Democrats’ abrupt and desperate move to ditch incumbent President Joe Biden as their 2024 presidential candidate and instead coronate Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket is already showing signs of backfiring on their party and playing right into GOP presidential nominee former President Donald Trump’s hands.
First and foremost, the mad dash by Democrats over the past several weeks since the late June debate between Trump and Biden to force the reluctant-to-drop-out Biden out of the race severely weakened Biden’s standing to the point where he basically had no choice politically but to drop. Then, when Biden finally did exit the race on Sunday afternoon—which came after Trump survived a failed assassination attempt and the highly successful Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—instead of holding an open process whereby several Democrats would openly compete for their party’s nomination, Democrat elders quickly consolidated behind Harris as their standard-bearer all falling in line within 48 hours. The coronation was swift, and now the conversation has shifted after enough delegates to the Democratic National Convention (DNC) had verbally committed to backing her to put her over the top to a question of who she would be picking as her running mate.
The move has been so quick and swift, made in a frenzied panic by Democrats fearful of what the numbers were showing and the effect that a weak Biden would have on their down-ticket prospects, that the shift reeks of desperation. One of the only voices of reason on the Democrat side, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), even ripped his fellow Democrats for pushing Biden out of the race:
As this top-of-the-ticket move solidifies, and it becomes clearer and clearer that Democrats are now stuck with Harris—just as they were previously stuck with Biden—it begs the question: Did they make a critical mistake? The early evidence would suggest that, yes, they did. Let’s examine all the available evidence at this stage, and see if a trend or pattern emerges. It’s worth noting this analysis published here is a very early look at what the data shows thus far, and things could change in this rapidly shifting environment. It’s also worth noting this analysis does not even scratch the surface of how radical and extreme Harris is, even as compared to Biden, a picture likely to emerge soon. This looks simply at polling data and other campaign mechanics, and it seems as though Harris is not off to the strong start many would have you believe.
First off, to answer the obvious Harris boosters and partisan Democrats rejoicing at Kamala’s selection: Yes, the vice president has posted record fundraising numbers in her first days as the heir apparent to Biden. She’s raised north of $80 million real fast. That’s a big number, sure, but there are several caveats to keep in mind that make the eye-popping statistic less impressive than it seems. First off, Democrats had for several straight weeks before this completely cut off their ticket from fundraising. Big donors and small ones alike turned off the spigot entirely as they lost confidence in Biden completely. When Biden made his announcement he was stepping aside, a month’s worth of pent-up donation energy splurged into the Harris effort. So, all she did was just basically recoup the money the previous Biden-Harris ticket had lost over the course of a month, money they were going to get anyway most likely, which came streaming back in when the Democrats had a candidate again who is not clearly cognitively incapable of standing for President of the United States.
But a deeper look at the real numbers here suggests that Harris’s possible floor is actually lower than Biden’s, and the potential for downside for Democrats party-wide is far bigger. Republicans are the ones actually rejoicing right now, mostly behind closed doors but some in public, cheering not-so-subtly and amazed that they could be so fortunate as to see Democrats nominate someone who’s so radical as Harris is to be their presidential candidate through what’s clearly a corrupt coronation and something that is anything but the grassroots, bottom-up, transparent, and open “process” the Democrats promised.
To that point about the corrupted coronation rather than an open process, now, Black Lives Matter is formally as an organization ripping Harris and Democrats for brushing aside anyone else to simply sweep her into the nomination:
Initial polling suggests Harris trails Trump nationally by anywhere from 2 percent to double digits. Just as was the case with Biden as the nominee for Democrats, these numbers are horrific for Democrats’ electoral college prospects. A 2 percent victory for Trump in the national popular vote essentially probably portends a landslide in the electoral college, and a 10 percent or higher victory for Trump in the national popular vote means more than mandate-level territory for him in the electoral college. Even the worst-case scenario poll for Trump, a Reuters survey showing Harris leading him by 2 percent nationally published on Monday, suggests that Trump would still win the electoral college even if that were accurate. In 2016, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton beat Trump by just over 2 percent nationally in the popular vote and still lost the presidency. In 2020, Biden beat Trump by 4.5 percent in the national popular vote and barely scraped by in the electoral college. For Harris to feel comfortable heading into the general election, she needs to be way higher than 2 percent ahead of Trump in national surveys. If that’s as high as she gets on her best days, she’s in for a rude awakening and so are all the Democrats huffing hope right now.
Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio addressed this momentary “honeymoon” surge for Harris in polling in a broader memo released on Tuesday:
Fabrizio’s memo argues that despite establishment media outlets’ and Democrats’ best efforts to frame the race as having “changed” significantly in the coming days using polls like this Reuters one, nothing really has changed or will change and the immediate “Harris Honeymoon” effect will wear off soon. “So, while the public polls may change in the short run and she may consolidate a bit more of the Democrat base, Harris can’t change who she is or what she’s done,” Fabrizio wrote. “Stay tuned.”
Smart Democrats know this to be true, too, and aren’t rushing in for the coronation. Former Pennsylvania Democrat Party chairman T.J. Rooney is seriously concerned at Harris’s ability to play well in the Keystone State. This key excerpt is from a piece in the Washington Examiner by Pennsylvania-focused reporter Salena Zito:
Former chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party T.J. Rooney said if you thought Hillary Clinton had problems connecting with the all-important smaller Pennsylvania counties in 2016, the ones such as Erie that ultimately cost her the election, Harris, because of her views on fossil fuels, will struggle even more so.
Rooney said her vulnerabilities have nothing to do with race. “Remember, Barack Obama won counties like Erie, Cambria, Elk, Luzerne and Northampton, nor does it have anything to do with gender, it is her electability in our state because of her world view,” he said.
To Fabrizio’s point, just hours after his memo was public, a National Public Radio (NPR)-Marist poll showed Trump leading Harris by 1 percent, 46 percent to 45 percent, was published:
That same pollster, for what it’s worth, was one of the only pollsters that showed Harris leading Trump—by a single percent, 50 to 49—right before Biden dropped out (most of the rest had Trump up, and most of them pretty substantially):
If Trump really does lead Harris by 9 percent to begin the slightly-more-than-100-days sprint to Nov. 5, as the latest HarrisX poll conducted for Forbes says he does, then that means in all likelihood it’s possible all 50 states are in play for him and battleground states will include places like Oregon, Washington State, Delaware, and Maryland not places like Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania. But given that we live in the real world here, we know that’s probably a rosier-than-reality view of things for Trump than exists. So let’s look at the numbers from the places that matter. Early battleground state polling from some key states like Virginia and New Hampshire—states Trump did not win in 2016 or 2020, but he still won the presidency in 2016 without them so if they flip his way this time he almost certainly will win in 2024—shows Trump leading Harris in both of them.
Even the New York Times polling that showed Trump leading Biden in Pennsylvania also showed Trump leading Harris there (but the Times has Biden down in Virginia and Harris with an infinitesimal lead there):
In addition, surveys out of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, and North Carolina conducted by a Democrat polling firm shows Trump clearly ahead of Harris in each state:
What’s more, as even MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki admitted on live television, early Democrat enthusiasm for a Harris ticket appears based more on “hope” than on reality. Harris’s approval ratings and head-to-head polling numbers against Trump are about as abysmal as Biden’s were, Kornacki said this week, and barring some massive sea change in things soon that seems unlikely to shift at all as the campaign progresses.
Then there’s the New York Times, the liberal newspaper whose editorial board warned Democrats against coronating Harris so quickly, which published an analysis showing of potential Democrat candidates against Trump upon a Biden withdrawal that Harris is by far the weakest of the bunch.
When Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer came out on Tuesday alongside House Democrat Leader Hakeem Jeffries to publicly back Harris as the new party leader, too, he literally had to beg the audience to applaud—and the audience gathered before them did not even oblige Schumer’s request:
Harris and her team are already making some critical mistakes too. First off, the fact that she is keeping on Julie Chavez Rodriguez and Jen O’Malley Dillon as her campaign manager and co-chair respectively after they effectively ran Biden’s campaign into the ground with repeated missteps does not instill confidence. Nate Silver, a leading elections analyst, expressed shock publicly at this news:
On that note, Politico Playbook on Tuesday morning quoted a “veteran Democratic operative close to Harris world” in its newsletter as essentially already writing off the states of Michigan and Wisconsin in Harris’s electoral college calculations.
