to both project what the population will look like in 2024 and to compare it with the population of each state in 2020.

Using four categories — change in the 18-to-64 population, change in the 65-and-over population, total deaths and the change in naturalized citizens — here’s how the resident population of each state changed from 2020 to 2024.

Notice (as with the Alaska example) that a number of states have fewer adults under the age of 65 than they did in 2020. No states have fewer adults ages 65 and over.

This is a recognized demographic trend. The baby boom lasted from 1946 to 1964, swelling the population. Subsequent generations have been smaller, especially relative to the country’s population. Those boomers are now ages 60 to 78, which is why the senior population is growing. That’s pulled a lot of 60-somethings out of the 18-to-64 pool and into the 65-and-up pool. (The peak year of baby-boom births was 1957. People born that year were 63 in 2020 and 67 now.)

The change in naturalized citizens is also uniformly an increase. (This looks at the number of naturalized citizens measured by the Census Bureau, not data on naturalizations.) But it’s more modest than the increase in adults overall or even new senior citizens. There is some overlap between those categories. In fiscal 2023, a fifth of newly naturalized citizens were 65 and over. (A third of all newly naturalized citizens that year were relatives of American citizens.)

The number of deaths in each state since 2020 — swollen by the coronavirus pandemic — is larger than the increase in people 65 and older or than the number of naturalized citizens. In all but nine states, the projected number of deaths from 2021 to 2024 is larger than the number of adults projected to have been added to the population.

The states that saw more deaths than added adults voted for Joe Biden by a seven-point margin in 2020. The states that saw more adults added than deaths backed Donald Trump by three points.

These numbers don’t generally overlap with partisanship, though. Naturalized citizens are not presumptively aligned with one particular party, nor are older voters. In April, we looked at the change in voter registration for people moving between states, which is a better (if itself now outdated) way of assessing that change.

Perhaps the most useful way to consider these numbers, then, is to remember that state-level polling doesn’t reflect huge shifts from the 2020 to the 2024 races. The odds are that changes in state populations from aging, deaths or naturalization have effects mostly at the margins.

Wang remains right, though: Those margins may be what determines the outcome. But that’s true of all voters, not just the new citizens.

Back in June, the Pew Research Center offered a sobering bit of data. The percentage of Americans who viewed both major parties’ presumptive presidential nominees unfavorably had reached 25 percent, 1 in 4. It was the highest such percentage in the history of Pew’s polling, and it suggested that people who disliked both candidates were poised to be the determining factor in November.

But that was June, back when the two still-presumptive nominees were former president Donald Trump and President Joe Biden. Then Biden — certainly understanding that his broad unpopularity was not a political asset — stepped aside. And, just like that, the race was redefined. No longer is 2024 a contest defined by double-haters, people who dislike both candidates.

Or at least, not so much.

On Wednesday, Monmouth University released new polling showing the difference between a Trump-Biden race and a Trump-Harris one.

Evaluating Trump and Biden, about 4 in 10 respondents viewed Trump favorably but not Biden and another 4 in 10 viewed only Biden favorably. About 2 in 10 viewed both unfavorably — the double-haters.

When comparing Trump and Harris, though, the double-hater pool was sliced in half. A lot more people view only Harris favorably than view only Trump favorably.

Put another way, a bunch of the double-haters shifted to liking only Harris. Asked to choose between Harris and Trump, those who view both Biden and Trump unfavorably picked Harris by a 5 to 1 margin.

You can see Harris’s advantages over Biden and Trump when breaking out the overall responses on Monmouth’s favorability question. Harris is viewed more positively overall. But among members of each politician’s own party, you can see Harris’s wide advantage: A lot of Democrats view Biden somewhat favorably, but three-quarters view Harris very positively. It’s a higher percentage than the percentage of Republicans who view Trump very favorably.

Among independents, a group that’s generally pretty skeptical of politicians, Harris is viewed about as favorably as unfavorably.

YouGov released other polling recently that mirrors Monmouth’s findings. Conducted for the Economist, it asked people how they felt about the two presidential and two vice presidential candidates, the latter being Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).

At both candidate levels, the Democrats were more popular. Walz is now much better known than he was when Harris picked him, but more Americans have an opinion of Vance. A negative one, on net.

One detail to notice from those results: Republicans are much more lukewarm about Vance than Democrats are about Walz. It’s also worth noting that a Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday shows Harris leading in the state of Pennsylvania. Her selection of Walz was criticized by media observers in part because it was believed that selecting Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was important to her success in that state.

