By Joe Saunders September 10, 2024 at 6:41am
With the presidential debate taking center stage in the 2024 campaign Tuesday night, both candidates got a wakeup call Tuesday morning with the release of a new poll on the state of the race.
For Team Trump, it was the third dose of good news in as many days.
For the Harris camp, panic might be starting to set in.
In an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll made public Tuesday, former President Donald Trump and Vice President are essentially tied, with Harris holding a 49-48 percent lead nationally. That lead is not “statistically significant” according to the poll’s methodology.
The news comes on the heels of the release of a New York Times/Siena poll on Sunday that showed Trump with a 1-point lead nationally.
It’s worth noting that the sources of these polls are not exactly Trump-friendly territory. NPR is basically a taxpayer-funded, liberal misinformation machine. (Any random five minutes spent listening to any NPR broadcast will prove that.)
The New York Times is The New York Times — about as unbiased as the morning newsletter of the Democratic Party.
Yet both show that, despite two months of Potemkin-level propaganda since President Joe Biden ended his re-election bid in July, Harris is actually losing support in vital areas.
As the Marist poll notes: “Trump has overtaken Harris … among independents and Latino voters. Harris previously led Trump by double digits among both of these voting groups.”
Even the PBS post on the social media platform X acknowledges what has to be a painful truth for the left.
NEW: The race for president is a dead heat, according to the latest PBS News/NPR/Marist poll.
Yet Trump has surpassed Harris with several key constituencies as they prepare for the final sprint of their campaigns. https://t.co/mrDzf9XHa4
— PBS News (@NewsHour) September 10, 2024
“The race for president is a dead heat, according to the latest PBS News/NPR/Marist poll,” the post states.
It adds: “Yet Trump has surpassed Harris with several key constituencies as they prepare for the final sprint of their campaigns.”
Will Trump beat Kamala Harris in their first debate?
Meanwhile, a Pew poll released Monday had similar results: “About half of registered voters (49%) say if the election were held today, they would vote for Harris, while an identical share say they would back Trump.”
All of that raises the stakes on the debate stage in Philadelphia, but they’re especially high for Harris, her campaign and the Democratic-media establishment that supports her.
The Marist Poll is a disaster to harris..they now need a wonderful debate performance from harris to build up momentum going forward, anything less than that..Trump will have a landslide victory..harris doesn’t do well under pressure also…debate tonight will be critical for her
— Emmy (@emmy_mmc) September 10, 2024
With the two candidates side by side for comparison, Americans will get to see their differences in sharp relief — and those differences aren’t related to race, gender or age.
Trump’s plans are no secret — he’s not shy about media interviews, even in venues that are guaranteed to be hostile.
He’s been no different on the debate stages of any of his previous runs for president.
Harris, however, has done everything possible to remain a cypher in the biggest spotlight in politics.
She’s dodged even the overtly sympathetic establishment media since becoming the Democratic nominee, with no news conferences, only three sit-down interviews, and only one of those on camera, as Fox News has reported.
On the Philadelphia debate stage, Trump will have an opportunity to remind Americans what he stands for and what his first time brought — a strong foreign policy that puts America first, a strong economy, and a strong border.
Harris will be trying to introduce herself again to the American public, and distance herself from her own administration’s policies that have put the country in a disastrous position since January 2021: An appalling foreign policy that prizes appeasement, an economy that’s ravaged by inflation Americans haven’t seen in generations, and a porous border that’s putting the entire country at risk.
In short, Trump has been endlessly vilified since 2015 by pretty much every major institution in American life — the mainstream media, Hollywood, academia — but retains the loyalty of at least half of the country.
Harris has been the beneficiary of an avalanche of positive media coverage and remains widely disliked and distrusted, and has lost her lead among the voters who will decide the election.
All of that plays to Trump’s favor when it comes to who will be the winner in November.
Tuesday night’s debate gives Harris her best chance to change that, but the smart money won’t be betting on it. Harris’ history of public appearances — a tendency to fall into word salads and sometimes talk like her audience is made up of none-too-bright grade-schoolers — could never have been encouraging for her staffers.
But given the poll results released Tuesday, it might be getting close to panic time.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn’t need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
Nationality
American
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