As the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris is sputtering, former President Donald Trump is soaring to new heights of popularity, according to a CNN data analyst.
CNN senior political data reporter Harry Enten laid down the tale of two very different campaigns in a video posted to X.
Trump’s policies and personality have made him a highly polarizing candidate from the moment he entered the quest for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015.
“If you believe that Donald Trump has somehow become less popular over time, let me change your mind about that. In fact, he is more popular at this point in the campaign than he was at this point in the 2020 campaign or the 2016 campaign,” Enten said.
Why is Harris on the attack? Trump’s more popular at this point in this campaign than at this point in either his 2016 or 2020 bids.
Harris’s popularity rise, on the other hand, has crested, and she’s fallen back (barely) into net negative favorability territory. pic.twitter.com/2hddgwc8Zq
— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) October 18, 2024
Enten noted that polling gave Trump a minus 27 net favorability rating when he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Currently, Trump is at minus nine, a higher rating than the minus 12 rating he carried in the 2020 campaign he lost by a whisker.
“So, I think there’s this real question in Kamala Harris’s mind and the campaign’s mind: Why is Trump more popular now than he was at this point in 2020 or 2016?” he said.
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As for Harris, he noted, “her popularity was rising once she became the presumptive Democratic nominee.”
“She was at minus 15 points back on July 17, then minus four points on August 17, then plus one point in September. She was actually in positive territory a month ago, but she has fallen back down to minus one,” he said.
“The momentum of Kamala Harris has stalled, and I think they feel like they have to change something that’s going on in their campaign because they were seeing a rise, and now it has stalled out,” he said.
Enten said having a higher popularity number than Trump means nothing on Election Day.
“Look, she’s still more popular than Trump, but Joe Biden was more popular than Trump — much more — and barely won, and Hillary Clinton was more popular than Donald Trump and lost. Being more popular than Trump isn’t enough,” he said.
“She wants to continue to see her favorability rise, but in fact, it’s going in the wrong direction at this point,” he said, speaking of Harris.
Piers Morgan, writing in an Op-Ed for the New York Post, pointed to one factor helping Trump — stunts like working the drive-thru window Sunday at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s.
“Trump definitely pursued a daring and different campaign path with this stunt, and I think it paid off spectacularly,” he wrote.
“For a privileged billionaire who’s never been seen cooking a meal in his life to put a shift in at McDonald’s like that was not just hilariously funny, it was also a powerful connective link to regular voters,” he wrote.
Writing on the website of the Association of Mature American Citizens, Walter Samuel said the race shows what happens when a well-packaged product is thoroughly examined by the American people.
“The liberal establishment set out to determine whether a combination of near-infinite financial resources, broad media complicity, and a relentless branding operation backed by leading figures within popular culture could gaslight voters into believing that up is down, left is right, and Kamala Harris, California Attorney General, U.S. Senator, and Joe Biden’s vice president had a record entirely unburdened by what had been,” he wrote.
“That experiment has failed, and its failure has left Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party struggling to put together a coherent campaign and message with less than a month left, hoping to run out the clock as their support slips away.”
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