YouGov also asked Americans whether certain terms applied to Harris and Trump. Despite Trump’s energetic efforts to portray Harris as unintelligent, that perception hasn’t caught on. In fact, Americans are more likely to describe Harris as intelligent than they are to describe Trump that way. Even members of their own parties are more likely to describe Harris as intelligent than Trump. Harris has slightly smaller advantages on ‘hard-working’ and ‘qualified.’

Perhaps the most striking finding, though, is that most Americans believe it’s fair to describe Trump as ‘corrupt’ — including 1 in 8 voters who say they plan to vote for Trump to be president. Harris, despite having a much more limited political profile, is viewed as corrupt by more than 4 in 10 Americans, including three-quarters of Republicans. This is unquestionably somewhat a function of ‘corrupt’ serving as a catch-all pejorative for disliked political actors — good news, in a sense, for Trump.

For now, Harris holds a strong position in her race against Trump. Voters like her better than Biden, including Democrats, and they’re rewarding her with their support. (In YouGov’s poll, Harris has a slight lead over the former president.) The campaign isn’t over yet, and Trump and his allies are just starting to target Harris and Walz with negative rhetoric and ads. But, for the moment, Harris has managed to break the grip that political skeptics had on the 2024 contest earlier this year. The double-haters may prove to be less important than the Harris enthusiasts.

Update: Within minutes of this article being published, Pew released a new assessment of the presidential race. It found, like Monmouth, that Harris’s favorability numbers have improved. It also found that the percentage of people with negative views of both candidates had fallen — again almost in half.

Kamala Harris, amid a furious battle for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, embraced a ban on fracking and offshore drilling. She supported Medicare-for-all. At one point, she advocated abolishing private health insurance. And she signaled an openness to a sweeping overhaul of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Now, the vice president’s campaign says she would not pursue the fracking and offshore drilling ban — it’s a highly unpopular position in states like Pennsylvania where natural gas drives the economy — if she becomes president. She does not support a single-payer health-care system, instead focusing on what she and President Joe Biden call “corporate price-gouging” by pharmaceutical companies. And she is taking a much harder line on illegal immigration, arguing that Republicans are to blame for blocking a tough border-control measure this year.

Since Harris catapulted to the top of the Democratic ticket less than a month ago, she has been forced to reiterate that she rejects a wide array of positions she embraced five years ago, a dynamic likely to become even more evident as she rolls out pillars of her agenda in coming days. On Friday in North Carolina, she is set to outline her economic plan, which is expected to largely mirror Biden’s efforts to lower costs for middle-class families, including by curtailing late fees, hidden costs and junk fees. But Harris’s aides stress that she will roll out myriad policies that are unique to her.

In 2019, Harris articulated a series of liberal positions as she sought to distinguish herself among a crowded group of Democratic contenders, many of them tacking to the left to court voters in the primaries. Now her singular focus is taking on Republican nominee Donald Trump, with a big emphasis on winning over swing voters.

But Harris’s critics say her dramatic shifts on so many issues point to a deeper issue — that Harris has few core political beliefs and only a vague governing philosophy. That lack of a clear political identity, Republicans contend, gives them an opening to frame her image for voters.

“It’s clear the Kamala Harris who wanted to ban fracking, who supported Medicare-for-all … couldn’t win Pennsylvania or a single swing state,” said Corry Bliss, a Republican campaign consultant. “The average voter does not have a well-defined vision of her, so we have a great opportunity to define her simply on her record.”

John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who worked for Biden, said a broad message is far more important than gritty policy details.

“What is driving the contrast is Harris talks about that she’s going to be for everyone and for the middle class, while Trump is going to be for himself and corporations,” Anzalone said. “That’s the big umbrella message, and all the policies are underneath it.”

Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket after Biden’s abrupt decision to drop out of the presidential race on July 21, which followed weeks of nervous Democrats calling for a new candidate after the president’s rocky debate performance against Trump. The party quickly coalesced around Harris, who is running on a tightly compressed schedule and has skipped many of the rituals of a presidential race — including a drawn-out primary contest and months of campaigning across the country — that usually force candidates to specify their views on a range of issues.

The Democratic Party platform was locked in before Harris became the nominee, limiting her ability to put her stamp on the document. Since Harris’s emergence, many Democrats have felt relief and even euphoria after weeks of worrying that Biden would lose decisively, and they have shown little appetite to press her even on such contentious issues as immigration and the war in Gaza.

