The sugar-high of Kamala Harris taking over for Joe Biden continues this week. She's set to announce a Vice Presidential pick next week, and the Democratic Convention is coming up after that. While it's clear she's performing better in the polls than when Biden was bottoming out, she's not outperforming Biden, either. We're in a moment when polls are narrowing but still telling a similar story—Trump is leading.

You don't have to take my word for it. Take Nate Silver's word. When Biden dropped out, Silver had Biden with 27% odds to win the race and plummeting. Kamala Harris has better odds than that: Harris has 38% odds to win, versus Donald Trump's 61%.

That's an improvement for Harris, and she's more likely to win the popular vote than Joe Biden. Polling for Biden was getting so bad that Trump winning the popular vote became the expectation, a seismic shift from the 2016 and 2020 elections.

Once the Democratic Convention ends, we would expect that to be Harris's peak polling point. Candidates typically get a boost from their convention, and then when Labor Day rolls around, we start settling into reality. Political gravity reasserts itself.

The Trump campaign holds this view of the race. Tony Fabrizio calls it the "Harris Honeymoon" and says," The honeymoon will be a manifestation of the wall-to-wall coverage Harris receives from the MSM. The coverage will be largely positive and will certainly energize Democrats and some other parts of their coalition, at least in the short term. That means we will start to see public polling—particularly national public polls—where Harris is gaining on or even leading President Trump."

Where do things go after that? It's impossible to tell. There's never been a race like this where one party chucked their nominee right before the convention and put the Vice President into that role. It's unclear what impact Biden will have on the race from here on out.

But we do have numbers for right now: of the nine polls in the RealClearPolitics average, Trump leads in seven. Harris has a lead in two polls, and each one has her with a one-point lead. The overall average has Trump with a two-point lead. These are similar margins to Joe Biden's before his final collapse after the debate. 

So far, the Harris Honeymoon period means that she's polling roughly where Biden was pre-debate but not taking an outright lead. Presumably, and Trump's campaign agrees with this, we'd expect the positivity around the Harris campaign to peak at the convention and at least tie the race, if not give her an outright lead in the averages. That remains to be seen.

At this point in 2016, Hillary Clinton held a 0.4-point lead over Trump, and in 2020, Joe Biden led the polls by 8.3 points. In short, early polling of Harris shows her running severely behind Biden and Clinton at these points in the campaign. Harris would understandably say, "It's too early to draw conclusions." And I'd agree with that sentiment, as would Trump.

But it's also getting late. Harris is running behind the Clinton and Biden campaigns, and those groups had more than a year to plan things out. Clinton lost her bid with all the resources in the world, and Biden barely scraped together a coalition in critical states to make it over the finish line. Harris has weeks to turn things around.

Harris is behind both of those campaigns with virtually no time to spare. Even the vice presidential selection process is accelerated. Usually, campaigns take months to vet possibilities and get everyone locked in. Trump played his selection process out to the convention. Harris has had, at best, two weeks.

Democratic leaders are slapping together a shotgun wedding for a Presidential campaign at the last possible second. Sure, Biden's campaign staff is still in place, but this is the same group that was losing to Trump before all the chaos exploded. And we still don't have a clear sense of how the attempted assassination of Trump will impact the race.

Everyone assumes Harris will improve her standing enough to have a polling lead by Labor Day. If that's true, then Democrats will declare everything they've done so far a success.

But what if the opposite happens? What if Harris only narrows the polls but never forces Trump to give up a lead in the polling averages? If that's the case, and gravity starts reasserting itself, Democrats will face many questions about upending the entire primary process, throwing everything out, and ramming through a new set of candidates in a slapdash manner, hidden from view.

Like any election, there are still more shoes to fall. We haven't gotten close to any October surprises, though. What would surprise us at this rate? I'm almost afraid to ask that last question. Democrats increased uncertainty about the outcome, but it's unclear whether they've changed the trajectory of things.

Is Harris performing better than Biden? Yes. Is she beating Trump in election models and polls? No. That's what makes this sugar high so interesting for Harris. It's better than Biden, but it is still well below what Clinton and Biden did in the last two presidential elections. That's a red flag for any campaign.