“The Midwest is not where the opportunity is for her,” that anonymous Democrat “close to Harris world” said. “The opportunity with her … is going to be Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania. And however those four states go, the rest of the country will follow.”
The fact that someone close to Harris would say this on a day she is literally campaigning in Wisconsin in Milwaukee is frankly malpractice akin to what Chavez Rodriguez and O’Malley Dillon did to Biden’s prospects. Give them a few weeks to keep digging deeper for Harris. On that note, at that Milwaukee event, Harris drew a reported crowd size of just about 3,000 people:
Even if you take that very generous estimate at its word, in Milwaukee alone in 2020 the Biden-Harris ticket won more than 317,000 votes—so that means Harris, at the height of her 2024 presidential campaign, was only able to draw less than 1/100th of the Democrat vote total in this area from the immediate last election. And by comparison, Trump, when he campaigned in the Bronx in deep-blue Democrat territory, was able to draw a crowd of between 8,000 and 10,000 per the New York Post at the time.
But even if one were to be that generous to Harris’s Milwaukee launch crowd size, compare it then up against her 2020 campaign launch in January 2019 in Oakland, California. There, according to the New York Times, she drew a staggering 20,000 rally attendees—before she went on to royally flame out before even making it to the Iowa caucuses. So that means she did nearly seven times worse in this rally to launch her campaign this time.
That same aforementioned Politico Playbook section also makes a critical miscalculation regarding Harris’s support levels among younger voters and Hispanic voters. “Harris’s emerging brain trust is also starting to rethink how the fundamentals of the race against DONALD TRUMP have changed,” Politico Playbook wrote in the lead-up to that other quote dismissing Wisconsin and Michigan as possible winnable states for Harris. “They believe Harris’ relative strength with young, Black and Brown voters will put more states in play than a weakened Biden could credibly contest.”
Two major surveys released in the past 24 hours show Trump crushing Harris among young voters, and straight-up-tied with her among Hispanic voters. The Quinnipiac poll shows Trump leading with young voters by nearly 20 points:
And the HarrisX survey shows Trump and Harris tied with Hispanics:
If Trump actually ties Harris nationally with Hispanics, and leads by even half of that number with young voters, then Democrats are in serious trouble.
Some polling even shows Harris–who is black–with a lower approval rating among black voters than Biden, who is white, in key swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania:
Another thing to watch as more polling becomes available is whether Trump’s numbers with seniors improve. Against Biden, Trump was doing particularly poorly with this traditionally Republican demographic this cycle. But against Harris, who’s arguably far more radical a Democrat than Biden, this demographic could easily revert—and if the other demographic shifts that we saw before with Trump versus Biden stay the same with Trump gaining the benefits with young voters, Hispanic voters, and black voters, that he did before, this could bottom out the Harris campaign sooner rather than later.
Campaigns are all about momentum and most people who work in this business understand this fact. That’s a big part of why many establishment media figures are doing their darnedest to help protect Harris early in her nascent bid, at least for now, looking the other way on many of these above serious weak points. In fact, without naming any names, several establishment media figures from several outlets have agreed in private conversations with Breitbart News in the past couple days that these are all major issues and that they are likely to catch up with Harris soon. Many of them are deliberately, at least for now, holding their fire desperately hoping she figures it out–but how long they hold off on criticizing Harris is anyone’s guess.
After all, when it comes to running for president, nobody is going to let anybody just waltz right into the White House—and if these Harris weaknesses threaten Democrats elsewhere in the party, her own team will cut bait on her so fast you won’t even be able to blink before it happens, as evidenced by how fast they just turned on Biden. On that note, CNN and The Hill newspaper had two very interesting pieces published early on Tuesday demonstrating how Harris is already amounting to a problem for down-ticket Democrats in the House and Senate respectively. If she becomes more of a lead weight than a rocket booster—and it’s looking like she’s pretty heavy around their necks right now—then Democrats could altogether abandon the prospects of holding the White House at all and shift all their energy and resources into protecting individual Senate and House seats. If Harris does not inspire real confidence soon, and the stuff you’re seeing right now is fake manufactured energy, then she could be in very real trouble and headed for a major dive.
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