Harris, meanwhile, has inherited Biden’s campaign apparatus and kept on many of his senior campaign advisers, while adding some of her own. So far she has largely adopted the policies Biden pushed or implemented as president, in some cases adding her own touch, such as an emphasis on lower-income Americans. One Harris adviser said many of the policies the administration ultimately pursued — including the child tax credit, student debt cancellation for those who attended Corinthian Colleges, and solving the problem of lead pipes — were ones that Harris pushed the White House to execute.

“On day one, I will take on price-gouging and bring down costs,” Harris said at a rally in Atlanta last month. “We will ban more of those hidden fees and surprise late charges that banks and other companies use to pad their profits. We will take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases. And we will take on Big Pharma to cap prescription drug costs for all Americans.”

When she has deviated from Biden, it is often a matter of tone rather than substance. Most notably, Harris often speaks forcefully about reproductive rights, while Biden, a lifelong Catholic, can appear uncomfortable talking about abortion.

Biden has devoted a half-century of his life to national politics and developed strong, well-known positions on many subjects. He spent 36 years in the U.S. Senate, chairing the Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees, while Harris spent four.

That could give her advisers more input as she shapes her agenda, according to people familiar with her emerging policy agenda who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private and sensitive conversations.

Republicans have not waited for Harris to issue new policy proposals before seizing on her past statements to attack her as dangerously liberal. Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate Dave McCormick, for instance, highlighted a series of Harris’s past positions in a widely shared ad he released last month.

A page on the Republican National Committee website calls the vice president “Flip-Flopping Kamala Harris” and lists several current policies that contradict past statements, such as her opposition to banning fracking, her embrace of fixing the “broken” immigration system and her dismissal of a single-payer health-care system.

Anzalone said that it is not unusual for candidates’ positions to evolve and change over time, and that running a primary campaign is distinct from running a general-election campaign. Biden himself has taken a tougher position on immigration as president than he did as a candidate, and Trump no longer talks about repealing the Affordable Care Act.

Under Biden, Harris has taken part in critical White House policy meetings, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal dynamics. In those sessions, she regularly raised the prospect of unintended effects on individuals she felt were not being discussed or were being overlooked, including people of color, rural residents and low-income workers, the people said.

Harris is likely to adopt a similar approach as she shapes her policy agenda in coming weeks, allies say. On economic policy, for example, she has brought on one of Biden’s senior advisers, Gene Sperling, suggesting an intent to continue the general thrust of Biden’s policies. But there is likely to be an additional emphasis on areas Harris cares about, such as the child tax credit and eliminating medical debt, according to a person familiar with the planning who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal plans.

Harris also hopes to focus on policies aimed at helping working- and middle-class people build wealth, such as making it easier for people to purchase homes and boosting small businesses, the person said.

The vice president has also turned to a number of informal outside advisers, including Brian Deese, Bharat Ramamurti and Joelle Gamble, all of whom held senior positions on Biden’s National Economic Council. Harris has also brought on some of her former staffers, including Brian Nelson, a former Treasury Department official who once worked for Harris in California, and Deanne Millison, the vice president’s former chief economic adviser.

A campaign official noted that Harris promoted many of the same economic principles when she served as California attorney general from 2011 to 2017, before being elected to the U.S. Senate. The official cited investigations she led or joined into pharmacies and drug companies for overcharging for prescription medications, and pointed to a probe of high gas prices charged by oil companies.

While foreign policy may attract less attention in a political campaign, it can be crucial to a president’s tenure. Harris has been consulting with some of Biden’s former foreign policy advisers, as well as those of former president Barack Obama.

Tom Donilon, who was national security adviser under Obama, is helping organize outside experts as Harris’s foreign policy takes shape. They include Wendy Sherman, Biden’s former deputy secretary of state; Colin Kahl, a former Biden undersecretary of defense; Susan Rice, who was head of the Domestic Policy Council under Biden and national security adviser under Obama; and Sasha Baker, a top Biden national security aide.

Harris’s current national security adviser, Phil Gordon, works at the White House and therefore is limited in what he can do for her campaign. But he is widely expected to hold a top position if she is elected president.

Biden spent much of his career steeped in foreign policy and came into office with clear, defined views on the world. When advisers tried to move him on certain issues — such as allowing Ukraine to strike deeper inside Russia or rethinking unconditional U.S. support for Israel during the war in Gaza — they have found it extraordinarily difficult, according to several senior administration officials and outside advisers.

