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The efforts to paint JD Vance and former President Donald Trump as “weird” appear to be paying off.
Kamala Harris entered her second week as a presidential candidate on Monday, and a slew of new polling indicates that her “honeymoon” period is not coming to an end just yet.
With the formerly-Biden, now-Harris campaign pushing out a new memo to reporters detailing the strength of the vice president’s candidacy as the week began, all the signs indicate that momentum is clearly shifting in the US presidential race. The campaign woke up on Monday morning to a pair of new polls from ABC News and the Wall Street Journal indicating what many had suspected for days: Kamala Harris has now completed a virtual reset of the presidential race’s dynamic, erasing months of bleeding suffered by the campaign when Joe Biden was at the top.
In the national Journal poll, Harris trails Trump within the margin of error, a reversal of a gap that was threatening to reach double digits just 28 days ago, when the paper’s last survey data came out. Trump sits at 49 per cent in the poll, enjoying a slight bump in the wake of the first wounding of a president in an assassination attempt since the 1980s, while Harris now trails close behind at 47 per cent.
And better news for the Harris campaign was found in ABC’s survey data: the rhetoric labelling JD Vance “weird” and misogynistic is working in the wake of unearthed video in which Vance berates childless Americans and argues they should have less of a say at the ballot box. The Ohio senator’s negative poll numbers are rising in the wake of the Republican National Convention this month where he was nominated to be Trump’s running mate, and has jumped eight percentage points in just the past week in ABC’s polling.
“As if the Republican Party needed another dumpster fire of their own creation, Trump and Republicans up and down the ballot are getting dragged even further down by JD Vance,” said the DNC in a statement Monday. “Vance is making history as the most disliked VP nominee post-convention that our country has seen in decades.”
But the most important metric for the vice president continues to be enthusiasm among members of her party, who were seen to be morose and fatalistic about the president’s chances before he dropped out of the race last Sunday. Harris’s entrance into the race has caused a 6 per cent jump in the share of Democrats who say they will definitely vote this fall, a share which now closely trails the respective percentage of Republicans who say the same.
That enthusiasm has been reflected in both donations and the Harris campaign’s newly-energized ground game. Campaign officials said in Sunday’s memo that more than 170,000 volunteers had signed up within the past seven days. A separate memo from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on Monday stated that the party was seeing an “undeniable surge of grassroots energy”.
The DNC’s Monday memo also noted rising unfavorable numbers for the Heritage Foundation-led Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for reshaping and sharply cutting down the federal government among ideological lines. Democrats including Harris herself have focused their rhetoric on tying Donald Trump to the right-wing wishcasting of Heritage and a number of other groups closely connected to the Trump campaign.
Trump himself has denounced unspecified parts of the plan publicly, and his campaign spokespeople have echoed those attempts to distance the former president from Project 2025.
Harris’s campaign announced a “week of action” focused on abortion rights on Monday as the state of Iowa saw a six-week abortion ban take effect. Reproductive rights and opposition to state-level abortion bans had been part of Harris’s focus on the campaign trail for months, long before her former running mate dropped out.
“And what this means is that 1 in 3 women of reproductive age in America lives in a state with a Trump abortion ban. So what we need to do is vote,” the vice president said in a campaign video released on Monday. “Because I'm going to tell you something: when I am President of the United States, I will sign into law the protections for reproductive freedom. So let’s get this done.”
