The NPR Politics Podcast - Poll: Harris Opens Narrow Lead Over Trump

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris opened a narrow lead over former President Trump in the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll, but it is still within the margin of error. Trump is still trusted by more voters on handling immigration and the economy, while Harris leads on abortion and preserving democracy. This podcast: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.The podcast is produced by Casey Morell and Kelli Wessinger. Our intern is Bria Suggs. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Don in Lagos, Nigeria. I'm currently packing for a trip to go be a groomsman for one of my close friends from school. This podcast was recorded at 10.40 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, August 8th, 2024. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but my boy will no longer be a bachelor. All right, here's the show. You didn't invite us to the bachelor party. I love that we go international. I know, I love that.

Yeah, that's amazing. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And today on the show, the shifting state of the presidential race. And we are lucky because we have our polling expert, Domenico, with us. And

Domenico, I want to start with a very simple question. What is the top line from this latest NPR PBS News Marist poll? Well, what we've seen here is that Kamala Harris has now jumped out to a slight national lead, 51 to 48. Even when you factor in third party candidates, she maintains that lead, which is the first time we've seen that in this polling. Even when Joe Biden was in the race, we saw him have huge deficits with younger voters, non-white voters, especially when we move to including third parties. Here, Kamala Harris has a 48 to 45 lead and the lowest percentage of people saying that they'll vote third party, only 5% for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. That's the big,

I'd say, top line news because that's up four points from when Harris first got in the race and we polled about it when a lot of people had moved into the undecided category. Domenico, I want to ask you, though, about the underlying conditions you're seeing, because I feel like you are often telling us to be cautious of horse race polling, right? Who's up and who's down, the momentum could shift. So what are you seeing underneath those top line numbers that you think we ought to be paying attention to? Yeah, and I'd say the only reason we're focused on it now is just because of what a seismic difference this has been with Harris getting in and wanting to test whether or not it's made any difference or what the difference has been. Underlying here,

I think there's a couple things that are happening. Number one, on the issues, people are not necessarily equating the economy with Kamala Harris as much as they were Joe Biden. Former President Trump in June had a nine-point advantage on the issue of who do you trust more to handle the issue of the economy. Now Trump just has a three-point lead on that question. That's a pretty significant shift. What we've also seen is that there are certainly reassurances, apparently, that voters who are younger, Black voters in particular, women and independents, who now seem to be gravitating more toward Kamala Harris.

Tam, these poll numbers don't just exist in isolation. I was out just the other day when Kamala Harris announced her new running mate, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota. You've been out with them also across the Midwest. And I think we'd both say there is a level of energy and enthusiasm in the crowds that I never saw at Joe Biden events and Joe Biden rallies. Yeah, I'm in Detroit right now where last night, Harris and Walz held a rally that felt like the kind of rally I haven't seen in a very, very long time. It was like the kind of rally you would see in October, late October, early November,

but it was August. At this rally, Air Force Two pulls up at the airport. The rally is in an airport hangar. People are spilling out of the hangar onto the tarmac. They get off the plane. There are DJs pumping up the crowd. They walk off the plane. People are going wild. It was just a level of enthusiasm that has not existed in eight years, at least. Clinton campaign, even in like the very last days, didn't have this feeling. And the Biden campaign this year really didn't have that feeling. And 2020 was obviously like, you know, people standing in socially isolated circles or in like a drive-through rally. With COVID, this is something different. What I don't know is, like, does this enthusiasm build? And what do rallies then look like in October or November? Or is this a honeymoon period? People cool off and then it becomes this long, hard slog that everyone was expecting it to be.

Because as the numbers show, this is a very closely divided electorate. And there are only this narrow group of people who can be persuaded. Well, I think what's interesting here, obviously, a couple points, is that Donald Trump really cares about crowd size, right? And we saw him just today post to his social media platform that the press goes crazy when Kamala Harris has 1000 people. Well, it's actually been bigger than 1000 people at some of these rallies. It was 15,000 last night, 12,000 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin earlier in the day. The rallies have grown so fast that they can't keep up.

But how does that compare to Trump? I mean, Trump brings out big crowds too, and he historically has brought out really large crowds. Yeah. I think Trump is sort of like on a default setting. Do you know what I mean? What does that mean? In other words, we know what he brings, right? We know what he is. We know what he does.

What the changes in this race have been have been on the Democratic side. And Donald Trump, there is a majority of people in this country who have an unfavorable opinion of him. There's a lot of data to suggest that there's a majority of people who don't want him to be president again, but that he has a strong base of support. He has a high floor and a low ceiling. He is what he is, right? He gets some big crowds. He fires people up with white grievance and anger about immigrants and things like that. That's sort of the control factor in this election. What's changed here is the Democratic enthusiasm. And that's a very big deal considering having this percentage of people who don't seem to want Trump to be in the White House again.

