Dem Strategist Sounds Alarm, Says Polls Should Worry Harris Supporters

Vice President Kamala Harris's rise to the top of the Democratic ticket has led to a bump in the party's polling numbers, but some experts are questioning the durability of her new lead.

“If the polling errors are anywhere close to what they were in 2016 and 2020, then Trump is in the lead right now,” Democratic strategist Julian Epstein told Fox News this week.

This comes as the RealClearPolitics polling average shows Harris with a slim 1.5-point lead over former President Trump nationally. This marks a significant change from the three-point lead Trump held over Biden the day before the president exited the race, according to Fox.

However, Harris's lead is much narrower than the deficits Trump faced at similar points in the 2016 and 2020 races. Back then, Trump was trailing Hillary Clinton by 6 points and Joe Biden by 7.1 points at the same stage. Despite these gaps, Trump outperformed his polling numbers in both elections, a reality that Democrats are well aware of as they approach the final stretch of the 2024 campaign.

A recent Politico report underscores that while some recent polls from Democratic firms show Harris with a lead, there are concerning signs. These polls indicate that Trump is leading in key characteristics that could sway voters. Additionally, Harris is nearly tied with Trump in battleground states, suggesting she is underperforming compared to her national numbers in the crucial states that will decide the election, Fox added.

“It’s still a very tough race, and that feels consistent with everything we know,” Margie Omero, a partner at the Democratic polling firm GBAO Strategies, told Politico.

Democratic pollsters are reportedly worried about repeating the same errors seen in the last two election cycles, despite efforts to address these issues after the 2020 election.

“I spent a ton of time and analysis trying to dig into those problems. And I feel much better educated about those problems,” Nick Gourevitch, a partner at Global Strategy Group who participated in the Democratic “polling autopsy,” told Politico. “I don’t think there’s any pollster in America who can sit here and say… that they’re 100% sure that they fixed any issues in polling. I think that would be silly.”

Democratic pollsters, aware of the uncertainties, are urging caution despite Harris’s recent surge.

“Every year, we’ve had different curveballs. This is a difficult industry,” John Anzalone, the lead pollster on Biden’s 2020 campaign, told Politico. “Something’s gonna happen in 2024. You and I, right now, don’t know what that is.”

Epstein, however, sees several reasons for Democrats to be concerned, pointing out that Harris is still “underperforming in the Rust Belt battleground by significant numbers” and “with working-class voters and Black voters.”

“The idea that Harris doesn’t have to specify policy or go before the news media is a strategy born of conceit and foolhardiness and will ultimately backfire,” Epstein speculated.

A former top official for President Biden has also criticized one of the few policies Harris has proposed: imposing price controls on food makers and grocers as a solution to inflation.

Last week, Harris introduced the proposal, which, if enacted, would allow the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general to impose hefty fines on grocers and suppliers if their prices are deemed excessively high. The Biden-Harris Administration has consistently blamed the nation’s inflationary pressures on “corporate price gouging” rather than on their economic policies of high spending during times of disrupted supply chains.

Former Biden White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain expressed skepticism about Harris's approach during an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Saturday.

“Inflation came from a lot of places,” Klain said. “And I think having a federal price gouging law was not going to solve inflation. But consumers deserve not to be gouged. That’s just fair.”

“But where’s the evidence of gouging, Ron? When supply goes down, demand goes up — we’ve seen this movie before. I was around for Nixon’s price controls,” co-host Joe Kernen responded. “It’s the worst thing you can do. If you artificially control a price and keep it low, then competitors don’t come in to increase the supply and it just exacerbates the situation.”

“I agree,” Klain replied. “I think what we really need to do is to further smooth out supply chains… fix the supply chain problems we did in the Biden-Harris administration with improving the efficiency of our western ports to make them operate more efficiently and get goods into our country more quickly and avoid things like the freight rail strike that President Biden prevented.”