Analysis: How Harris is reversing Biden's biggest weakness in the campaign

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

59% : In a CBS News survey earlier this month, nearly 7-in-10 voters described her as energetic, well above the roughly 6-in-10 who applied that label to Trump.
54% : Trump led Biden by nearly 20 percentage points on that measure in a Gallup Poll this spring.
53% : "Convincing Americans that the vice president is weak is so important for Republicans partly because, on a variety of important personal attributes, multiple polls show that voters are judging Harris more favorably than they did Biden -- and, in many instances, more favorably than they do Trump.
52% : She'll be like a play toy," Trump insisted.
51% : Likewise, in the CBS poll, while the share of women of all races who called Trump "tough" was just 10 percentage points greater than the share who saw Harris that way, Trump's advantage among men reached nearly 30 points.
49% : For one thing, more voters in each survey described Trump as strong or tough (though the difference between them was smallest in the Marquette poll, the most recent).
48% : "If they decide to go in that direction and they use all the tools at their disposal, and they lie as much as Trump does every day, then it could be a very powerful attack," said long-time Democratic consultant Tad Devine, who served as a senior strategist in the Dukakis campaign.
48% : In the New York Times/Siena College polls of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin released over the weekend, significantly more voters in each of those critical swing states described Harris than Trump as intelligent and honest; more voters in each state said Trump had a clear vision for the country's future, but in all three more than half said Harris did as well.
47% : But amid the long-standing questions about his temperament, honesty and ethics, and the more recent doubts about his age and mental capacity, the trump card for Trump has always been the perception that he's a strong leader.
45% : That was more than the just over one-half who had said the same about Biden in a Marquette poll this spring, and well above the roughly two-fifths in the new survey who said Trump had the right temperament to succeed.
45% : "Trump was the very picture of strength after his assassination attempt when he shook his fist, and Biden was the very picture of weakness after his blank stare during long stretches of the debate," said Republican pollster Whit Ayres.
40% : That was well below not only the 61% who said the same of Trump but also the 44% who applied that description to Biden.
37% : On Monday, MAGA Inc, the principal super PAC backing Trump, released plans for a $100 million ad campaign over the next several weeks intended to persuade voters that Harris is a "soft-on-crime radical who is too dangerous for the White House," according to a memo first reported in Politico.
34% : Voters have long viewed Trump as a strong leader, capable of keeping them safe, and as they grew more skeptical about Biden's physical and mental capacity, Trump's advantage grew to towering proportions this year.
32% : After the debate, Ayres told me he believed that to beat Biden, Trump would need to do little more than contrast those two images in television ads for the remainder of the campaign.
31% : Detailed results provided by Marquette show that while White women were only slightly more likely to describe Trump than Harris as strong, Trump's advantage over her on that measure exceeded 25 percentage points among White men.
28% : The surveys have also found a huge gender gap in the assessments of whether Harris and Trump are strong.
27% : Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who conducted surveys for Biden's 2020 campaign, said his strength deficit to Trump had become a nearly insurmountable obstacle for his 2024 campaign.
25% : In the Marquette Poll, nearly 3-in-5 of those surveyed agreed that Trump is too old to be president.
25% : With Harris replacing Biden, Ayres believes "the entire core comparisons" that had been boosting Trump "have been upended."
22% : Polls all year have shown that a significant share of voters were dubious that Trump was still up to the job -- a perception perhaps fueled by his frequent verbal flubs on the campaign trail, such as confusing Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley when talking about the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol.
21% : "Lake also believes Harris can scramble the contrast on strength that had been benefiting Trump so much against Biden.
18% : That wasn't nearly as many as the 4-in-5 who said that about Biden the last time Marquette asked the question in May, but it dwarfed the roughly 1-in-8 who expressed those concerns about Harris now.Other personal comparisons with Trump are also benefiting Harris.
10% : In an interview on Fox News, Trump implied that Harris' gender made her too soft to stand up to other world leaders.
9% : Spokespeople for the Trump campaign routinely describe Harris as weak; the principal super PAC backing Trump recently released an ad describing her positions on criminal justice issues as "dangerously liberal."
5% : Even before Biden's disastrous performance in the June debate - where he struggled to finish sentences and sometimes appeared disoriented - far more voters described Trump than Biden as strong.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.