Terry JonesAs Election Day looms and polls tighten up, a solid majority of Americans remain unhappy with the Democratic Party’s machinations to remove President Joe Biden as its candidate and replace him with Vice President Kamala Harris. And it’s not strictly partisan. Many Democrats are also upset at how the party switched candidates, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.
As Harris continues to struggle, the national online I&I/TIPP Poll of 1,240 registered voters indicates lingering widespread disappointment with the Democratic Party’s maneuvers to get rid of the age-impaired Biden last July.
The poll asked voters whether they agreed or disagreed with the following three statements:
- “The process the Democratic Party used to select its nominee for President did not yield the strongest candidate.”
- “The process the Democratic Party used to select Kamala Harris as its nominee was undemocratic.”
- “I lost significant faith in the Democratic Party because it did not disclose Biden’s health issues during the primary process.”
For the first question, 58% said they either “agree strongly” (41%) or “agree somewhat” (17%). (Numbers on all calculations might not add up exactly due to rounding). At the same time, just 32% said they disagreed.
Independents largely viewed the Dems’ moves as the Republicans did. Among indie and third-party voters, 55% agreed with the statement in No. 1 above, while about a third disagreed.
Even Democrats weren’t exactly thrilled with the move. Some 40% agreed either “somewhat” or “strongly” that Harris was not the strongest candidate the party could have had, while 52% disagreed.
The feeling of disappointment was broadly spread across all 36 of the I&I/TIPP demographic groupings, with only Democratic Party members, black voters, and self-described liberals defending Harris as the strongest possible candidate.
Meanwhile, black and Hispanic voters, often lumped together for polling purposes, showed an eye-opening disparity. Among likely voters, 55% of black voters said they felt Harris was the strongest possible candidate, while only 25% of Hispanics did, a huge 30-point difference.
The remaining two responses of the three weren’t too far different.
The second question asked voters whether voters agreed that the Democratic Party’s process for installing Harris as the party’s candidate, without a popular vote of any sort, was “undemocratic.”
Once again, an overall majority — 52% to 38% — agreed the Democrats’ process was “undemocratic.” A solid majority (71%) of Republicans agreed, along with a slim plurality of independents (45%).
But once again, more than one out of three Democrats (37%) agreed that their party process for picking a candidate was “undemocratic.”
The third and final question asked voters if they had “lost their faith” in the Democratic Party due to its failure to disclose Biden’s health issues during the primaries earlier this year.
Among all voters, 55% responded that they agree. For Republicans, those saying “agree” totaled a hefty 80%. Indies again sat in the middle, at 45%, while among Dems it was 37%.
Will the solid one-third of Democrats who remain angry with their party over how Harris became the nominee cost them the election? Will they still vote anyway, or just stay home?
The Democratic Party apparatus shows signs of deep concern with how Harris’ campaign is turning out.
In a revealing post on X titled “The Scent of a Harris Panic in the Air,” historian and columnist Victor Davis Hanson does a deep dive on all the things ailing the Harris campaign. For Dems, the picture Hanson paints can’t be comforting:
The 2024 race is still close.
But then so was the 1980 Carter-Reagan race at this same juncture. Indeed, incumbent president Carter was then comfortably up in the last two October Gallup polls — before utterly and suddenly evaporating on Election Day.
But in the last seven days, there seems a sense of panic in the Harris campaign.
How do we know that?
Why are Democratic pundits — from Axelrod to Carville — blasting the Harris campaign and otherwise warning of bad things to come?
Why are some of the once Democrat sure-thing senate races — e.g., in Ohio, Wisconsin, and even Michigan — tightening up?
Pundit poll-watchers are suggesting that Trump is close, even, or slightly ahead in the swing-state polls, suggesting that he is nearing a margin that could cancel out anticipated “ballot irregularities”.
The expected October Harris-Biden surprises—the opportune Fed interest rate cut, the transparently desperate Jack Smith beefed-up re-indictment, the current new Hollywood Trump-hit movie, the desperate Zelensky fly-in to Pennsylvania, the election-cycle customary Bob Woodward unsourced gossip book — seemed so far to have had no effect.”
Even in the mainstream media, some have taken notice of the growing issues with the Harris-Walz ticket. CNN’s Harry Enten notes that Donald Trump’s net favorability rating has risen from -27 in 2016 to -12 in 2020 to -9 today, prompting a series of sharp attacks by Harris recently against Trump.
“Look, she’s still more popular than Trump, but Joe Biden was more popular than Trump — much more — and barely won, and Hillary Clinton was more popular than Donald Trump and lost,” Enten said. “Being more popular than Trump isn’t enough. (Harris) wants to continue to see her favorability rise, but in fact, it’s going in the wrong direction at this point.”
In its most recent poll reading, the RealClearPolitics Poll Average shows Harris with 49.2% to Trump’s 48.3%, a skinny 0.9 percentage point edge, the lowest since Aug. 12.
Harris, to be blunt, hasn’t turned out to be the candidate the Democratic Party powers-that-be hoped. She had a surge in support after her debate against Trump, topping out at a 2.2 percentage point advantage on Oct. 2, but since has seen her support decline.
In the latest TIPP Tracking Poll, Trump held a two-point lead over Harris, 49% to 47%, after Harris held as much as a 4-point lead in recent weeks.
