Opinion about the polls about Harris and Trump
The first day in the life of a presumptive candidate: when she was a teacher at a preschool school, she wouldn’t be able to vote for Donald Trump
The first is the party unity she enjoys by virtue of being the presumptive nominee without having had to endure a bruising Democratic primary battle. This is an equivalent to a video game cheat code that will allow you to skip through some early levels on the way to the boss fight at the end of the game. Harris didn’t have to spend the last year getting pummeled by, or trying to pummel, Democratic presidential rivals, almost certainly including some of the very Democrats who are now under consideration to be her vice-presidential nominee. While some of the out-of-the-mainstream views she espoused during her unsuccessful 2020 presidential run will no doubt follow her in this election, Ms. Harris benefits greatly from not yet having had to renavigate several issues that divide the Democratic Party these days, including border security, crime and policing, and the war in Gaza.
A top adviser for Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns knows his own business, regardless of how you feel about him. He saw a path to a Trump victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 that others didn’t. When Mr. Fabrizio puts a memo out, I take it seriously. Campaigns often leak polling memos to drive a preferred narrative, so it is sensible to take it with a grain of salt.
This is, to use the parlance of our time, a vibe shift. It’s hard for me to overstate the euphoria Republican activists were feeling about the election coming out of their convention in Milwaukee. And, indeed, before the shake-up atop the Democratic ticket, most voters said that they thought Mr. Trump would win November, according to a July poll by Echelon Insights, where I am a founding partner. If you asked voters again, you wouldn’t be able to tell if they would vote for Mr. Harris or not.
Tomorrow Wright, a pre-K teacher who hadn’t been planning to vote when Biden was a Democratic candidate, was the first person I met at the Atlanta rally for Harris.
She said that Biden had disappointed her by not doing more to cancel student loan debt. She had waited at noon for her first ever rally because Harris had electrified her, and she wanted to avoid the brutal southern sun during the day.
At the Georgia State Convocation Center, where around 10,000 people packed the stadium for Harris, most of the people I met said they were going to vote for Biden. Many told me they couldn’t help him more because of the lack of energy on the ground.
Tammy Clabby, a long time activist for the Democratic Party, worked for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. “How could I tell a young person to vote for Joe Biden when he couldn’t finish a sentence in that debate?” Harris’s ascension, however, changed everything. Clabby compared the vibe to Barack Obama’s first electrifying run.
It was an analogy I heard over and over at the ebullient rally, which often felt like a dance party, and not just when the Grammy-winning rapper Megan Thee Stallion was performing. There is a woman who has become a catalyst for the Democrats’ desperate hope for hope and a fighter to take on Trump.
Conservatives seem to think that the sudden change in their political fortunes are a result of a media psy-op.
Is it possible to turn a vapid, lefty San Francisco Democrat into a cultural phenomenon by mixing her with other like-minded people? Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida wrote on social media.