Harris and her allies believe they’ve already won. There’s one problem with that.
And CNN just threw a giant wrench in the plans of the Kamala Harris campaign.
If you listen exclusively to the mainstream media talking heads, you’d think that the Kamala Harris campaign has effectively assumed total control of the election and has rendered the Trump campaign useless. It seems every week they are producing poll after poll suggesting Kamala Harris now has a five to ten point lead over former President Trump, who was just beating Joe Biden so bad they had to force him out of the race. Not very believable, for many Americans.
There’s one big problem with this flowery narrative for Kamala Harris. It’s that Donald Trump has one key to victory in his bag that she and her Democrat allies can do nothing about. That is his surprising rise in favorability that poses a serious issue for the Harris campaign’s vehement Trump attacks.
In a recent analysis, CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten raised concerns for Vice President Kamala Harris regarding the growing challenge of defeating former President Donald Trump in the upcoming election. Enten pointed out that Trump’s favorability ratings have significantly improved compared to his previous campaigns, suggesting that the Harris camp might need to reconsider their strategy.
According to a set of polls from The New York Times and Siena College released on Saturday, Harris leads Trump by a narrow margin of 50% to 46% among likely voters in key swing states, including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Despite this edge, Enten noted during his segment on CNN News Central that Trump’s current favorability rating is higher than it was at comparable points during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. This shift, he argues, could be a warning sign for Harris’ campaign.
“If you’ve followed Donald Trump’s campaigns over the years, you know he’s either won or come close to winning despite being unpopular,” Enten explained. “In 2016, his favorability was at just 33%, yet he won the election. In 2020, it rose to 41%, and now he’s at 44%.” This increasing popularity could prove advantageous for Trump, making him a more formidable opponent than before.
CNN's Harry Enten Warns Harris Campaign Trump May Be 'Tough To Put Away' Because Of His Popularity Surge pic.twitter.com/Sc0ScxJ0Rc
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 14, 2024
Enten also highlighted a dilemma for the Trump campaign: “If Trump is more popular now than ever before, why is he still trailing in the polls? Can they turn that around?” This paradox is likely to drive the Trump team to explore strategies to close the gap as the election approaches.
Enten’s commentary included a cautionary note for the Harris campaign: “They can’t afford to underestimate Trump. He’s managed to win even when he was less popular, and now he’s more popular than ever. Harris’ team may need to reassess their confidence going into the final stretch of the campaign.”
As the election season heats up, the central question remains whether Harris can maintain her lead and capitalize on her favorable ratings, or if Trump’s rising popularity will once again defy expectations and make him a tougher opponent to beat.
Corporate Media Polls Don’t Tell The Whole Story
There’s one thing that the 2016 and the 2020 election had in common that the Democrats have to be panicking about ahead of this November. That is the fact that Trump seriously outperformed expectations according to the corporate media polls that gave him no chance at winning.
While Trump did not “win” in 2020, he seriously outperformed all expectations. In Wisconsin, for example, he performed nearly six points better than he was supposed to. He made several swing states close contests that were not supposed to be close in the slightest.
The same thing happened in 2016. Everyone was writing off Donald Trump but, again, he pulled out major wins that he was not “supposed” to win that year, like Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio.
Even if the corporate media polls were to be trusted, a current Kamala Harris one point national lead is terrible news for her campaign. If Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are all within one point according to the polls, history suggests Donald Trump is going to pull out an electoral college victory no matter what the popular vote ends up being.
So why is this the case? Well, the fact of the matter is that a ton of Trump voters continue to be left out of “the system” and don’t get considered when these data “experts” are putting together their survey results. They still don’t know how to factor in the millions of Trump voters who turn up out of no where to show support for Trump.
While some of it is the inability to account for Donald Trump energizing new voters, like some Amish communities who are historically not engaged voters, there’s also the reality that corporate media wants to show that Kamala Harris can win. They’re going to sample favorably for Kamala Harris right now because the morale for the Democrats was absolutely gone when Joe Biden was in the picture. So now they want to give Kamala Harris all the flowers in the world and make it seem like she is way ahead, even if she’s not, so that the Democrats don’t have the bottom of their base fall out and get embarrassed in November.
Stay tuned to the DC Daily Journal.