Are Democrats part of that big swing? As our own I&I/TIPP Poll strongly suggests, a third of Democrats remain upset with the quality of their party’s candidate this year — and with the fact that they had no say in making Kamala Harris their candidate in the first place.
I&I/TIPP publishes timely, unique, and informative data each month on topics of public interest. TIPP’s reputation for polling excellence comes from being the most accurate pollster for the past five presidential elections.
Terry Jones is an editor of Issues & Insights. His four decades of journalism experience include serving as national issues editor, economics editor, and editorial page editor for Investor’s Business Daily.
I & I Editorial Board
The democrat party is inappropriately named and should be called the COMMUNIST PARTY, and should have been for a long time now. People with so called “buyers remorse” obviously didn’t (and many still aren’t) pay any attention to what has really been going on for quite some time.
This doesn’t mean I give a pass to the rino party who has lost their way in terms of being actually conservative. They remind me more of corporate weasels who are more concerned with their own WORTHLESS careers than the good of the company(country) and are very good at playing games to protect and advance their political positions to increase their power and wealth.
I think we first need to get rid of the democrats and then clean out the rinos. I realize there is a snowball’s chance in hell of this happening which is why our country is going to go the way of Rome.
Great
Translated … Dems are less unthused than are Trump supporters – which means lower turnout for Team Harris on Election Day. This shouldn’t be a surprise.
The Democrats reap what the Democrats sowed.
This is the machination process of ‘Obama World’. The elites do not want to share power, they want to control it. While I would pinpoint Pelosi and Hillary Clinton as the initial catalysts, Obama, Schumer, Jeffries, etc. all piled on to remove Joe, who had the actual pledges and coronate Harris, a poor choice. Looking back, of course, a ‘normal democratic party’ would run a real primary process, and let the winner emerge…they have lost the competitive / democratic spirit and have moved to a command and control of their people.
I am frankly surprised that only a third of Democrats are dissatisfied with the selection process that yielded Kamala Harris as the Democrat nominee. This was one of the most “undemocratic” undertakings I’ve seen in my lifetime. How can anyone argue that she truly represents the Democrat electorate? As a conservative I can only imagine how the media would have handled such a move by the GOP. The backlash from the GOP electorate would have been palpable.
Right, if the Republicans had tried to push someone like Chris Christie or Nikki Haley, there would have been a mass exodus of voters. Conservatives wouldn’t have put up with it.
Instead of replacing Biden they should have brought in a good young VP to shore up Bidens age. Most of the reason voters were down on Biden was the thought if he failed, we were stuck with Harris. Biden could have won with a great VP choice.
TODAY IS LAST DAY TO REGISTER IN PA.
All over it on Common Cents – and check your registration status on CC:
https://www.commoncts.blogspot.com
Fun Fact: Democrat voters wouldn’t care less about the process if Harris was winning. She’s not, so buyer’s remorse.
The incompetent, ignorant and incoherent Kamala, as a presidential candidate, is the direct result of the corruption of our laws and our constitution by Nancy Pelosi!
When will she be charged for abuse of power and abuse of our constitution?
Two additional questions to ask:
How come Harris waited until she was 29 before regisering to vote?
How many cases did she ACTUALLY prosecute as prosecutor?
The questions cited in the graphs revealed bias in the verbiage, rendering the conclusions invalid.
(?) A charge of bias is always all the better for proof; but even if evidence emerged to suggest that such a charge was warranted, this has nothing to do with logical validity or invalidity.
This “column “ is disingenuous spin. The only party that is going to have buyers remorse is the Republican Party on November 6th.
Easy on the copium, dude.
Vice President Kamala Harris Did Nothing To ‘Earn’ The Democrat Nomination. Forced resignation. Nancy Pelosi kept the pressure on Biden to drop out. Democrat voters were disenfranchised; they had no opportunity to vote for the candidate of their choice. Harris is being stuffed down the throats of the people.
Anti MAGA voters are returning to Trump along with a flurry of democrats leaving their party. Trump has been bolstered by Republicans coming back home. They don’t like Harris. Harris’s popularity is declining compared to a month ago. Trump is rising and Harris is falling.
The process was undemocratic, but so what? For well over a hundred years the parties selected their nominees without primaries.
Well Biden was losing bigly as trump would put it in the most recent polls before he was replaced.
Harris gave the democrats a chance.at least.
Let’s have whomever loses concede defeat. Don’t need another Jan 6 insurrection to deal with.
Define “insurrection” please. Once you research the meaning you will understand that what happened on 1/6 was not one.
Even lame brains look down on the brain dead.
Biden was removed because his senility became overwhelming obvious. The democrats were desperate to win and realized Biden would lose big. Then it became a question of money. Obscene amounts would not be accessible unless Harris became the candidate upon Biden’s removal.
Initially Harris attempted the Biden Basement strategy, but without a pandemic, she was forced out into public appearances. She has flubbed even the softball, friendly appearances. She cannot help herself and has exposed her lack of effectiveness.
Trump may be personally objectionable to some, but he functioned well as President in spite of bureaucrats sabotaging his efforts, congressional democrats resisting everything he attempted and the spurious Russia disinformation.
Electing Harris, based on her exposed personality and past record would be a disaster.
FinTech ZoomUs There is definately a lot to find out about this subject. I like all the points you made