Harris thought she would have a cake walk this election. Nothing could be further from the truth.
And now Kamala Harris is hysterical after being handed one piece of awful news.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ sudden rise to the top of the Democratic ticket might be giving the party a slight bump in the polls, but not everyone is buying it.
Some experts are raising alarms, reminding us that this so-called lead could be just smoke and mirrors.
“If the polling errors are anywhere close to what they were in 2016 and 2020, then Trump is in the lead right now,” Democrat strategist Julian Epstein candidly told Fox News Digital, cutting through the noise.
Harris’ supposed lead, as shown by the RealClearPolitics polling average, is a razor-thin 1.5 points over former President Trump nationally.
It’s a shift from the three-point lead Trump held over Biden just before the current president decided to bow out of the race. But let’s be real, that slim margin isn’t nearly as comfortable as the Democrats would like to believe.
Compare this to where Trump stood in 2016 and 2020, trailing Hillary Clinton by 6 points and Joe Biden by 7.1 at the same time in the race. Trump didn’t just survive those odds — he thrived.
In 2016, he pulled off a stunning victory, and in 2020, he far outperformed his polling numbers, proving that the polls aren’t always gospel. The Democrats know this, and it’s making them nervous as 2024 approaches.
Even more telling are recent polls conducted by Democratic firms, which should give Harris and her supporters serious pause.
As reported by Politico, these polls may show Harris in the lead, but they also reveal troubling signs, including Trump gaining ground in key characteristics that actually matter to voters.
Harris isn’t just struggling nationally — she’s essentially tied with Trump across the critical battleground states.
This means that in the states that will ultimately decide the election, Harris is underperforming, and that’s a red flag that Democrats can’t afford to ignore.
“It’s still a very tough race, and that feels consistent with everything we know,” admitted Margie Omero, a partner at the Democratic polling firm GBAO Strategies, in an interview with Politico.
Even the Democratic pollsters aren’t resting easy, haunted by the specter of another polling error despite their best efforts to fix the issues after 2020.
“I spent a ton of time and analysis trying to dig into those problems. And I feel much better educated about those problems,” said Nick Gourevitch, a partner at Global Strategy Group who was part of the Democratic “polling autopsy” post-2020.
But his admission is telling: “I don’t think there’s any pollster in America who can sit here and say… that they’re 100% sure that they fixed any issues in polling. I think that would be silly.”
Democratic pollsters are treading carefully, despite Harris’ seemingly quick rise in recent weeks. The lead pollster on Biden’s 2020 campaign, John Anzalone, offered a sober assessment: “Every year, we’ve had different curveballs. This is a difficult industry,” he told Politico.
“Something’s gonna happen in 2024. You and I, right now, don’t know what that is.”
But Julian Epstein isn’t mincing words when it comes to what the Democrats should really be worried about.
Harris, he points out, is still “underperforming in the Rust Belt battleground by significant numbers” and is struggling “with working-class voters and Black voters” — two critical demographics.
Epstein doesn’t hold back in his warning: “The idea that Harris doesn’t have to specify policy or go before the news media is a strategy born of conceit and foolhardiness and will ultimately backfire.”
It’s a strategy that’s playing with fire, and the Democrats might just get burned.
Stay tuned to the DC Daily Journal.