While Harris’s foreign policy platform is still somewhat embryonic, she is expected to largely continue Biden’s efforts on Russia’s war in Ukraine and on countering China. Less clear, and of great interest to many Democrats, is whether she will craft her own policy on Israel.

Biden is a staunch supporter of the Jewish state whose views were shaped in the 1970s when he first became a senator. Many Democrats believe that Harris is more in line with the outlook of younger voters and people of color, who often see Israel as a military powerhouse that has oppressed Palestinians.

One ally of Harris said the myriad factors that have made this presidential race so unusual — the tight timeline, the relief within the party, and many Democrats’ view of Trump as an existential threat — favor her and make her specific policy positions less important than they were five years ago.

“Running in 2019 against other Democrats was dicey. Running in 2024 against Trump again is different — it’s clear where he is,” the ally said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy. “The policy task for the next three months is infinitely easier than first round.”

Welcome to The Campaign Moment, your guide to the biggest developments in a 2024 election in which Democrats are about to find out how far “vibes” can take you.

(Make sure you are subscribed to this newsletter here. You can also hear my analysis weekly on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.)

The big moment

Democrats have a new lease on political life with Vice President Kamala Harris atop their ticket. And while the presidential race remains close, the signs are getting better and better for them.

New swing state polling this week showed Harris taking a slight lead over Donald Trump (within the margin of error) in most of the decisive states in the presidential race. And a new Monmouth University poll out Wednesday showed Democrats leapfrogging Republicans on both enthusiasm and optimism, metrics that help turn out voters.

But just how optimistic should Democrats be about the fuller 2024 electoral picture? And could they even dream of winning the “trifecta” — i.e. the presidency and the House and Senate?

What seemed largely out of reach less than a month ago deserves some consideration in the vastly changed political universe.

The bottom line? A Democratic triple play remains tough, particularly when it comes to holding their narrow Senate majority, mostly because the map is so challenging for the party. But Harris’s candidacy has to tempt Democrats to start thinking bigger.

There is little question that Harris performing better than President Joe Biden is a major relief to congressional Democrats who were worried they would go down with him. But there is a real question as to just how much Harris recasts the House and Senate maps.

One key metric on this front is the so-called “generic ballot,” which asks voters to choose between a generic Democrat and a generic Republican for Congress. This is a good measure given that we don’t get regular polling in most Senate and House races, and given that there are fewer and fewer voters who split their tickets between parties.

The generic ballot hasn’t shifted as much as the presidential race in recent weeks, and it has long been neck-and-neck. But Democrats’ current one-point advantage in the FiveThirtyEight average is as good as at any point since mid-2023.

That would seem encouraging for Democrats’ efforts to flip the approximately four districts they need to erase Republicans’ razor-thin House majority. Still, Democrats probably need to win most of the “toss-up” House races, given that Republicans are generally favored in more districts.

Which brings us to the Democrats’ biggest hurdle: the Senate, where Democrats hold their own razor-thin majority, 51-49.

Democrats’ hopes there are a bit more complicated, for a couple reasons.

The big reason is that they are overwhelmingly playing defense, so even a slight advantage nationally might not be good enough. The Cook Political Report’s seven most competitive Senate races are all held by Democrats, and they’re defending a trio of red states: Montana, Ohio and West Virginia. One of those states, West Virginia, is in all likelihood gone with Sen. Joe Manchin III’s (I-W.Va.) retirement.

That means Democrats are basically starting at a 50-50 tie, and they also must win the White House to hold the tiebreaking vote (which is cast by the vice president).

The other reason the Senate is more complex is that Democrats in the vast majority of races were already running ahead of Biden — and often far ahead. In fact, Gabe Fleisher notes that Democrats have yet to trail in any quality poll in six of their eight most endangered states: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin.

Recent polling — from the New York Times/Siena College, AARP, Fox News, NPR/PBS/Marist College and Marquette University Law School — shows that’s continued. Democrats’ margins in those six states have ranged from up three points to up 14 points in recent weeks.

That suggests these Democrats could have survived even if Biden lost.

But they also would have been bucking recent history. As Fleisher also notes, only one out of 69 senators has won since 2020 in a state their party lost in the presidential race. And there’s no guarantee Democrats’ over-performances would have held up over time.

