Donald Trump pulls ahead of Kamala Harris in major poll — a sign her campaign is fizzling

By Published Sep. 8, 2024, 8:13

For the first time in weeks, former President Donald Trump pulled ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris in one of the most-watched national polls — raising the prospect that her momentum has fizzlied out just ahead of their debate.

Trump edged out Harris 48% to 47% among likely voters nationally, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.

The poll mirrors the surveys from late July when Trump led Harris among likely voters just after President Biden dropped out of the race. Other polls have similarly begun to show the 45th president regaining ground against his rival weeks after the Democratic National Convention wrapped up.

Trump’s renewed razor-thin lead comes despite the fact that 70% of voters and 37% of those backing him felt that the 45th president had uttered something they found offensive.

Harris had surged in the polls across the board after getting jolted to the top of the ticket and captured the lead over Trump in the RealClearPolitics aggregate of polling. She also gained ground in the battleground state polls, which still remain largely a tossup.

On the issues, voters trust Harris more than Trump on abortion (54% to 49%) and democracy (50% to 45%), but trust the 45th president more on the economy (55% to 42%) and immigration (53% to 43%), the New York Times/Siena College poll found.

Top issues for voters were the economy (21%), abortion (14%), immigration (12%), inflation and the cost of living (7%) as well as democracy (7%).

Democrats enjoy a slight lead over Republicans on enthusiasm — 91% to 85%, per the poll.

Moreover,most of the poll respondents — 56% — said they do not believe Harris represents a change from the unpopular Biden administration. Just 25% said Harris represents major change and 15% said she would be a minor change.That’s relative to 51% who felt that Trump represents major change, 10% who indicted minor change and 35% more of the same.

Political strategists includingJames Carville have said whomever can position themselves as the changemaker candidate is best positioned to emerge victorious. To that end, Carville recently suggested in an op-ed that she needs to break from Biden publicly on major policy.

Additionally, Trump’s approval ratings appear to have ticked down slightly with 46% viewing him as either very favorably (27%) or somewhat favorably (19%), compared to 52% who see him as somewhat unfavorably (10%) or very unfavorably (42%).

That’s down from 48% who viewed favorably back in July.

Notably, Harris’ favorability trailed Trump’s — 45% viewed her favorably, with just 24% having very favorable views of her. About half of poll respondents viewed her unfavorably, with 37% saying their views of her were very unfavorable.

Back in July, she scored 46% favorable to 49% unfavorable.

“Highest-rated pollster in the country and a large sample size, too. Fortunately for Harris she has the debate this week and none of this will matter if she has a good night,” election data guru Nate Silver mused on X about the recent poll.

Silver’s 2024 election forecast gives Trump higher odds of winning the Electoral College relative to Harris, though she is favored to win the popular vote.

Republicans haven’t won the popular vote for president since 2004. Trump had been roundly besting Biden in popular vote polls before the incumbent dropped out on July 21.

Harris still retains the advantage in the RCP aggregate of polling nationally, with a 1.4 percentage point edge over Trump in a head-to-head matchup.

The New York Times/Siena College poll sampled 1,695 voters from Sept. 3–6 with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.

Shortly after Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris, Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio sent out a memo predicting that the vice president would enjoy a “honeymoon” in the polls.

Harris has consistently maintained that she is the “underdog” in the race and that she is taking nothing for granted. Her campaign has touted momentum, including her topping Trump in the fundraising cricut with a $361 million haul in August against Trump’s $130 million across their campaigns and aligned committees.

Trump and Harris are slated to square off in the Tuesday debate hosted by ABC News in Philadelphia, which will mark the first time the two will have ever crossed paths in person.

The debate will have the potential to dramatically shakeup what appears to be a tossup race for the presidency, with about eight weeks to go until Nov. 5.

https://nypost.com/2024/09/08/us-news/donald-trump-pulls-aheads-of-kamala-harris-in-major-new-poll-after-weeks-of-trailing-her/

A decade of untruth: Adding up the media’s lies about Trump and Biden. 1/2

Sep. 8, 2024, 6:11 a.m. ET

Victor Davis Hanson

The public is exhausted after a decade of chronic untruth from the left wing and its media.

The 2016 presidential campaign will be long remembered for the false allegation that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to warp the election.

