After a seismic shift atop the Democratic presidential ticket, the likely new nominee faces some of the same problems the current president does.
While Kamala Harris is likely much less prone than Joe Biden to show cognitive issues by mixing up names and losing track of what she’s saying, she’s still got to find a way to make up ground against Donald Trump in the next 104 days.
A HarrisX/Forbes poll released Monday (but conducted July 19 to 21, the day Biden left the campaign) has Trump in blowout territory, leading Harris 50% to 41% overall and 51% to 40% among likely voters.
“Kamala Harris starts her 2024 battle behind Trump, who is enjoying a strong post-convention bump and leads her by almost [double] digits in our polling,” commented Dritan Nesho, HarrisX CEO and chief pollster. “If the polls don’t start to close and show better traction for her, Biden’s decision to step aside for Harris may be a case of ‘too similar, too late.’”
That survey isn’t the only one with red flags for the blue team.
An On Point Politics/SoCal Research Sunday survey shows Trump with majority support, leading Harris 51% to 43% in one of the first national polls conducted after Biden left the race.
While the poll had a +2 Republican lean in sampling (with 38% of respondents being GOP versus 36% Democrat), other data should worry Democrats — including 24% of respondents saying they’re more likely to support Trump with Biden out, against just 18% less likely to do so.
The Trump camp spotlighted this survey along with a slew of Trump-Harris trial heats in its favor ahead of Biden deciding not to run, saying in an email to press that “even if Democrat Party insiders and donors are able to successfully anoint disgraced border czar Kamala Harris as the new nominee — disenfranchising millions of Democrat primary voters in the process — it won’t save them.”
But not all polling is bad for Harris.
A Quinnipiac poll released Monday shows a too-close-to-call race, with Trump up 45% to 41% in a six-way run including minor candidates. To put that in perspective, Trump was up by 5 points against Biden in the same scenario.
“The dramatic reset at the top of the Democratic ticket does little to move the race as Vice President Harris enters the fray with numbers similar to President Biden,” said Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy.
A Morning Consult survey released Monday shows a 47% to 45% lead for Trump, a more positive look for Dems than the 6-point lead Trump had over Biden, even though just 65% of Democrats support her to lead the ticket.
That’s better than what a Sunday survey from YouGov showed. In that poll, 60% of Democrats say the Californian should be the party’s presidential nominee, with 21% of Democrats wanting someone else and 19% not sure what they want.
These numbers have room for improvement, especially given that most Republican registrants have coalesced around Trump amid months of lawfare against him and his survival of an assassination attempt this month. If Harris can’t unify the party, she can’t win. And she hasn’t gotten it done yet despite help from most of the Dem establishment.
Single-state polling is beginning to surface that includes at least some sampling from after Biden left the race, and it doesn’t show Harris delivering just yet. If the election were held today, she would lose at least two states Biden won in 2020.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution survey released shortly after Biden left the race showed Trump leading Harris, 50.5% to 45.9%. Trump’s lead over Harris was more than the 3.5% advantage he had over the current president in the same sample.
And the poll suggests Harris is a turnoff among key demographics Democrats will rely on in the Peach State.
Among nonblack minorities (Asians and Hispanics), Trump leads the veep by 12 points — as compared with a more modest 3.8% lead he had with the same demographics against Biden in the same sample.
Harris also performs worse among women than Biden against Trump, carrying her own gender with a 7.4% margin, while Biden had a 9-point lead.
Meanwhile, Republicans last won New Hampshire in 2000 — but polling conducted between July 19 and 21 suggests they have at least an even shot this year in the Granite State.
The New Hampshire Journal poll released Sunday shows Trump ahead of Harris, albeit marginally — 40.2% to 39.3%, with an additional 20.5% favoring Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the Live Free or Die State.
Pollsters also posed the Trump/Biden question. While Trump still carried that trial heat, it was by just 0.3% (39.7% to 39.4%), with Kennedy up to 20.9%.
Both Trump leads are well inside the +/- 3.99% margin of error. But the polling data include an important caveat that should hearten Republicans: “Political polls using online panels occasionally display a liberal/Democratic house effect in comparison to other polls, and this should be kept in mind when interpreting the results presented above.”
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