“We saw Senate Democrats outrunning Biden in previous polls even when he was doing poorly, though I’m not sure it fully captured where he was after the [June 27] debate,” said Jessica Taylor, Cook’s Senate race expert. “I think it’s just a smaller number by which they have to outrun the top of the ticket now.”

Assuming Harris continues to poll well, the big Senate races to watch would seem to be those other two, non-West Virginia red states: Ohio and especially Montana. Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) has generally trailed in the limited polling we’ve seen, and that looks most likely to be the tipping point state for the Senate majority.

There’s also a question of whether Democrats can put one or two GOP-held seats in play — potentially Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Tex.) or Sen. Rick Scott’s (R-Fla.) — that could offset a loss elsewhere. Neither Cruz nor Scott won resoundingly in 2018 (by three points and one point, respectively), and some polls have shown a tighter race than some people might appreciate. For instance, Scott has recently led by the low to mid-single digits, and a Suffolk University poll this week showed Floridians disliked him by a 49 percent to 35 percent margin.

So if you’re a Democrat who dares to dream, keep an eye on Montana, Florida and Texas. Those could tell the tale about how much the electoral map has changed.

Another moment you may have missed

There are growing signs of Republican concern about Trump’s messaging. And increasingly, Republicans and Trump allies are going quite public with those concerns.

They’re practically begging Trump to change it up and move beyond falsehoods about Harris’s crowd sizes, her race, her intelligence and other non-policy issues.

To wit:

• Nikki Haley on Tuesday on Fox News: “The campaign is not going to win talking about crowd sizes. It’s not going to win talking about what race Kamala Harris is. It’s not going to win talking about whether she’s dumb.”
• Former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.): “You have got to make this race not on personalities. Stop questioning the size of her crowds and start questioning her position when it comes to what did she do as attorney general on crime.”
• Former senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway: “The winning formula for President Trump is very plain to see: It’s fewer insults, more insights and that policy contrast.”
• Vivek Ramaswamy on Tuesday on NPR: “I think a stronger focus on policy is the path to winning this election.”
• Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro on Monday: “The current rally formula is simply not sufficiently focused on the very stark policy differences. … Instead, when Trump attacks Harris personally rather than on policy, Harris’s support among swing voters rises — particularly among women.”
• Fox News host Sean Hannity last week on Trump’s attacks on Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R): “You know the thing is I’m sure they agree on like 85, 90 percent of the issues, and we’re 40 days away from early voting. We don’t have time for this. This is a real threat to the country.”

Trump hasn’t really heeded their advice, including at a news conference last week that barely touched on policy specifics. But he did just call another one for Thursday in New Jersey.

A momentous stat

1 percentage point

That’s Republicans’ current electoral college advantage, according to an analysis over the weekend by Washington Post data scientist Lenny Bronner.

The number represents the approximate gap between Harris’s slight current lead in The Washington Post national polling average and Trump’s slight edge in what looks to be the “tipping point” electoral college state, Michigan.

Why is that notable? Because it suggests a smaller electoral college edge for Republicans than we’ve previously seen in the Trump era. The gap between the popular vote and the margin in the “tipping point” state — i.e. the state that delivered the winner 270 electoral votes — was nearly three points in 2016 and nearly four points in 2020. That allowed Trump to lose the popular vote but win the electoral college in 2016, and it made for a much closer race than many people realized in 2020.

The conventional wisdom has long been that Democrats need to win the national popular vote by two or more points to win the electoral college. It’s still early, but as with other aspects of the new Harris vs. Trump race, that’s worth reconsidering. And as the chart above shows, it’s not as if the electoral college advantage has consistently landed in the GOP’s favor in recent decades.

Take a moment to read:

• “Trump vs. Harris magnifies America’s generational and cultural divides” (Washington Post)
• “Harris cuts Trump’s advantages on economy, immigration” (Washington Post)
• “Tim Walz has good numbers so far, despite GOP attacks” (Washington Post)
• “Kamala Harris honed her Senate identity as a Trump foil” (Washington Post)
• “Trump was close to breaking his poll ceiling. Then Harris arrived.” (Washington Post)
• “Harris Is Set to Lay Out an Economic Message Light on Detail” (New York Times)
• “The One Policy Idea Uniting Trump and Harris” (Atlantic)

Former president Donald Trump on Wednesday appeared to open the door to significantly expanding his plans to impose sweeping new tariffs if he returns to office, suggesting an escalation in proposals that many experts already see as likely to cause a global trade war.

