Now that voters have seen more of Vice President Kamala Harris, her establishment media-driven momentum has clearly subsided.
No wonder her handlers kept her hidden for so long.
According to a Gallup poll conducted Sept. 3-15, voters have less favorable views of the vice president than they did in the immediate aftermath of the Democratic Party coup that torpedoed President Joe Biden’s re-election bid in July and made Harris the party’s presidential nominee.
Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump has surged and now once again enjoys the same favorable rating he had in June.
Trump’s rating, in fact, has increased by five points since August.
On the other hand, Harris’s post-coup “bump in favorability,” as Gallup put it, has “moderated somewhat.”
In a poll published on Aug. 22, Gallup showed the vice president with a favorable rating of 47 percent.
The new Gallup poll, however, gave Harris only a 44 percent favorable rating compared to 46 percent for Trump.
As one might expect in light of those numbers, the candidates’ unfavorable ratings stood at 54 percent for Harris and 53 percent for Trump.
Will Trump win in November?
Meanwhile, the poll delivered massive news on the independent-voter front.
Whereas 44 percent of independents gave Trump a favorable rating, only 35 percent did the same for Harris.
Thus, Trump’s “Unity” alliance with former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to have paid dividends.
Furthermore, Trump’s 46 percent favorable rating at this stage of the race bodes extremely well for the former president.
After all, in late August/early September polling from 2020, Trump recorded only a 41 percent favorable rating compared to 46 percent for then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Likewise, at the same point in 2016, Trump earned only a 33 percent favorable rating. Then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton stood at 38 percent.
In other words, by this time in the last two election cycles, Trump trailed his opponents by five percent in favorability.
When it comes to that metric, therefore, the former president has never found himself in a stronger position overall.
The immediate significance of the new Gallup poll, of course, involves Harris’ decline in favorability.
For many weeks following her ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket, the vice president enjoyed fawning coverage from the party’s minions in the establishment media. The press, in fact, effectively ran her campaign for her.
Meanwhile, Harris’s advisors kept her largely shielded from unscripted public appearances, such as press conferences.
When Harris finally gave her first interview in late August, accompanied by running mate Tim Walz, not even gentle treatment from CNN’s Dana Bash could prevent the vice president from exposing her own myriad inadequacies as a thinker and speaker.
Then, when Harris finally sat for her first solo interview last week, she spoke gibberish.
In the meantime, last Tuesday’s presidential debate, which ABC News rigged in her favor, was supposed to reinvigorate her campaign. But the new Gallup poll, which shows Trump with a nine-point favorability edge over Harris among independents, included data collected from voters after the debate.
That debate, therefore, apparently did nothing to improve her electoral prospects.
Now that voters have seen more of the unimpressive and word-salad-prone vice president, one wonders how she could possibly recover.
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