Citing the bogus “Steele dossier,” loser Hillary Clinton and other Democrat grandees claimed that the victorious Trump was an “illegitimate” president.

Almost immediately, the left and media then pushed for the appointment of special prosecutor Robert Mueller. He assembled a “dream team” of partisan prosecutors to prove Trump-Russian collusion.

Some 22 months later, Mueller found no evidence that Trump improperly won the 2016 election with help from any colluding Russians.

More hysteria followed when Trump was impeached in December 2019.

The left claimed he had pressured the Ukrainian government to look into the family of Joe Biden (then a potential 2020 election opponent) for its corruption with Ukrainian oligarchs — as a condition for releasing military aid designated to Kyiv.

Yet Hunter Biden was paid nearly $1 million a year by a Ukrainian energy company to enlist his father, Vice President Joe Biden, for quid pro quo services.

In turn, Joe Biden himself bragged he had pressured Ukraine to fire its prosecutor, Victor Shokin — who happened to be looking too closely into the various shady schemes of the Biden family.

The deceptions and lies continued.

On the eve of the first 2020 debate, Biden aide and now Secretary of State Antony Blinken helped to round up “51 former intelligence authorities” to claim falsely that Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop — full of incriminating evidence of felonious Biden family behavior — was fabricated by the Russians.

Yet the FBI already had the laptop and had authenticated it as genuine.The FBI was also actively enlisting Silicon Valley social media companies to suppress accurate news accounts of the laptop’s embarrassing contents.

The signees of the false letter included former intelligence kingpins such as Leon Panetta, James Clapper and John Brennan.

None has ever apologized for deliberating lying to the country in a (successful) attempt to help alter an election.

During the summer of 2021,top military officials, at least publicly, parroted the Biden administration’s liethat it was safe to abruptly withdraw all troops from Afghanistan.

The Biden plan was to take political credit for ending the two-decade-long war on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and the American invasion of Afghanistan.

(https://nypost.com/2024/09/08/opinion/decade-of-untruth-tallying-the-medias-trump-biden-lies/

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2/2

Yet many intelligence officials in and outside the Pentagon had warned both Biden and the Pentagon top brass that any such reckless and total withdrawal would collapse Afghanistan.They rightly also advised that sudden flight would give terrorists a windfall of equipment and infrastructure.

But they were ignored and during the subsequent Biden misadventure, 13 American service members were needlessly killed.

After the greatest military humiliation in a half-century, Biden and many in the media lied that the mission was nevertheless a successful withdrawal.

But that was not all: For the first time in history, a presidential candidate, Donald Trump, was subjected to numerous criminal and civil suits in an election year.

Yet the federal prosecutor, Jack Smith, met with Biden officials. A high-ranking Biden Justice federal attorney joined the New York municipal prosecution. The Georgia prosecutor met stealthily with Biden’s legal counsel. And a major Biden donor funded the civil suit.

The once collusion-hungry media ignored all such lawfare and rank collusion.

During the 2020 Democratic primaries, the general election, and throughout the first three years of the Biden administration, it was evident that Joe Biden was physically and mentally incapable of serving as president.

Yet his aides and the media all misled the American people. They insisted that Biden was vigorous and sharp.

Then suddenly in June 2024, within a 24-hour period, Biden was declared by these same insiders as unfitto continue as the Democratic nominee.

Their new problem with Biden was not his long-standing, embarrassing dementia.

Rather,bad polls increasingly warned that voters no longer believed their liesand thus would likely not reelect Biden but would instead punish most Democrats in the upcoming 2024 election.

So, a new media narrative arose; the once-“hale” Biden was forced to resign as the Democratic nominee.

His once widely caricatured vice president, Kamala Harris, just as abruptly was coronated as his replacement candidate by an equally suddenly gushing and colluding media.

In sum, for some nine years, the media and the left have successfully fed the country a succession of rank deceptions and conspiracies.

They did so because they proclaimed Trump too dangerous to be president and therefore any means they employed to stop him were to be justified.

And they are doing so yet a third time in 2024.

As they continue, they have all but destroyed democracy, ruined the reputation of the media, alienated the public — and embarrassed their country before the world.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.

https://nypost.com/2024/09/08/opinion/decade-of-untruth-tallying-the-medias-trump-biden-lies/