Any “bounce” that Vice President Kamala Harris may have gotten from last month’s Democratic National Convention (DNC) appears to have evaporated, according to the most recent New York Times/Siena poll out on Sunday.
Josh Kraushaar offered a breakdown of the poll, taken between September 3 and September 6, which showed an overall win for former President Donald Trump (48%) over Harris (47%).
“The Harris bounce, blown,” he said, and quoted the NYTimes article accompanying the poll as saying that the responses were “largely unchanged from a Times/Siena poll taken in late July just after President Biden dropped his reelection bid.
Several of the poll’s key questions outlined where the DNC — which relied heavily on attacks on former President Trump contrasted with the “joy” represented by Harris and running mate Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) — may have missed the mark.
A number of those polled indicated that they might consider Harris, but wanted to know more about her — particularly her policy positions — before they were willing to commit to casting a vote in her favor.
From the article: “The new poll underscores the risks and potential rewards, particularly facing Ms. Harris, on Tuesday night, when she and Mr. Trump will face off on ABC News. The survey found that 28 percent of likely voters said they felt they needed to know more about Ms. Harris, while only 9 percent said they needed to know more about Mr. Trump.”
According to the poll, five percent were still undecided — and two-thirds of those said they wanted to know more about Harris’ policies before casting a vote.
The poll also indicated that Harris’ apparent push to drive voters to view her as a “change” candidate — and to put distance between her campaign and the policies implemented by the Biden-Harris administration — was not going as well as she might like.
“If November is about change,” the article stated, “Ms. Harris will need to make the case that she can deliver it. More than 60 percent of likely voters said the next president should represent a major change from Mr. Biden, but only 25 percent said the vice president represented that change, while 53 percent said Mr. Trump, the former president, did.”
Further complicating that particular issue is the fact that less than one-third of those polled believe the country is moving in the right direction — and if they don’t view Harris as a change from that, it poses yet another problem for her to address.
Attempts by Harris and Walz to paint Trump and his running mate — Senator JD Vance (R-OH) — as “extreme” and “weird” also appear to have fallen flat, as the poll indicated only 32% view Trump as “too conservative. Contrast that with the 47% who see Harris as “too liberal,” and it poses yet another hurdle for Harris to clear in Tuesday’s ABC debate.
The Vice President’s strongest issue, according to the poll, is abortion — but even that may have her on shaky ground. Despite her repeated insistence to the contrary, 16% of Democrats — and almost half of the independents polled — do not believe that Trump would move to enact a federal law restricting abortions.
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