• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, August 21, 2024

Kamala Harris has achieved something no Democratic opponent has since Donald Trump entered the presidential race in 2015 -- she has garnered more attention.

That was one of the surprising insights coming out of the Ipsos political tracking team's monthly election briefing this afternoon, which touched on a wide range of unprecedented and anomalous signals characterizing the current presidential predictions marketplace.

Based on the most recent polling, the Ipsos team has Harris slightly ahead of Trump, but based on the team's core prediction model, which also factors Biden's incumbent president approval rating, the Ipsos team still favors Trump to win -- at this point.

What isn't clear is how comparable the current Harris/Walz vs. Trump/Vance ticket scenarios are, given how unique this election news cycle has been, although Ipsos' Chris Jackson said that while incumbent sitting presidents like Biden normally have a "50/50" shot even with low approval ratings, the same thing may not be true for successor candidates like Harris.

"When we look around the world in cases where an incumbent president doesn't run for reelection," Jackson said, successor candidates "only win about one time out of eight when the incumbent president is at this sort of approval level."

In other words, despite her recent performance in the polls and an expected bump from the Democratic National Convention this week, Harris still has an uphill campaign to the White House.

But Jackson also characterized Harris' ability to overshadow Trump for the past month as "miraculous."

"Looking at Google Search trends, which Trump has basically dominated since he emerged onto the stage in 2015 over whomever his Democratic rival was at the time," he said, "In the last month, Harris has actually beaten him two- or three-to-one in terms of Google Search traffic or news mentions."

Jackson, who has frequently described Trump's ability to garner attention and command the news cycle as a "super power," says Harris' ability to take that away from him has been a "rare feat of actually eclipsing Trump in the popular mind, at least temporarily."

In terms of current polling, Ipsos has Harris in a slight lead nationally and a little better than that in terms of its polling of the key swing states that will likely determine the presidential election's electoral outcome.

Asked which person swing state voters most associated with the word "weird," respondents to Ipsos' poll cited Trump nearly two-to-one over Harris.