In the first polling of voters after her long-awaited first televised interview, the momentum of newly-minted Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris appears to have stalled.
In a post by the pollster for Rasmussen Reports, momentum appears to now favor former President Donald Trump in the 2024 see-saw race.
The outfit’s overnight polling of its likely voter sample, typically with a slightly higher percentage of Democrats, showed that the advantage continued to shift to Trump following the Thursday night CNN interview in which Harris gave few details on her plans.
Rasmussen’s overnight data shows Trump leading the national popular race 49% to 45%.
“OH NOOooo… !! This wasn’t supposed to happen! Our latest nightly data point (50% post-Kamala-interview) shows Trump opening up his biggest lead in 10 days,” said Rasmussen pollster Mark Mitchell on X. He later said the exact numbers are 48.8% for Trump to 45.3% for Harris.
Rasmussen is one of the only pollsters to run a daily survey and it will combine several days to give an average when it releases an official survey. For the Trump-Harris debate, that’s on Thursday. Last Thursday’s average had Trump leading 48% to 46%.
Mitchell said that the election is a moving target, though a trend is growing clear. “Our motto: collect the numbers and throw them over the fence. Everyone else is playing with dark magic and chicken bones to put out biweekly releases.”
Competitors move in and out of the race to take irregular polls. One just released by USA TODAY/Suffolk University had Harris up 48% to 43%. It was done before the interview and after the Democratic National Convention.
Some others see a similar shift in momentum as Rasmussen. Richard Baris, the director of the Big Data Poll, said on X Friday, “In the field now. Looking at the data from the last two nights. Noise is dying down…Kamala Harris is headed to where Joe Biden was before the debate.” At that time, Trump was ahead.
Democratic pollster John Zogby, who is a co-grader with conservative analyst Jed Babbin on the Secrets weekly White House report card, said that the CNN interview didn’t help or hurt Harris.
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“No runs, no hits, no errors,” said Zogby, who added, “From their point of view, they did what they needed to do.”
He added that the next needle-moving event will be the debate between Harris and Trump. “I think that’s going to be the Super Bowl,” he said on the regular podcast he does with his son and John Zogby Strategies managing partner Jeremy Zogby.
