Kamala Harris Outperforming Biden Against Trump ‘Based More on Hope than It Is on the Numbers’

“Simply put, Harris’ chances of winning are not that high,” Kornacki said of Harris’ chances of winning. “Look at this: This is the average of the polls since the debate comparing Kamala Harris to Donald Trump: Trump 47%, Harris 46%. The same polls, when Joe Biden won, had Trump at 47% and Biden at 45%. The numbers for the Democrats have gone up, on average, from 45% to 47%. [percent] to 46. I think that confirms that Democrats see this move as something that will improve their chances in the general election. It’s based on hope rather than on the numbers we have today.”

“If we dig deeper into this, we get favorable versus unfavorable,” he continued. “These are the basic impressions people have of these candidates. For Joe Biden, these numbers have been like this for a long time. They’re very bad: 36% favorable, 57% unfavorable. Again, these are polling averages over the past month. What’s the difference with Kamala Harris? Again, not much different. From 36% favorable to 38% unfavorable, from 57% to 52% unfavorable. And yet a majority of voters say they have an unfavorable impression of Kamala Harris.”

“Let’s give you Donald Trump’s numbers for comparison: he has a 41% approval rating and a 55% disapproval rating,” Kornacki added. “All three of those numbers are said by a majority of voters to be unfavorable. So, again, from a Democratic perspective, we believe that if Harris re-emerges as a presidential candidate and looks at it differently, these numbers will work in her favor, both in terms of approval ratings and in her race against Trump. But we don’t know. As you say, she’s not been fully tested yet. Her name never came up in the 2020 primary. She dropped out two months before that. So we’ll see how it goes. Democrats are hopeful that these numbers will improve. They may not. And they may not play out this way.”