By Dave Andrusko
Yesterday I wrote about pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris’s disastrous CNN “town hall.” However, as I further peruse the comments of Democrat operatives, I guess I underestimated how terrible she was.
You can understand why a conservative like David Harsanyi would plaintively ask “Why Can’t Kamala Answer a Simple Question?” But how about this from David Axelrod, former Obama White House advisor?:
The things that would concern me, and then I, she did one thing at the end that I thought was really important. The thing 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 [Cooper] 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. And so, you know, on certain questions like that, 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, but I’ll tell you something. John King mentioned Bill Clinton.
No one’s 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 didn’t address them particularly.
There’s lots of news this morning. What would you take from this headline from Gallup?: “Trump, Harris Favorability on Low End of 68-Year Trend.”
But that is underplaying the most significant finding by far:
“This is the first time in Trump’s three presidential campaigns that his scalometer rating has not been below 50% positive.”
As you can see from the table, Trump is at a total favorable of 50% while Harris is at 48%!

This in spite of a relentless attack by Harris, Democrats, and the legacy media culminating in the absurd charge that Trump is a “fascist.”
Speaking of the New York Times poll, Adam Nagourney and Ruth Igielnik tell us “Kamala Harris and Donald J. Trump are locked in a dead heat for the popular vote, 48 percent to 48 percent, the final national poll by The New York Times and Siena College has found, as Ms. Harris struggles for an edge over Mr. Trump with an electorate that seems impossibly and immovably divided.”
That’s the lead and a polite way of saying Trump has the wind at his back. For example,
The result, coming less than two weeks before Election Day, and as millions of Americans have already voted, is not encouraging for Ms. Harris. In recent elections, Democrats have had an edge in the popular vote even when they have lost the Electoral College and thus the White House. They have been looking to Ms. Harris to build a strong national lead as a sign that she would do well in such critical swing states as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
And
Ms. Harris’s position, if anything, may have declined among likely voters since the last Times/Siena College poll, taken in early October. At the time, she had a slight lead over Mr. Trump, 49 percent to 46 percent. The change is within the margin of error, but The Times’s national polling average has registered a tightening in polls over the past few weeks as well, suggesting at the very least that this contest has drawn even closer.
Hot Air’s David Strom notes, “At this point in 2020, the polling averages had Biden up by 8 points, and in 2016, Hillary was up by 5. Biden won the popular vote by half that margin.”
And then there is the widely-respected Nate Silver. He writes this morning
The Times poll’s large sample sizes and high quality help us dig a little deeper into the numbers — not just who’s winning, but why. For instance, it asked voters “What one issue is most important in deciding your vote this November for president?”.
This was an open-ended question; respondents volunteered their answers rather than being read options from a prefabricated list. And here’s how they responded. I’ve done a little algebra on the backend here to calculate the net number of votes gained or lost by Harris based on issue groups. ¹
Immigration and the economy are costing Harris.
Silver explains further that
In a separate set of questions in the Times poll, voters trusted Trump more to handle immigration by a margin of 11 points, larger even than his edge on the economy (+7).
And let the finger pointing begin. We begin with this tweet from Jim VanderHei:
Dems fear they’re blowing it – a surprising number of people close to Harris and her swing state operations tell us they FEEL she will lose even though polls SHOW a legit 50-50 toss-up. Internally, some aides are already pointing fingers…
Finally, Ed Morrissey of HotAir has a story under the headline “Progressives to Harris: Fire Everyone and Start Over.”
Morrissey derives from a panicky story in the Associated Press that
The component arguments in this reaction matter less than the reaction itself, though. This does not sound like a Democrat coalition that has confidence in its anointed nominee any longer, and certainly not one that senses “joy” in the offing on November 5. Going public with these criticisms and demands in the final fortnight sends a very clear message that Democrats see Harris losing an election against a candidate they were convinced would lose — and that they don’t really know what to do about it.
It’s really worth a read.
Let me close with this from Nagourney and Igielnik:
And voters continue to be pessimistic about the direction of the country, a measure that historically has been a danger sign for the party in power. Just 28 percent of respondents said the country was heading in the right direction. Mr. Trump has repeatedly painted a dark picture of the nation under President Biden and Ms. Harris.
More on Monday.
(FYI: my wife and I voted yesterday.)
