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27 days until the November 5 elections. What do we know and what does that tell us?

Oct 9, 2024

By Dave Andrusko

I don’t think it’s picking on pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris to say that she is not particularly fast on her feet. When she is forced to address a subject of substance, she seems hopelessly out of her depth.

How does Harris square the circle on a really tough sell? By that, I mean you would think that she would ask for the equivalent of a mulligan for the Biden-Harris record of the last four years. After all, Biden’s approval ratings have been underwater for much of his administration (and Harris’s as well). And in an all-important direction-of-the-country question, only about 30% say right direction.

But no! Appearing on The View this week she was asked by co-host Sunny Hostin point blank, “If anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” Her answer?

“There is not a thing that comes to mind, and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact on the work that we have done.”

Stay with me for a few paragraphs while I try to wade through what appears to be contradictory findings. The New York Times just reported on a New York Times/Siena poll that has Harris up three points—49%-46% and a finding that “Voters are now more likely to credit Vice President Kamala Harris than Donald J. Trump with representing change” by 46% to 44%.

But NBC News, looking at the same poll, finds that Trump “is winning the ‘change’ argument, which could very well be important in deciding this contest between a former president and a sitting vice president,” according to Mark Murray. “In the NYT/Siena poll, 25% of likely voters said Harris represents major change and 15% said she represents minor change, while 55% said she represents more of the same. That’s compared with 53% of voters who see Trump as representing major change, 8% as minor change, and 34% as more the same.”

Adding further complexity (or confusion), Newsweek’s Martha McHardy reports

Donald Trump has surged ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris in a dramatic seven-point swing, according to a new national poll.

 

The poll, conducted by ActiVote between October 3 and October 8, gives Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, a 1.2 percent lead over Harris, the Democratic candidate, with 50.6 percent of the vote to her 49.4 percent.

 

It marks a reversal of fortunes for Trump, who was trailing Harris by 5.4 points, 47.3 percent to her 52.7 percent, in a poll conducted by ActiVote between September 11 and September 17. The former president has seen a 6.6-point increase in his lead in just three weeks.

 

Both polls surveyed 1,000 likely voters and had a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percentage points.

What else can we say today? The Daily Wire’s Zach Jewell writes that

Republicans in Pennsylvania and North Carolina registered nearly twice as many voters as Democrats in September, according to new data reported by Michael Pruser of Decision Desk HQ.

 

In Pennsylvania, on the back of registration efforts from conservative activist Scott Presler, Republicans registered nearly 61,000 new voters compared to Democrats gaining nearly 36,000 voters. Presler has recently been leading an effort to register Amish voters in Pennsylvania, a group of 87,000 people in the Keystone State, many of whom have never voted. North Carolina, another vital battleground state, saw over 19,000 Republicans register to vote in September, nearly double the Democrats’ numbers in the state, according to the data.

If you go to Mr. Pruser’s  Twitter/X page [@MichaelPruser], you see that yesterday he also wrote

I have been tracking PA absentee requests and returns since the primary in 2020. Today was the first time in just over four years (10 statewide elections) that Republicans out-requested Democrats in mail absentees for the previous day.

 

8,299 Republican requests

 

8,079 Democrat requests

Pennsylvania is critical to both Trump and Harris.

More on Thursday.

Categories: Politics