Previously, the Republican presidential nominee had called for levying tariffs of 10 percent on all U.S. trading partners, aiming to create a “ring around the collar” of the national economy. But during remarks on the economy in Asheville, N.C., Trump for the first time floated tariffs of between “10 and 20 percent” on imports to the United States.

The Trump campaign sought to play down the significance of the comment and said the former president did not specify that the 20 percent tariff would apply to all nations. Still, the new figure represented an intensification of Trump’s trade proposals, which have already alarmed some Republican donors wary of disrupting the global trade order and have faced heavy criticism from Democratic lawmakers.

“We’re going to have 10 to 20 percent tariffs on foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years,” Trump said Wednesday. “We’re going to charge them 10 to 20 percent to come in and take advantage of our country.”

His comments on trade came as part of a speech designed to focus on the economy that stretched more than an hour. He attempted to hammer his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as polls suggest she is gaining ground in the race. Trump reprised his calls for eliminating taxes on tips and Social Security, said he would lower energy costs, and also exaggerated the extent of inflation and spending under the Biden administration.

The tariff remark could draw renewed attention to the former president’s economic plans and his first-term approach to global trade. A 10 percent universal tariff, coupled with a tariff of as much as 60 percent on China that Trump has also eyed, would cost a typical middle-income household roughly $1,700 per year, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a pro-trade Washington-based think tank. Doubling that would increase its costs to U.S. households, while probably doing more to shield domestic producers from foreign competition.

“It has been 10 percent universal across the board — 20 percent would be a doubling of that, and all analyses have already shown that would be detrimental to the economy,” said Erica York, an analyst at the Tax Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank. “It’s an escalation of what would already be an escalation from his first term.”

Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank, said: “He has clearly floated the 10 percent, and if he’s now saying ‘10 to 20 percent’ you can assume the baseline is the same — that seems like a reasonable conclusion to me.”

Holtz-Eakin said many business leaders are concerned with the seemingly erratic nature of Trump’s policy process. “If you go to 10 to 20 percent in North Carolina, who is to say you won’t go to 40 percent in Wisconsin?” he added.

Trump’s speech on the economy came two days before Harris is set to roll out her own economic plan in Raleigh, N.C. After Harris said this past weekend that she also supported no taxes on tips, Trump accused her of copying his ideas.

“When Kamala lays out her fake economic plan this week, [it] probably will be a copy of my plan because basically that’s what she does,” he said.

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), leaned into a similar argument Wednesday, criticizing the Harris campaign as “a fake platform that offers no specifics about how to do the people’s businesses and a fake promise to change the government.” (Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has committed to an Oct. 1 vice-presidential debate with CBS. Vance has yet to commit.)

Although Trump’s Wednesday speech was billed as focusing on the economy, he frequently veered into other topics and lobbed personal attacks at his rival. He claimed — without evidence — that President Joe Biden was a “very angry man” because he is no longer the Democratic nominee for president and suggested: “He’s going to put you in World War III.” He also attacked Harris as the “border czar,” a frequent Republican attack line. (Though Biden asked Harris to negotiate with Central American countries to help address the root causes of migration, he never put her in charge of border policy.)

Trump also mocked Harris’s laugh, calling it “the laugh of a person with some big problems.” He also repeatedly mispronounced her first name — a move that critics called an attempt to other-ize her — and commented on a recent Time magazine cover story about Harris. (“I want to use that artist, I want to find that artist, I like him very much,” he said.) He spoke in apocalyptic terms as he described what would happen if Harris wins the White House, predicting “a 1929 style depression.”

Trump’s and Harris’s decision to talk about the economy in North Carolina highlights the broader importance of the state in this year’s election. A Democrat has not won North Carolina in a presidential race since 2008, but the party is showing interest in competing there this cycle. The Washington Post’s polling average has Trump leading Harris by three percentage points in the state. Biden was trailing Trump by five points before he dropped out.

Asheville, where Trump spoke, has leaned Democratic in recent presidential elections. It is in Buncombe County, which Trump lost in 2016 and 2020. (Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton received 54 percent of the vote in 2016, and Biden received 60 percent in 2020.) Trump, however, has won all seven counties that border Buncombe County twice.

In the presidential race, Democrats have devoted more than $15 million on television ads between now and Election Day, while Republicans are spending $12 million, according to AdImpact, a firm that tracks advertising outlays.

LeVine reported from Asheville. Stein and Arnsdorf reported from Washington. Dan Keating, Meryl Kornfield and Scott Clement contributed to this report