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Republicans continue to insist that Kamala Harris’s momentum out of the gate is merely a “honeymoon” phase that will slow or halt soon — but there’s no sign of it slowing down just yet.
As GOP attacks focused on her running mate’s military record and work as governor of Minnesota, they have largely failed to resonate with voters thus far.
Harris is charging into August with another $36 million in the bank after the successful rollout of Tim Walz as her vice presidential nominee last Tuesday. Her campaign is also surging in the polls as enthusiasm among Democrats and independents for the Democratic ticket has rebounded following Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race.
Republicans have dismissed her sudden shift in the race’s dynamics as nothing more than a temporary plateauing of support for Harris even though they have shown no signs of being able to blunt it. The vice president and her running mate will appear onstage in front of a major national audience later this month at the four-day Democratic National Convention, and given that party conventions are typically accompanied by boosts in popularity Harris could see her momentum continue through the end of the month.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s rambling, nonsensical press conference this past week aimed recapturing the headlines, his party is attempting to make the argument that Harris is hiding from journalists. The vice president has responded to this saying she’ll do a full sitdown interview by the end of the month, and she sometimes takes reporters’ shouted questions while coming to and from events.
“All this is a little bit of a honeymoon phase with Harris. She still hasn’t taken any questions from media. She’s done no interviews whatsoever, and she’s hiding from her record. You have to answer those questions at some point,” Senator Markwayne Mullin, a Republican, told NewsNation on Sunday in the latest attempt by a Republican to land that attack.
Trump has also launched his own attacks on Harris’s honeymoon. On Sunday, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “Kamala Harris, whose ‘Honeymoon’ period is ENDING, and is starting to get hammered in the Polls, just copied my NO TAXES ON TIPS Policy. The difference is, she won’t do it, she just wants it for Political Purposes! This was a TRUMP idea - She has no ideas, she can only steal from me. Remember, Kamala has proposed the LARGEST TAX INCREASE IN HISTORY - It won’t happen. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
Even Trump’s pollsters noted the shift in the polling since Harris took the Democrat’s top spot. Pollster Tony Fabrizio told campaign staff that polls would get worse before they got better, but stressed the race had not fundamentally changed, according to the New York Times.
Fabrizio said voters will saddle Harris with Biden’s policies and her backing of a liberal approach to criminal justice. That will cause a dip in her polls, but not for three weeks, according to the Times.
So far, there have been few signs of a dip.
Just a few weeks ago, Democrats were widely reported to be privately inconsolable over their electoral prospects for the fall, fearing wipeouts not just at the top of the ticket but in the House and Senate as well. Now, that feeling has all but evaporated in Washington.
Harris’s campaign heads into the Democratic convention suddenly very competitive — if not winning outright — in swing states where her former running mate Joe Biden had been struggling for months. Places such as Nevada and Arizona and even red-leaning purple states such as Florida and North Carolina have seen a resurgence in interest and enthusiasm for Democratic candidates.
“It’s hard to even describe the excitement, the energy, momentum, and what we’ve solved over the last week,” the chair of the Florida Democratic Party, Nikki Fried, told The Independent in late July after the first week of Harris campaigning as the presumptive party nominee.
A new Democrat-aligned poll of North Carolina, which was won by Donald Trump in both 2020 and 2016, released on Sunday found Harris tied with her opponent in the state.
Even if Harris is unable to win states such as North Carolina, Ohio and Florida in November her newfound competitive edge in these Republican-leaning swing states could force her foes to play defense to the tune of millions of dollars in ad spending.
A second poll released by the Financial Times showed the vice president leading Trump slightly on the issue of the economy, after he had led Biden on the issue for months.
Trump on Sunday released a slew of posts on Truth Social claiming without any proof that Harris’s campaign had used artificial intelligence to inflate the size of the crowd at her most recent rally as reports continue to pick up steam on social media extolling the sizable crowds coming to see the vice president in Georgia, Arizona and other recent rallies.
He has also lashed out at the media for supposedly not adequately covering the size of crowds at his own rallies.
