| It's understandable if all the shakeups in the past month of presidential politics have left you feeling unsettled. As Businessweek national correspondent Joshua Green writes today, don't grasp at the polls yet for any feeling of certainty about how the race has changed. Plus: The dirty, dangerous job of dismantling a ship on the beach. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. Please note: Our email domain is changing, which means you'll be receiving this newsletter from noreply@news.bloomberg.com. Update your contacts to ensure you continue receiving it—check out the bottom of this email for more details. The bet Democratic Party leaders and donors made by pushing Joe Biden out of the 2024 presidential race was that Kamala Harris would be a better candidate to face off against Republican nominee Donald Trump. Early polling suggests this wager is paying off: Harris is outperforming Biden in snapshot surveys taken in the days since she replaced him, even leading Trump in a couple of them. In Washington, the question strategists in both parties have is whether Harris' bump is real—and if so, whether it will last. Anyone who's watched cable news or listened to a political podcast lately has been inundated with confident-sounding takes about how the race has changed and Zapruder-like breakdowns of flash polls purporting to show how Americans are greeting the news that Democrats have a new presumptive nominee. The professionals running those polls, however, urge patience: We won't have a solid picture of the post-Biden American political landscape for at least a few more days. Drew Linzer runs the data analytics firm Civiqs and, like many other people, had an inkling a couple of weeks ago that Harris was likely to replace Biden. Because Civiqs runs a daily tracking poll, Linzer started measuring a Harris-Trump race two weeks before Biden bowed out and had some of the earliest data about how Harris was faring. "In our results, the issue with Biden was always that an unusually large percent of people we'd expect to be Biden voters said they were unsure or voting for someone else—a tendency highest among young and independent voters," Linzer says. "The big difference between Biden and Harris is that those people said they would vote for Harris."  Harris at her Pittsfield, Massachusetts, fundraiser on Saturday. Photographer: Stephanie Scarbrough/AFP In the Civiqs tracking poll last week, Trump went from leading Biden 46% to 44% to losing to Harris, 48% to 46%. A July 23 Reuters/Ipsos poll mirrored that finding, with Harris leading Trump 44% to 42%. Late last week, the Wall Street Journal showed Harris and Trump effectively tied, something AtlasIntel also found. Notably, Republican pollsters also seem to see a Harris bump. On Tuesday, Trump's pollster, Tony Fabrizio, sent campaign reporters a memo designed to frame coverage of the presidential race. Fabrizio said he expected to see a "Harris Honeymoon" over the next few weeks because of Harris' "largely positive" coverage in the mainstream media. "We will start to see public polling—particularly national public polls—where Harris is gaining on or even leading President Trump," he said. But he insisted that the fundamentals of the race hadn't changed. Fabrizio didn't share any of the Trump campaign's internal polls. But he wouldn't rush out a nothing-to-see-here-folks memo unless he was seeing the same thing Linzer is. That's hardly surprising, given the outpouring of relief, excitement and money with which discouraged Democrats have responded to Harris' ascension. But Fabrizio may still be correct that the race will eventually settle back into the narrow Trump lead that was fairly consistent in public and private polling until Biden's faltering debate performance on June 27. "Clearly, this has energized Democratic voters," Linzer says. "But nothing like this has happened before, so we're really only looking at a snapshot in time." Traditionally, major political events will give candidates a boost—a convention, a nomination or even choosing a vice president (although Trump appears to have gotten little benefit from adding JD Vance to his ticket). But often that bump proves temporary. For the moment, Harris is riding high and still has several more opportunities to make a big public splash. In the next few weeks, she'll announce her running mate and headline the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But Harris' sudden ascension, condensed campaign timeline and the mystery of how she'll manage the presidential spotlight are all variables that make it difficult for pollsters—responsible ones, at least—to state with confidence how she'll fare. "It's not the answer that my clients and your readers want to hear," Linzer says, "but we just have to watch it play out." | 
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