After a dramatic change at the top of the Democratic presidential field, any potential new nominee would face some of the same issues facing the current president.
While Kamala Harris is less likely to exhibit the cognitive problems of confusing names or not knowing what someone is saying than Joe Biden, she still has to find a way to catch up with Donald Trump over the next 104 days.
a HarrisX/Forbes The poll released Monday – but conducted from July 19 to July 21, when Biden dropped out of the campaign – showed Trump overwhelmingly favored, leading Harris 50% to 41% overall and 51% to 40% among likely voters.
“Kamala Harris is starting the 2024 race behind Trump, who is riding a strong post-convention surge and has a near-league lead over Harris. [double] “Our polling shows Biden’s support is in the numbers,” said Dritan Nesho, CEO and chief pollster for HarrisX. “If Harris’ support doesn’t start to rise once the polls close, Biden’s decision to back down for Harris may be a case of ‘too much of the same, too late.'”
This study isn’t the only one that has raised red flags for the blue team.
An On Point Politics/SoCal Research poll conducted Sunday, one of the first national polls conducted since Biden dropped out of the race, showed Trump leading Harris with a majority of support, 51% to 43%.
While the poll gave Republicans a +2% lead in its sample (38% of respondents were Republican and 36% were Democrats), other data should worry Democrats, including the fact that 24% said they would be more likely to support Trump if Biden were to step down and just 18% said they would be less likely to support him.
The Trump campaign noted the poll’s findings and a series of favorable primary contests between Trump and Harris, writing in an email to reporters before Biden’s decision to drop out of the race: “Even if Democratic insiders and donors are successful in nominating disgraced border clerk Kamala Harris as the new candidate, they will not save millions of Democratic primary voters, disenfranchising them in the process.”
But not all the polls are bad for Harris.
A Quinnipiac University poll released Monday showed Trump leading Biden by 5 points in a six-candidate race that included minor contenders, 45% to 41%. By comparison, Trump had a 5-point lead over Biden in that same scenario.
“The dramatic shuffle at the top of the Democratic field will have little impact on the race, with Vice President Harris entering the race with approval ratings similar to President Biden’s,” said Tim Malloy, a polling analyst at Quinnipiac University.
A Morning Consult poll released Monday showed Trump leading 47% to 45%, a more positive outlook for Democrats than the six-point lead Trump had over Biden, even though only 65% of Democrats support him leading.
That’s a better figure than a YouGov poll conducted Sunday, which found 60% of Democrats said the Californian should be the party’s presidential nominee, while 21% said they wanted someone else and 19% didn’t know what they wanted.
Those numbers leave room for improvement, especially given that most registered Republicans have rallied around Trump as he battled a months-long legal battle and survived an assassination attempt this month. Harris can’t win unless she can unify the party. And despite the support of much of the Democratic establishment, she hasn’t done that yet.
Single-state polls that include at least some samples from after Biden dropped out of the race are beginning to surface and show that Harris has yet to make a showing: If the election were held today, Harris would lose at least two states that Biden won in 2020.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll released shortly after Biden dropped out of the race showed Trump leading Harris, 50.5% to 45.9%. Trump’s lead over Harris was larger than the 3.5% advantage he had over the current president in the same sample.
And polls suggest Harris lacks appeal among key constituencies Democrats rely on in the Peach State.
Among non-black minorities (Asian and Hispanic), Trump leads the vice president by 12 points, while in the same sample, his lead over Biden among the same demographics was a more modest 3.8 percentage points.
Harris also received less support from women than Biden and Trump, and won among same-sex voters by 7.4 percentage points, while Biden had a nine-point lead.
Meanwhile, Republicans last won New Hampshire in 2000, but a poll conducted July 19-21 suggests Republicans have a chance of winning at least an even margin in the state this year.
A New Hampshire Journal poll released Sunday showed Trump narrowly leading Harris, 40.2% to 39.3%, with an additional 20.5% backing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in “liberty-or-death” New Hampshire.
The poll also asked whether Trump or Biden had won more popular votes. Trump still leads in the primary, but by just 0.3 percentage points (39.7% to 39.4%), while Kennedy has risen to 20.9%.
Both of Trump’s leads are well within the margin of error of +/- 3.99%. But the polling data contains an important caveat that should encourage Republicans: “Political polls using online panels sometimes exhibit a Liberal/Democrat House effect compared to other polls. This should be kept in mind when interpreting the results above.”
