Kamala Harris Surges In Polls While JD Vance Remains A Drag On Trump Ticket
Kamala Harris Surges In Polls While JD Vance Remains A Drag On Trump Ticket
Good news, everyone!
New polls dropped on Wednesday that show Vice President Kamala Harris surging ahead of adjudicated rapist, convicted felon, and all-around diseased maniac Donald Trump. A Cook Political Report swing state survey has Harris up in Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. She’s tied in Georgia but down in Nevada, which has six electoral votes to North Carolina’s 16, so I’d take that trade.
Cook’s May poll had Trump leading President Joe Biden in every swing state but Wisconsin, but those were the dark times before Harris was the nominee and we weren’t cuddling in bed each night with a Tim Walz plushie. The recent Cook poll was fielded earlier than the New York Times/Siena poll that had Harris with solid four-point leads (50 to 46 percent) in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Quinnipiac’s latest Pennsylvania poll has Harris leading Trump 48 to 45 percent. She’s down just two points in a new Florida poll, which doesn’t mean she’ll flip the state but is consistent with her increased strength in Georgia and North Carolina.
Nationally, Harris leads Trump 48 to 45 percent in the YouGov polling average for The Economist. She has what roughly translates to a 48 to 43 percent lead in the new Monmouth poll.
If you’re still scarred from 2016, just keep in mind that Hillary Clinton’s lead against Trump was not very stable, especially in swing states. For example, the final Times/Siena poll of Pennsylvania had Clinton leading Trump by seven points (46 to 39 percent), but undecided voters were at 15 percent. That’s a precarious situation when the fundamentals were already against Democrats winning a third term in the White House. The problem wasn’t the polling so much as the Times declaring that “the state remains out of reach for Donald Trump.” That’s not what the data showed!
The Robert F. Kennedy Jr. factor remains a concern, but while the weirdo’s share of the vote is decreasing daily, Trump hasn’t directly benefitted.
Underestimating Harris was a bipartisan failure
It’s increasingly clear that the dynamics of the race changed almost instantly after Biden stepped aside for Harris. In February, just 26 percent of Democrats in a Monmouth poll said they were “very enthusiastic” about Biden as the nominee. Now, that’s jumped by a whopping 50 percent, and 76 percent of Democrats said they’re “very enthusiastic” about Harris. And she hasn’t yet delivered her Hannibal Lecter-free Democratic National Convention speech.
Harris is doing tremendously well with young voters, and an Equis poll that had Biden up just five points among Latino voters now has Harris up by 19 points. In the Rust Belt, where many Democrats feared Harris wouldn’t connect with (white) voters, she’s performing 11 points better among non-college white voters than Biden.
Republicans are fuming because they never respected Harris. They dismissed her as a “DEI” hire and an intellectual lightweight in the same class as Sarah Palin or Dan Quayle. They perhaps fatally assumed that Harris was an identical candidate to Hillary Clinton and are now watching in horror as her campaign delivers Barack Obama 2008/2012 vibes.
However, even many well-meaning white liberals were guilty of what George W. Bush once called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” They said they loved Harris but they thought maybe it was best that she waited until 2028 … when the stakes were less dire or maybe until there was no more sexism or racism in the Rust Belt. As James Baldwin said, Harris “was born here almost 60 years ago. [She’s] not going to live another 60 years … How much time do you want for your progress?”
They didn’t think Harris could raise the money, but she broke fundraising records. They didn’t think she could endure the GOP onslaught that a hostile press would enable, but so far she’s gone Road Runner on their asses.
Political writer Magdi Jacobs posted in July, “Some of us are screaming from the sidelines: ‘You will not be able to control the misogyny; You will not be able to control the racism.’ People aren’t listening to us. We have seen, since 2016, how Harris is treated. We are telling you to consider it. For us; For her.”
That struck me as shockingly paternalistic. Please shield Harris from harm with this shiny glass ceiling. (Jacobs also suggested that the race would devolve into a brawl between Harris and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who instead endorsed Harris almost immediately.)
Harris damn well knows she’s Black. She’s competed in elections where time and again very concerned liberals wondered if other voters were ready to elect a Black woman and Harris still won. She didn’t deserve nor desire their concerns. Some liberals suggested her best hope for the presidency was for Biden to win re-election — both an insulting and rapidly diminishing prospect.
I wrote the day Biden dropped out: “Yes, Republicans and the media will hammer Democratic candidates, but Biden was specifically unpopular. I refuse to believe that right-wing propaganda is so powerful and the Democratic brand is so toxic that 38 percent approval is the best any Democratic nominee could achieve. Barack Obama wasn’t president in some alternate reality timeline.”
Biden didn’t give Harris the nomination, either. Yes, his endorsement helped but Democrats didn’t rally behind Harris so quickly because they felt obligated to the president. Harris won a behind-the-scenes mini-primary within hours. That’s impressive. She is impressive.
JD Vance, still a couch fucker.
Republicans insist that Harris is simply enjoying an extended “honeymoon” period because she’s hiding from the press and voters don’t really know her, even though she’s served as vice president for four years. She’s not exactly a Final Jeopardy answer.
Professional liar Kellyanne Conway claimed on Fox News that “Kamala Harris is just one big ole blind date. Everybody is making her whatever they need her to be. She’s so good looking. She’s so smart. She’s so wealthy. She’s so funny. She’s close to her mom. She goes on really cool vacations, and she’ll never break your heart.”
Two words should shut down any argument that Kamala Harris’s polling success comes from voters having limited awareness of who she is: JD Vance.
Vance was a relative political unknown when Trump picked him as his running mate. Vance had an appealing backstory and a decent amount of fame from his memoir Hillbilly Elegy. He was young, a veteran, and in theory someone voters could “make whatever they need [him] to be.” Yet in practice, Vance is a historically unpopular VP pick, who can’t go a single day without voters learning another weird thing about him.
A new poll this week put Vance at just 37.7 percent approval among voters. Boomers especially hate him, perhaps because they remember Eddie Haskell. Fifty-two percent of voters aged 59 to 77 hold an unfavorable view of him, and that’s a key electorate.
The “childless cat lady” attacks haven’t endeared him to voters, and a smarter campaign might realize that Vance’s baseless smears of fellow veteran Tim Walz’s military career won’t improve his popularity. No one likes the couch fucker.
There are less than 100 days until the election, and as Coach Walz said, we can all sleep when we’re dead. However, according to the Monmouth poll, Democrats are fired up and ready to go: In April, just 36 percent of Democratic voters were enthusiastic about the Biden/Trump race, but now Democratic voter enthusiasm for a Harris/Trump race is 81 percent.
I don’t know the future. I can’t tell you how this is going to end, but today at least, it’s starting to feel like Kamala Harris might finally show voters a world without Donald Trump.
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This is crap!
Baloney on Joe didn't help.
He and Harris had to have gamed this out.
As a team.
Unless you want to convince me that Hillary and Bill, Clyburn, Elizabeth Warren, AOC and I believe at least one union are just sitting around on a Sunday afternoon in July reading Joe Biden's tweets, ready to endorse, that's a coordinated response.
And look who's NOT part of that response? Pelosi. Schumer. Obama. The chattering class who wanted to ditch her.
Don't get me wrong. She is a great candidate and will be a great president. She called all the state chairmen and nailed their endorsements. But she sealed up the nomination within 24 hours of his announcement and that doesn't happen organically.
At least not in the Democratic Party.
I don't know about you but preparation and planning impress me more than relying on a feeling.