Nate Cohn and his colleagues have published the first high-quality survey since KAMALA HARRIS replaced President JOE BIDEN on the ticket that suggests the VP’s hot streak may be coming to an end.
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But Cohn, who says “the result is a bit surprising,” offers some wise analysis about why the poll may be a leading indicator of “a reversion back toward” Trump:
- Trump remains popular, with a 46 percent approval rating — which is better than where he stood in either of his last two presidential campaigns.
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3. In what Cohn calls “one of Mr. Trump’s overlooked advantages,” the Times poll says voters see the former president as closer to the center than Harris. This has to be a bitter pill for the Harris campaign to swallow, given how much work it has done since she took over as the Democratic nominee to occupy the center and, as Cohn points out, given some prominent issues where Trump is objectively not in the mainstream, such as election denialism.
[Put another way, trumpie's insults of Komrade Kamala have worked.]
- Finally, since Harris entered the race,the two campaigns have been locked in a race to define her. The conventional wisdom was that Harris was winning that battle. But this poll suggests otherwise. “Nearly half of voters say she’s ‘too liberal or progressive,’” Cohn writes. “A majority of voters see her as at least somewhat responsible for the problems along the border. And a majority of voters say she’s a ‘risky’ choice and ‘more of the same’ — hardly an enviable combination.”
...margins in the race will be “razor thin,” which at the end of the day is probably the biggest takeaway from this poll.
