‘The Thrill is Gone’ Edition: Independents Prefer Trump Over Harris in Latest Gallup Poll
This poll indicates that Trump’s favorability is rising and Harris’s is dropping.
A new Gallup poll of former President Donald Trump’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’s favorability ratings shows a surprising shift from the August iteration of the same poll. Trump has now surpassed Harris overall and, most significantly, among independent voters who participated in this survey.
Trump’s favorability rating now stands at 46%, a gain of 5 points from one month ago, and his unfavorability rating at 53%, a decrease of 2 points. Meanwhile, Harris’s favorability is 44%, down 3 points from last month. Her unfavorability is 54%, an increase of 5 points.
While both candidates’ favorability ratings are underwater, Trump’s unfavorable rating among all adults is 7 points higher than his favorable score, and Harris’s is 10 points higher. He has a 2-point favorability edge over Harris.
However, among independents, Trump’s lead increases to 9 points. His numbers are 44-53 (net: -9) and Harris’s, 35-60 (net: -25).
According to Gallup, “Trump is currently viewed better than he was at a similar point in the 2020 and 2016 campaigns, while Harris’s positive rating is on par with Biden’s in 2020.”
Even Gallup, considered a left-leaning pollster, admits Harris’s “bump in favorability after her unexpected nomination as the Democratic presidential nominee has moderated.”
This survey, conducted Sept. 13-15, encompasses the Sept. 10 presidential debate.
Trump is more popular than Harris in the Gallup poll. https://t.co/M8VvMNshaI
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) September 18, 2024
At the risk of reading too much into a single survey, this poll indicates that Trump’s favorability is rising and Harris’s is dropping.
It suggests that the media-driven “Harrismania” we were forced to endure throughout the month of August, which was never based on reality, may finally be fading.
If this is true, it would follow the pattern of Harris’s run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Her candidacy began on a promising note. She enjoyed some early success, particularly after her infamous ambush of then-candidate Joe Biden during a June 2019 primary debate. She attacked him over his record on busing and his past association with segregationist lawmakers. But as voters got to know Harris a little better, her popularity waned. Donations to her campaign eventually dried up and she was forced to drop out of the race before a single primary vote was cast.
There have been other indications that the initial “thrill” of the Harris campaign is gone. Most notably, on Wednesday, the Teamsters, a transportation workers union with 1.3 million members, announced they would not be endorsing a presidential candidate this cycle. The decision came after an internal poll found that 58% of its members supported Trump while only 31% chose Harris. This marks the first presidential election since 1996 (because of NAFTA) that the organization has not endorsed a Democratic candidate. Mary Chastain reported on this story here.
Harris really should take this decision personally. In the Teamsters’ presidential town hall straw polls that were released in July before President Biden dropped out of the race, he led Trump by a margin of 44.3% to 36.3%. If he were still the nominee, he likely would have received the Teamster’s important endorsement.
TEAMSTERS RELEASE PRESIDENTIAL ENDORSEMENT POLLING DATA
“For the past year, the Teamsters Union has pledged to conduct the most inclusive, democratic, and transparent Presidential endorsement process in the history of our 121-year-old organization—and today we are delivering on… pic.twitter.com/CnFNN9uosx
— Teamsters (@Teamsters) September 18, 2024
In another sign that the initial euphoria may be subsiding, CNN’s Daniel Dale published a scathing attack on the Harris campaign’s rapid response page on X over the weekend. According to Dale, @KamalaHQ “has made a habit of misleadingly clipping and inaccurately captioning video clips to attack former President Donald Trump.”
The account has been “repeatedly deceptive” and has made “inaccurate comments on multiple occasions,” Dale noted. And he goes on to fact check eight of the account’s most disingenuous posts from the last month. I wrote about this story here.
The polls are so tight at this moment that all we can do is read the tea leaves. As of Thursday morning, Trump and Harris are quite literally tied in the RealClearPolitics average of battleground state polls.
The polling averages in the states that will decide the race are as follows: Arizona, Trump +1.6; Georgia, Trump +2.0; Michigan, Harris +1.7; Nevada, Harris +0.2; North Carolina, Trump +0.1; Pennsylvania, Harris +0.7; and Wisconsin, Harris +1.1.
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
If Kamala were a man, would thrills be running up Chris Matthews’s leg?
Panic ensues, as the entire MSM discover that the thrill that ran up each of their legs was actually a heat-seeking gerbil.
How many of you actually know a native born New Yorker?
They’re loud, brash, uncouth, sometimes violent and, worst of all, are Yankees fans.
Sound like a certain orange haired man you know?
We’re not selecting the next American Idol or The Bachelor here. We’re hiring someone to be our chief executive.
Donald Trump’s job for the first forty years of his professional like was to be an executive. He spent four years as the nations chief executive and, to my astonishment, did a fantastic job by and large.
