The presidential race has fundamentally shifted.
Prior to President Joe Biden’s exit from the race, President Donald Trump held a clear advantage. Biden’s abysmal debate performance (and subsequent Democratic Party infighting), the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, and a successful Republican National Convention all converged to yield small but tangible leads for Trump in the battleground states. Those gains have largely dissipated in the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascendance to the top of the Democratic ticket.
The polls have swung decidedly in Harris’s favor as disaffected Democrats return home, the enthusiasm gap closes (particularly among young voters and voters of color), and the media continues to lavish praise upon Harris and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota.
The Cook Political Report, which ranked the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia and Nevada as “Leans Republican” when Biden was in the race, has returned those states to the “Tossup” category.
A New York Times/Siena College poll of nearly 2,000 likely voters conducted August 5-9 found Harris leading in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, three states that were key to Trump’s victory in 2016 but which he narrowly lost to Biden in 2020. (The results in Michigan and Pennsylvania were within the poll’s margin of error.)
Democrats are also becoming more bullish about flipping North Carolina, a state Trump carried by a mere 1.34% margin in 2020. The last time a Democrat carried North Carolina was in 2008 when Barack Obama’s campaign successfully turned out high numbers of African American and young voters. Some Democratic strategists believe having Kamala Harris, an African American woman, at the top of the ticket in 2024 could set the stage for a repeat of Obama’s 2008 victory.
In Maine, one of two states that allocates its Electoral College votes by congressional district, Trump leads Harris by just 4 points in the Second Congressional District, according to recent polling conducted by the UNH Survey Center. However, Trump carried Maine’s Second Congressional District by 7 points in 2020 and by 10 in 2016.
FiveThirtyEight blog founder Nate Silver, recently updated his presidential election forecast, giving Kamala Harris a 56% chance of winning versus 43.5% for Donald Trump. Throughout the month of July, however, it was Trump who had the higher likelihood of winning, according to Silver.
The media’s gushing response to Kamala Harris supplanting Joe Biden has been over-the-top and cringe-worthy yet predictable. Harris has been portrayed as everyone’s fun aunt and a mother to the nation (“Mom-ala,” if you will). Some have hailed her as the second coming of Barack Obama or a more likable version of Hillary Clinton. Her campaign has been described as “joy-filled” and positive even while it casts her opponent as an existential threat to American democracy itself. We are expected to believe that Harris has been a vital player within the Biden Administration who deserves credit for its successes but cannot be held responsible for any of its failures.
If the election were held today, Kamala Harris could very well be elected the next president of the United States.
Luckily, there is still time to turn things around!
Although she has been Biden’s vice president since 2021, Kamala Harris remains an unknown to many Americans. It seems that her campaign wants to keep it that way. Since the campaign’s launch, Harris has shied away from serious interviews or live press conferences. Some political commentators have described the current state of the race as Kamala’s “honeymoon period.” They assert that Harris’s newfound favorability is fleeting, and it will begin to decline as soon as she is forced to articulate and defend her policy positions, many of which are wildly out-of-touch with mainstream public opinion.
The bottom line is that Harris and Walz are extreme on abortion. Together, they constitute the most pro-abortion ticket in U.S. history, opposing even the most basic protections for unborn babies and their mothers.
Harris and Walz oppose the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, a commonsense bill that would ensure that an infant born alive during an attempted abortion is afforded the same degree of medical care as any other newborn of the same gestational age.
Harris and Walz support using your tax dollars to pay for abortions. They oppose the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act and longstanding pro-life appropriations riders like the Hyde Amendment.
Harris and Walz support the so-called Women’s Health Protection Act, a sweeping bill in Congress that would enshrine unlimited abortion until birth in federal law and eliminate virtually all existing protections for unborn babies and their mothers on the state level, including parental involvement laws and right-to-know laws.
You have the power to impact the outcome of this election.
First and foremost, make sure you are registered to vote. Then, make a plan for how you will vote. This could be by mail or in person. Take advantage of early voting if your state offers it. In addition to your vote, it is critical that we make an effort to educate, energize, and mobilize the pro-life voters in our social circles. This could include our friends, family, neighbors, members of our faith communities, coworkers, and so forth.
To help you in communicating what’s at stake in this election and the positions of the candidates on the most critical right-to-life issues, National Right to Life has put together several terrific resources.
Compare the Presidential Candidates: Donald Trump vs. Kamala Harris
Compare a Los Candidatos a la Presidencia: Donald Trump vs. Kamala Harris (Espanol)
Compare the Vice-Presidential Candidates: J.D. Vance vs. Tim Walz
The Record on Life: Kamala Harris
The Record on Life: Tim Walz