And we've seen it in our polling. When we look in our polling at people who say that they are definitely going to be voting this fall, there has been a huge jump in just the last month of people who are key core Democratic groups saying that they would. Among the lowest to say that they were definitely voting previously were Black voters, Latinos, and Gen Z slash millennials. All three of those groups now are almost on par with white voters. Tim, how does that jibe with what you hear from voters? I know you've been speaking with some of the people in the crowds. Okay, so I have like two things that I'm thinking about here.

One is during the RNC, I went out door knocking with a Biden campaign volunteer. And the first door we knocked on, it was a Democratic household. He asked the voter who answered the door, are you going to vote for Joe? And she was like, I don't know. And she just shut down. Then let's fast forward to yesterday. I'm in Wisconsin. I'm talking to people who have driven three hours to get to this rally, multiple people who drove from all over to get to this rally. And the common theme kept coming up. People saying things like, well, I was just like in a funk. I was depressed. I was going to delete social media because it was just so negative and it was bad for my mental health. And now they're ecstatic. I mean,

I think part of this is just like- And same state. You're talking about Wisconsin. Yeah. Same state. Exactly. Same state. And I think part of this is just people are excited to have something to be excited about. All right. Well, on that note, let's take a quick break and we'll be back in a moment. And we're back. And I want to ask you both about the mood that we are seeing around Kamala Harris and this momentum from Democrats, because it strikes me that, you know, she did not have to go through a conventional process. She did not go through a primary. She has not been doing a whole bunch of national press interviews right now. In fact, I don't believe she's done any national press interviews since she became the official Democratic nominee and since Joe Biden dropped out of this race. So she's not being tested the way that traditional candidates are tested. And do you think that that is intentional? Do you see it as cause for concern? She has been running for president as long as I've had this cold that I have. It's been a little over two weeks and it

feels like a long time to have a cold, but that is not a long time to be running for president. In just the last few days, she's had to pick a vice president. She's had to figure out what her political identity is. But there are certain contours of running for office and of being a leader. And that includes opening yourself up to scrutiny and allowing yourself to be pressed on what you really believe and what you really want to do. And the mechanisms for doing that in this country are holding press conferences and doing sit down interviews with journalists. Or even just taking questions from journalists, because, Tam, you and I have traveled with her. You know, she might come under the wing of Air Force Two and offer a statement, but it's been pretty rare that she's actually taking questions on the record from journalists, which I think strikes me as being different, though, Tam, because she was doing a whole bunch of interviews.

Right. So the question is, when is this going to change? And how long can it last like this? And what will the pressure be like? I covered, again, the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, and she went something like six months without holding a press conference or taking questions at any length. And it became this drumbeat of like, what is she hiding? Why isn't she talking?

And she and her campaign around her became calcified about not wanting to do it. And I would wonder, Domenico, whether you think any of this matters to actual voters. I don't think they're sitting around like going with a countdown clock saying, how long has it been since she's taken questions? But there might be an element of she's got this stump speech, but what's under the hood? They have to be really careful here with the Harris campaign that they don't cause themselves an unforced error because they have all the momentum right now.

And it's a problem if she's having to figure out what her political identity is, as you said, especially because the biggest criticism of her in 2019 was that she didn't really have a message. She didn't quite seem to know who she was at her core politically. And she has been able to go out and have a pretty crisp opening to this campaign. She has a message now that she's running against Donald Trump and not running in a Democratic primary. And it doesn't seem like it would be all that difficult. And it starts to raise questions about how confident they are in putting her out there in unscripted moments, which is a problem if you're doing that on the heels of Joe Biden when everybody was holding their breath on the Democratic side every single time he did an interview. And this may be about campaign logistics or something like that. I was going to mention – I mean it's been a short timeframe and they do have to – they had to pick a vice president, have to plan for the convention and she doesn't have a huge staff. But people don't care about that, honestly. Like, and if there was some major thing that happened in the world, you better believe they'd figure out how to get a podium set up and a lectern in front of her so she could make a statement. So I don't buy any of the campaign logistics problems of it or whatever. That's their own issue to figure out.

It's not really something for people to really care all that much about. I honestly think the biggest problem could be them causing themselves a problem that doesn't need to be one and allowing the Trump campaign to push this line and make it become a bigger issue than it needs to be. I'll be keen to see if this changes after the Democratic convention, because then I think the pressure really builds on this. I do think it's worth pointing out that, you know, up until this point, Harris was giving a whole bunch of interviews. You'll remember she was on TV right after Joe Biden's poor debate performance defending him. So she wasn't really like the Clinton campaign up until this point. She was actually quite present in the last few months doing television interviews, doing radio interviews, which is why I think the last few weeks to me have seemed very notable because we haven't heard from her the way we were previously

used to hearing from her. All right, well, let's leave it there for today. We'll be back in your feeds tomorrow with our weekly roundup. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montaner, our senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.