Kamala Harris is not an executive, has no real world experience and has been a dismal failure at carrying the bucket of warm spit that is her current job as VP.
She Peter Principled out a decade ago. She would be more of a disaster as president than Dementia Joe has been. And that’s pretty damned bad.
“They’re loud, brash, uncouth, sometimes violent…”
And, they talk funny.
Rangers fans.
I’m not any of those.
It’s worth pointing out that America is not outer borough New York. Trump’s insult monkey act has its risks, as we have been seeing.
But Kamala isn’t even a convincing trunk monkey.
At least trunk monkeys help their owners.
Hey, I think she has the I.Q. of a Golden Retriever. She makes Sarah Baby Palin and Dan Quayle look like Rhodes Scholars. When, oh, when will people ever stop pointing to the other guy when confronted with their guy’s (or gal’s) deficiencies, as if one somehow justifies the other?
Dude, why the harsh on Golden retrievers? I know for certain my German Shepherd is at least twice as smart as she is.
I had a Golden Retriever. Very lovable dog, but not exactly the smartest. LOL
The more important metric, IMHO, is that in this same poll at this time-period in the 2020 Election, Trump has improved 5-points while Harris is 2-points worse than Biden was. I think this is important because the shifting dynamic of the race has more to do with Trump improving than it does Harris faltering. I think a candidate is always in a better position when a majority or plurality is voting for THEM rather than against their opponent and that seems to be what’s slowly emerging in this campaign.
Very fair. The faltering in Harris public approval is IMO b/c she didn’t take advantage of the opportunity she was handed. She was handed the ability to reset the policy positions of the d/prog candidate. Instead of biting the bullet and kicking Joe Biden to demonstrate that as nominee she is her own person with unique policy positions she has largely failed to explain herself. This failure has been noted and the public is correctly linking her policy positions to the Biden Admin and that record isn’t good. Not on inflation, the economy, border security, crime, foreign policy. Worse by her silence she is allowing DJT, Vance and alt media online to define her policies b/c she refuses to take clear unambiguous positions instead offering up more ‘Joyful’ word salad, non answers and excuses.
Hillary supposedly lost because she did not campaign enough in the upper Midwest, although I think calling half of America a “basket of deplorables” was a bigger factor. It is what you choose not to do that is important, which in Harris’ case in not outlining credible policies, or any at all. Price controls on low-margin grocery stores would be counterproductive and taxing unrealized capital gains is idiotic. We are voting for the Chief Executive Officer of the USA, not a high school class president.
It’s not so much Harris faltering as the MSM’s supply of gaslight exhausting itself.
Running interference for the idiot’s campaign is like being an actor in a version of Noises Off that lasts two months instead of 103 minutes.
check this out:
in their latest move to help harris
Springfield, Ohio, mayor granted emergency powers as Haitian immigrants say they fear for their safety amid Trump and Vance’s false claims
showing haitians in church with police guards
hey,, they wouldnt even defend the jewish students who were being atacked
Unbelievable!
trump should win 62% of the vote
Keep in mind that Gallup, per Nate Silver’s pollster rankings, has a significant R lean.
Gallup doesn’t measure (or at least publish) head-to-head match-ups. Instead, it measures favorability/unfavorability approval/disapproval and a host of other polling indicators like direction of the country, how do you ‘fee’ about the economy, etc etc. They’re a useful pollster because they ask the exact same core questions each election cycle. If they lean R or lean D doesn’t really impact how candidates do from one election cycle to the next.
Let’s arguendo say the lean R. OK. In 2020, they showed Trump’s approval rating and favorability appreciably lower than they do today and that’s the real takeaway. Also in 2020, they showed Biden’s favorability and approval significantly higher than Harris’ today.
Whenever I see a story based on a single pollster, I check Silver’s ratings. It’s the only thing I use him for; otherwise, I don’t think he’s a talented political analyst. The fact is that Silver rates Gallup at R +0.6, which on his scale is substantial. There are more pronounced leans than that, mostly but not entirely in the D direction.
This isn’t to say that Gallup is right or wrong. No one can know that. It is only to put a discount factor on the one pollster.
I would say Gallup leans slightly to the left.
Nonsense. That’s impossible.
As Danny has pointed out, anyone who ignores any poll is rejecting reliable data about how people think.
In exactly the same way that anyone who doesn’t accept crooked election results is rejecting reliable data about how people voted.
Danny is mentally ill, as are others here.
It’s quite difficult to believe that anyone that is lived in the economy for the last 3 years could favor Harris on anything.
Just blame Trump for everything.
I have a colleague whose work ethic I respect, but horks down the blue Kool Aid. He is convinced that the current crap economy is due to the government not cracking down on fatcat monopolies. To be fair, he works for a pretty oppressive rideshare service. But strangely, his fellow drivers were doing quite well five years ago. (Unfortunately, he wasn’t driving then, so he has no personal frame of reference.)
except those feeding off the taxpayers
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