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As Harris Builds Her Polling Lead, Trump Retreats In Some States

Former President Donald Trump's campaign is now reallocating resources from several states that were previously in play when President Joe Biden was at the top of the ticket, according to a new report.

Axios reported Thursday that the 2024 Republican presidential nominee's campaign team is now "drawing down its operations" in Minnesota, New Hampshire and Virginia. Vice President Kamala Harris' emergence as the new Democratic presidential nominee has led to polls trending more in her favor in those states, whereas they were more favorable to a potential Republican flip when Biden was still in the race.

This is a sharp one-eighty from the Trump campaign's previous claims that it would open up eight new field offices in Minnesota, and hire multiple full-time staffers to try and turn the Gopher State red for the first time in more than 50 years. Now, Axios reports that there are just two full-time Trump campaign employees for all of Minnesota, with a state director and a senior adviser responsible for the GOP's efforts to capture the Midwestern state's 10 electoral votes.

Trump has roughly a dozen field offices in Minnesota, which serve as hubs for volunteers to conduct phonebanking efforts and a storage location for lawn signs and campaign literature for canvassers to leave at the homes of voters. But according to Axios, those offices were opened in May and June, when Trump still assumed he was going to face Biden in November (and before Harris announced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate).

"[T]he [state] party and Trump campaign have been working jointly with our local organizations to get those [offices] staffed up," Minnesota Republican Party chairman David Hann told the publication.

The news of Trump apparently conceding these states comes on the heels of a leak from within his campaign lamenting that New Hampshire was "no longer a battleground state" with Harris in the race. Tom Mountain — a Trump campaign operative from Massachusetts — predicted the former president was "sure to lose by an even higher margin" than 2020, when Biden won the Granite State by seven points.

Virginia was also thought to be a battleground in 2024 when Biden was still running for a second term, with the ex-president just one point behind his Democratic rival in the Old Dominion State in the last poll aggregated by FiveThirtyEight before Biden announced his exit. Now, the latest polls show Harris three points ahead.

Now, Trump is reportedly shifting resources to the so-called "Blue Wall" states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which he won in 2016 and Biden flipped in 2020. Harris is polling neck-and-neck with the 45th president of the United States in those three states, and both of them will be relying on them heavily in their efforts to accumulate a victory-clinching 270 electoral votes.

Pennsylvania in particular is viewed as critically important for both campaigns. The Wall Street Journal reported that both Democrats and Republicans are eyeing Georgia and Pennsylvania — with 16 and 19 electoral votes, respectively — as two must-win states to seal up the Electoral College majority in November.

For Trump, his campaign's math shows that he could lose all battleground states except Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania and still win the election. Harris' campaign has found that if she wins Georgia and Pennsylvania, she would only need one remaining battleground state between Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin to get across the 270-vote threshold.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Analysts Skeptical Of Trump's Polling Gains Among Black Voters

In a Sunday, March 31 article published by New York magazine, political columnist Ed Kilgore points to the upward trend of Black and Latino voters' support for a second Donald Trump term — but argues "the shocking gains" still may not be enough to work in the MAGA hopeful's favor.

The political columnist writes, The reported young voter trend away from Biden is probably more understandable given how this group has been impacted by inflation-related reductions in real wages, high interest rates, unaffordable housing costs, and the failure to forgive student loans (though that was the Court’s doing, not Biden’s).

However, Kilgore notes, "among non-white voters, the polls keep showing shocking gains by Trump at Biden’s expense, as Ron Brownstein observes at CNN."

Kilgore writes:

There has been some talk about Trump’s gains among Black voters in the polls being attributable to a big movement among particular subgroups, particularly young Black men. But as Abramowitz notes from the authoritative American National Election Studies data, there were no major differences in the Biden-Trump numbers last time they met at the polls. In 2020, Biden won 93 percent of Black men along with 95 percent of Black women — and won 94 percent of non-college-educated Black voters along with 93 percent of their college-educated counterparts.

