With Election Day less than two weeks away, Americans are souring on Vice President Kamala Harris in the final stretch of the race for the White House.
According to an aggregate of favorability ratings maintained by RealClearPolitics, the Democrats’ presidential nominee has remained underwater for more than a week with unfavourability scores rising to their highest levels since the party’s August convention. Harris is now entering the last few days of the election with a net-negative favorability rating of more than 2.5 percent as of Friday afternoon.
MSNBC Political Correspondent Steve Kornacki broke down some additional numbers that spell out bad news for Harris as she leads the Democrats’ efforts to maintain her administration. According to the network’s polling, Kornacki said, former President Donald Trump has a negative 6-point “feeling” gap among registered voters. Harris, however, is facing an even wider gap with a 10-point deficit among voters, 49 percent of whom have negative feelings toward the incumbent vice president.
“The significance here is the trajectory of the Harris campaign on this sort of feelings thermometer,” Kornacki said. “When she first entered, she was basically in the same ballpark as Trump on positive/negative. After about six weeks as a candidate, she had actually in our poll moved above water on this question.”
The latest cascade of presidential surveys, however, reveals a tidal shift against Harris, who had already consistently polled behind where President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were against Trump throughout their respective races.
On Friday Trump tied with Harris in RealClearPolitics’ latest aggregate of surveys for the first time since the vice president eclipsed the Republican nominee’s polling lead in early August. On Wednesday, a new national survey from The Wall Street Journal found Trump up against Harris by 3 points in a two-way race.
“Moreover, voters give Harris her worst job rating as vice president in the three times the Journal has asked about it since July, with 42% approving and 54% disapproving of her performance,” the paper reported. “By contrast, views of Trump have turned rosier.”
According to the Journal, “Voters recall [Trump’s] time as president more positively than at any point in this election cycle, with 52% approving and 48% disapproving of his performance in office — a 4-point positive job rating that contrasts with the 12-point negative rating for Harris.”
Harris has responded to the downward trending poll numbers by transitioning a campaign she once centered on “joy” into a dystopian effort to depict the political opposition as an existential threat to “democracy.” On Wednesday, the vice president peddled the left’s latest hoax characterizing Trump as a 21st-century “fascist.”
“So, yesterday, we learned that Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, a retired four-star general, confirmed that while Donald Trump was president, he said he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler had,” Harris said.
The vice president was referring to The Atlantic’s latest hit piece on former President Trump. In the piece, Kelly made claims that had already been making the rounds among the Hitler hoaxers for years.
Harris announced she would deliver her campaign’s closing argument one week before Election Day in the same place Trump spoke on Jan. 6, 2021, in an apparent effort to characterize her Republican opponent as a violent extremist even after he was the target of two failed assassination attempts this year.