Gone is the sugar high over Kamala Harris based on less than accurate polls which peaked following the Democrat Convention only to replaced by Politico gloom due to the first "high-quality" survey since Joe Biden was dumped by the Democrats. The grieving Politico team of Ryan Lizza, Rachael Bade, and Eugene Daniels sounded their sad notes of reality check despair in the Sunday Playbook, "Sobering new polls for Harris."
Once again, a new NYT/Siena poll is all anyone is talking about.
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.
Or could it be that Kamala's hot streak never started in the first place since, as Politico just admitted, this was their first high-quality survey meaning that the "hot streak" was based entirely on hope not reality?
The Times poll shows DONALD TRUMP leading Harris by 1 point — 48 percent to 47 percent — among likely voters.
Like any single poll, we’ll have to wait to see if it’s validated by other research in the coming days. The debate on Tuesday could also scramble things in some new way, so we don’t want to read too much into this morning’s numbers.
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:
It's only surprising if you were unquestioningly drinking the Democrat sugar high Kool Aid of artificial enthusiasm which is apparently what Politico was doing.
Trump remains popular, with a 46 percent approval rating — which is better than where he stood in either of his last two presidential campaigns.
Trump has the edge over Harris when voters were asked generally which candidate is better on whatever was their top issue. One caveat to this is that when voters were asked about specific issues, the results were more mixed and along the lines you would expect: Harris has an advantage on democracy (50 percent to 44 percent) and abortion (55 percent to 38 percent), and Trump has an advantage on immigration (53 percent to 42 percent) and the economy (56 percent to 40 percent).
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.
Who is the candidate of change? One question that stuck out to us is about which candidate represents “change.” We’ve repeatedly noted that Harris, a sitting VP tied to an unpopular incumbent, has done a lot of savvy political work projecting herself as the candidate of the future. But the Times poll douses some of those flames. It finds that 25 percent of respondents see her as representing “major change,” versus 51 percent for Trump. That’s a big problem given that 61 percent of voters in this poll say they want major change.
Which tells us that one should never put much faith in early inaccurate quickie polls especially those taken in the month of August whose purpose is to artificially boost enthusiasm. However, despite Politico now suffering a big disappointment, we can expect them to fall into the same pattern of hyping polls based on not much more than the mists of fading hopes in future election cycles.