Still, he notes, "If, as Republicans hope, non-white voters (including Asian Americans, a smaller but growing group that is often not polled at all) turn out to be the crucial swing vote in 2024, it’s far from clear they will tilt toward the candidate whose vision of a restored American Greatness is so consistently exciting to white supremacists."

Furthermore, Kilgore adds that Brownstein suggests, "whatever level of support Trump has among Black or Latino voters could be driven down with some targeted messaging from the Biden campaign and the Democratic Party."

When it comes to the question of whether Latino voters could help Trump secure a win, Kilgore writes:

Even as polls show Trump posting unprecedented Republican numbers among Hispanics, he is promising the largest deportation drive of undocumented migrants in American history, including the creation of detention camps and the use of the National Guard to participate in mass round ups; military action against Mexico, including a naval blockade, to combat drug cartels; the end of birthright citizenship; and the possible reinstitution of his policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border.

Similarly, what could also deter Black voters away from Trump, Kilgore notes, is:

Even as Trump is posting historic numbers among Blacks, he has proposed, as a condition of receiving federal funds, to prohibit school districts from discussing 'critical race theory' in classrooms, and to require local police departments to implement the 'stop and frisk' tactics that civil rights leaders say unfairly target young Black men.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Can The Supreme Court's Ratings Sink Lower? They Just Did

The U.S. Supreme Court notched yet another all-time low in its approval rating, this time in a Quinnipiac University poll.

The survey found that a 54 percent majority of Americans disapprove of the way the Supreme Court is handling its job, while just 35% approve.

Registered voters expressed nearly the same level of discontent at 36 percent approval and 55 percent disapproval—the lowest job approval among registered voters in the survey since Quinnipiac began asking the question in 2004.

It's yet another new low for a court that has seen its reputation take an abrupt nosedive ever since it overturned a 50-year precedent on abortion rights this summer.

In June, Gallup found public confidence in the high court had sunk to just 25 percent, a historic all-time low since Gallup began tracking the measure in 1973. Confidence in the court stood at 45 percent in that May '73 survey, taken just months after the high court had established a constitutional right to abortion in its January ruling on Roe v. Wade.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Democrats Rise As Support For Abortion Rights Hits Record High

A new NBC News poll conducted in the wake of the leaked Supreme Court draft found support for abortion rights reaching its highest point since 2003, with 60 percent of Americans saying abortion should either always be legal (37 percent) or legal most of the time (23 percent). Meanwhile, 37 percent said abortion should be illegal in most cases or without exception.

Similarly, 63 percent of respondents support maintaining the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, while just 30 percent wanted to see it overturned.

The poll also found Democratic enthusiasm ticking up. The mismatch between enthusiasm among voters on the right and left has become a focus of concern. In the poll, the number of Democrats expressing a high level of interest in the midterms (a 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale) jumped 11 points since March to 61 percent.

Republicans' level of interest got a modest 2-point bump to 69 percent in the same period of time.

“How [abortion] plays out in November is to be determined. But for now, it is injecting some much-needed enthusiasm into parts of the Democratic coalition,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates.

News from the survey wasn't all good. President Joe Biden's approval rating registered at just 39 percent and, for the fourth straight time in the poll, people saying the country is on the wrong track topped 70 percent.

"The other times were in 2008 (during the Great Recession) and 2013 (during a government shutdown)," writes NBC.

GOP pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, who conducted this survey with Horwitt, called the number a "flashing red light."

Still, the generic ballot was dead even, with 46 percent of Americans saying Democrats should control Congress while another 46 percent said Republicans should. Republicans held a slight two-point edge on the question in March, a change within the poll's margin of error.

But given the "wrong track" numbers, Horwitt said, “It is remarkable that preference for control of Congress is even overall, and that the gap in interest in the election has narrowed."

Overall, the NBC survey isn’t exactly cause for celebration, but it does suggest a continued shift in the political landscape we have been seeing in other polls.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

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Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

As Harris Builds Her Polling Lead, Trump Retreats In Some States

Analysts Skeptical Of Trump's Polling Gains Among Black Voters

Can The Supreme Court's Ratings Sink Lower? They Just Did

Democrats Rise As Support For Abortion Rights Hits Record High

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