A new nationwide poll indicated Sunday that Vice President Kamala Harris has lost her edge and may soon lose a great deal more.
The latest
New York Times/Siena College poll asked nearly 1,700 registered voters between Sept. 3 and 6 whom they would vote for if the election were held today: 48% said they’d vote for President Donald Trump; 47% said Harris.
With minor candidates included, Trump has a two-point lead (48%-46%) over Harris.
The Times
suggested the result was surprising because it is “the first lead for Mr. Trump in a major nonpartisan national survey in about a month.”
Statistician and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver suggested over the weekend that these poll numbers “are just a bit worse for Harris than the previous NYT/Siena national survey in July and considerably worse for her than a series of battleground state polls the Times conducted in early August.”
“The honeymoon is officially over,” Trump spokesman Jason Miller
told Politico, “and Kamala Harris has been exposed as a radical left individual who owns the destruction of our economy and our border.”
It’s clear that over the next few weeks, Harris will have to do more than campaign on “joy” and anti-Trump attacks.
Whereas only 12% of respondents said they needed to learn more about Trump, 31% said the same about Harris. 63% of respondents specified that they would like to know about her policies and plans.
While voters appear keen to know more about Harris’ agenda, prominent Democrats have
suggested in recent weeks that their candidate should continue to ignore the “nitty gritty” and focus instead on “vibes.”
‘None of this will matter if she has a good night.’
Rep. Annie Kuster (R-N.H.), the chairwoman of the New Democrat Coalition,
told CNN, “I don’t think there’s a real strong reason for her to try and weed out any points of view right now.”
Secrecy may not, however, constitute a winning strategy.
“I don’t know what Kamala’s plans are,” Dawn Conley, a small business owner from Tennessee, told the Times. “It’s kind of hard to make a decision when you don’t know what the other party’s platform is going to be.”
The presidential debate Tuesday will afford Harris an opportunity to retire her platitudes and provide Americans with a basic idea of how she might run the free world.
Nate Silver
suggested that “none of this will matter if she has a good night” at the debate.
However, the debate will also provide Trump with a chance to very publicly hammer Harris over three of the top four issues cited by respondents in the poll as deciding factors when voting in November: the economy, immigration, and inflation and the cost of living.
When asked which candidate they figured would do a better job of handling their top issue, 50% of respondents said Trump; 43% said Harris.
On the economy, 56% said Trump would do a better job; 40% said Harris. On immigration, 53% said Trump would do a better job; 42% said Harris.
Harris was, however, greatly favored to do a better job on the issue of abortion.
There appears to be a couple of issues in which Harris is on the wrong side where the majority of voters are concerned. For instance, 65% of respondents signaled support for increased domestic production of fossil fuels, and the majority (51%) oppose a federal law establishing price controls on food and groceries.
Price controls, climate-alarmist curbs on American energy, and other proposals advanced by Harris appear to have a plurality of Americans figuring her for a radical.
‘Voters want a return to pro-America policies that actually work, not the weak, failed, and dangerously liberal policies of Comrade Kamala.’
While only 32% of respondents suggested Trump is too conservative, 47% of likely voters indicated Harris is too liberal/progressive. Whereas 40% of women said Harris leaned too far left, 56% of male respondents said so.
Harris’ tether to Biden may also serve to trip her up in November. It appears that a great many respondents (63%) want the next president to “represent a major change from Joe Biden.”
When it comes to assigning blame for the Biden-Harris administration’s failures, 55% of respondents said Harris should receive some or a lot of blame for rising prices; 63% said she should receive some or a lot of blame for problems at the border; and 49% said she should receive some or a lot of blame for the botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan she
boasted about signing off on.
Harris may be unable to shake off her responsibility for recent failures, but she has proven able to shed points in critical swing states.
The Times’ swing-state polling averages suggested the two candidates are now tied in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina. Harris supposedly has a three-point edge in Wisconsin, a two-point edge in Michigan, and a one-point lead in Pennsylvania.
Last week’s YouGov/CBS News poll
indicated that Harris and Trump were tied in Pennsylvania and that the Democrat had a two- and one-point lead in Wisconsin and Michigan, respectively.
The Times/Siena poll also acknowledged that Trump is more popular now than polling data suggested he was previously ahead of both the 2016 and 2020 elections. Overall, 46% of likely voters said they had a somewhat or very favorable view of Trump. By way of comparison, 45% of likely voters said the same of Harris.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung
told Newsweek in a statement, “Polling shows President Trump is dominating both nationally and in the battleground states because voters want a return to pro-America policies that actually work, not the weak, failed, and dangerously liberal policies of Comrade Kamala.”
The Trump campaign
noted, “We continue to see a sustained pattern of President Trump overperforming with black voters (17-74 among registered voters; Trump +5 compared to 2020 exits and Harris running 13 points behind Biden) and Hispanic voters (42-51 among registered voters; Trump +10 compared to 2020 exits and Harris running 14 points behind Biden).”
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