The presidential race has got some on the left pressing the panic button. The polls still show this race as tight as it can get, and yet you have more and more people talking about how it is Donald Trump’s to lose because he has gone up a little and the momentum seems to be on his side.
But boy, his ‘momentum’ only is getting him from down two points to up two points in a margin of error poll that has a four-point window. So, has anything actually changed?
The early voting data we are seeing is promising for Trump. We are seeing more Republicans voting early – whether it is in person or by mail – than we have in the last election. That is great, but we don’t know whether those are additional votes or whether they are just cannibalizing Election Day votes (though, as we discussed on Wednesday’s show, it is a net-positive regardless).
Here’s the thing: I try to take in as much media as I can on the polls and on big events like the Kamala Harris CNN town hall with Anderson Cooper, and I am sensing real alarm in Democrat circles.
Dems Ring the Alarm?
Our friend Dan Turrentine was saying on 2Way that he is hearing the DCCC and the DSCC – those are the Democrat campaign apparatuses for the House and the Senate – are telling their candidates that it is okay to not follow Kamala Harris’ lead on messaging down the stretch.
That is not exactly a ringing endorsement of her closing message, which is her telling us over and over why Trump is bad. He is very, very bad, and that is why you can’t vote for Trump.
As we talked to Mark Halpern about yesterday, Democratic incumbents in tight races are starting to embrace Trump in their ads. Why are they doing that? They are doing that because they, too, have information that Trump is winning.
This race is not won. It is certainly not done. Kamala Harris could still win, but Donald Trump is winning. It is obvious, if you just look around at the objective signs of who is doing well and who is suffering. You look over at Trump and he is having a ball. He is at McDonald’s with the gleaming smile.
They want to make fun of him for deciding to play music when those people passed out at his very packed, hot event in Pennsylvania last week. It was actually a really nice moment. I think anybody who saw it – including an ABC News reporter – found that it was sweet. They want to say this is all freaky stuff, but the reality is Trump is having a great time.
Trump looks and is behaving like a winner. Kamala Harris is not.
The Infighting Begins
The infighting is already starting on the left. We told you about the Morning Joe freak out over how Kamala Harris is dealing with the attack by Trump on her support for using taxpayer dollars to pay for trans surgeries in prisons for illegals and felons. They are starting to pull out the knives for Team Harris. ‘She is not doing it right.’ ‘Why aren’t they dealing with this?’
We also saw it on CNN last night after the town hall. They have run out of spin. I actually felt bad for David Axelrod. For the most part, I think he is a straight shooter and knows a talented political candidate when he sees one. This ain’t it, and you could hear sort of the dejection from him and others at the network. Here’s some of what Axelrod had to say:
AXELROD: She can be clinical on some of these economic issues. She was great on the long-term care for the… elderly… The things that would concern me is, when she doesn’t want to answer a question, her habit is to kind of go to word salad city.
And she did that on a couple of answers. One was on Israel. Anderson asked a direct question, ‘Would you be stronger on Israel than Trump?’ And there was a seven-minute answer, but none of it related to the question he was asking… On immigration, I thought she missed an opportunity because she would acknowledge no concerns about any of the administration’s policies, and that’s a mistake. Sometimes you have to concede things, and she didn’t concede much…
No one is going to be Bill Clinton, but you do want to relate to the people in front of you. She didn’t do a lot of that. She didn’t ask them questions. She did address them particularly…
He is right. There was almost no warmth in her performance whatsoever. That is truth telling. She didn’t connect. She can’t. She doesn’t have it in her. She didn’t build a life that allows her that sort of emotional connection with people or the ability to have the confidence to show who she really is.
Kamala Flip Flops
The thing about Trump is he shows us who he is. It is not always pretty, but it is real. It is authentic. Somehow, that is more steadying. She makes you feel unstable, like I have no idea what I am hiring. I think I am hiring a far-left liberal from San Francisco who is trying to act a little bit more moderate so she can win a presidential election. But I don’t want a radical in the presidency – and almost no one does.
Even the Democrat Party has realized, in the context of this race, how effed up their policies have been on social matters in particular. They are not running on those lunatic social issues we saw after George Floyd and with the trans stuff. They are running away from all that. They are pretending – like we are seeing with Colin Allred, the liar in Texas running against Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas – that they have not voted to approve boys in girls sports or haven’t tried to make it easier for these radical doctors to trans kids.
The Democrats are fracturing over those social issues, and the Republicans are winning on them. I think Kamala Harris is totally in line with all those controversial issues the country is rejecting, so of course she has to dodge. The problem is that she can’t say she has disavowed everything that she stands for.
She had to pick her top few flip flops – like open border, Medicare for all, and fracking – but she can’t then also say, ‘And I am no longer for trans surgeries on minors, and I’m no longer for boys playing in women’s sports, and I’m no longer for funding these sex change operations for illegals in prisons on the taxpayer dime.’ She has to dodge.
Poll Plunge
Kamala Harris is struggling, and we can see it. CNN did everything it could to set Kamala Harris up for success last night. Anderson Cooper threw a few challenging questions her way and did follow up on a couple of issues. But make no mistake, the whole thing was set up by CNN and agreed to by Kamala Harris to be a ‘Trump is Hitler’ extravaganza. Even so, she was totally flat-footed. She didn’t break through.
Kamala Harris did not have any sort of a spike the ball moment. I don’t think she reassured anyone, and I don’t predict any boost in the polls. In fact, what we are seeing in these polls right now is that she has gone down steadily since she started speaking.
The current Real Clear Politics national average has her up 0.2 in the national, which is her lowest lead since August 5. The Wall Street Journal’s latest poll has Trump up three points (the margin of error is 2.5 percentage points). In August, Harris was up one. That is a four-point swing. The Wall Street Journal also found that views of Harris have turned more negative since August. Back then, equal shares of voters viewed her favorably and unfavorably. Now, the unfavorable views are dominant by 8 percentage points, 53 to 45.
Why is that? I posit it is because she started putting herself out there. She owned the month of August. The Dems had just done the switcheroo, they had the Democratic National Convention, they did the ‘brat vibes’ nonsense, and her numbers went way up from where Joe Biden’s had been.
Then, things stalled. They couldn’t get past the stall, so they decided a great idea would be to put her out there more. It has just been a disaster because there is nothing behind the veneer, there is nothing inside, and voters know it.
You can check out Megyn’s full analysis by tuning in to episode 925 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.