As we head towards the fall, there's one word that is music to the ears of Kamala Harris: "Momentum." The mainstream media has been harping on it for a couple of weeks, but it's more than talk – it's showing up in the numbers.
A recent New York Times/Sienna Poll shows Harris leading Donald Trump by four points in each of the three key rust belt swing states: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. If she wins all three, she'll win the presidency. The head pollster at Rasmussen Reports warns against reading too much into swing state polls.
"Swing states do tend to be messier than national polls because there's smaller sample available," Mark Mitchell tells CBN News. "Generally, the polls are smaller. You layer that on top of how you could shift weightings around. You can play some tricks. You can kind of make those look like whatever you want."
Still, with Joe Biden gone and Harris drawing big crowds and better numbers as the Democrats' presidential nominee, the race has clearly changed. Tim Murtaugh, who served as Trump's Communication Director in 2020 and wrote the book, Swing Hard in Case You Hit It: My Escape from Addiction and Shot at Redemption on the Trump Campaign, says we are entering a new phase.
"A bounce that goes on for three weeks or a month is no longer a bounce and should be considered sort of the state of the race," he says.
Right now, Harris is trying to strike a tougher tone on issues where she's vulnerable, like saying she will crack down on illegal immigrant gang activity at the U.S.-Mexican Border.
"I went after transnational gangs, drug cartels, and human traffickers that came into our country illegally," Harris recently said in a campaign speech. "I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won."
Trump pushed back this week during an interview with Elon Musk on X. "We have millions of people coming in a month and then (Kamala) gets up and tries to pretend she's going to do something," Trump told Musk. "She had three and a half years, and they have another five months, but they won't do anything."
The Trump campaign is hoping voters will believe that Kamala Harris is far too liberal, but that means he'll have to stay focused on the message. It will require a campaign and a candidate who are both disciplined.
"The race has been, in fact, completely upended and twisted around," Murtaugh tells CBN News. "And so now the task that is in front of the Trump campaign is that they've got to define or redefine Kamala Harris, if you will, over the course of the next 80 some days. And all of the material is laid out right there in front of them."
While the polls show Harris doing much better than Biden, there's still good news for "Team Trump" at this late stage. Polling suggests that the underlying fundamentals in the race like immigration and the economy haven't changed.
"The issues that matter most are in the basket that is favorable to the MAGA platform," Mark Mitchell of Rasmussen Reports tells CBN News. "When we ask the question, which party do you trust more on the issue of the economy, the Republicans win by upper single digits. Inflation: they win by double digits. The border: they win by double digits."
That's good news for Trump, but Harris will probably continue to get good polling news after next week when the Democrats hold their convention complete with Hollywood glitz and A-List celebrities.
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