As Election Day looms and polls tighten up, a solid majority of Americans remain unhappy with the Democratic Party’s machinations to remove President Joe Biden as its candidate and replace him with Vice President Kamala Harris. And it’s not strictly partisan. Many Democrats are also upset at how the party switched candidates, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.
As Harris continues to struggle, the national online I&I/TIPP Poll of 1,240 registered voters indicates lingering widespread disappointment with the Democratic Party’s maneuvers to get rid of the age-impaired Biden last July.
The poll asked voters whether they agreed or disagreed with the following three statements:
- “The process the Democratic Party used to select its nominee for President did not yield the strongest candidate.”
- “The process the Democratic Party used to select Kamala Harris as its nominee was undemocratic.”
- “I lost significant faith in the Democratic Party because it did not disclose Biden’s health issues during the primary process.”
For the first question, 58% said they either “agree strongly” (41%) or “agree somewhat” (17%). (Numbers on all calculations might not add up exactly due to rounding). At the same time, just 32% said they disagreed.
Independents largely viewed the Dems’ moves as the Republicans did. Among indie and third-party voters, 55% agreed with the statement in No. 1 above, while about a third disagreed.
Even Democrats weren’t exactly thrilled with the move. Some 40% agreed either “somewhat” or “strongly” that Harris was not the strongest candidate the party could have had, while 52% disagreed.
The feeling of disappointment was broadly spread across all 36 of the I&I/TIPP demographic groupings, with only Democratic Party members, black voters, and self-described liberals defending Harris as the strongest possible candidate.
Meanwhile, black and Hispanic voters, often lumped together for polling purposes, showed an eye-opening disparity. Among likely voters, 55% of black voters said they felt Harris was the strongest possible candidate, while only 25% of Hispanics did, a huge 30-point difference.
The remaining two responses of the three weren’t too far different.
The second question asked voters whether voters agreed that the Democratic Party’s process for installing Harris as the party’s candidate, without a popular vote of any sort, was “undemocratic.”
Once again, an overall majority — 52% to 38% — agreed the Democrats’ process was “undemocratic.” A solid majority (71%) of Republicans agreed, along with a slim plurality of independents (45%).
But once again, more than one out of three Democrats (37%) agreed that their party process for picking a candidate was “undemocratic.”
The third and final question asked voters if they had “lost their faith” in the Democratic Party due to its failure to disclose Biden’s health issues during the primaries earlier this year.
Among all voters, 55% responded that they agree. For Republicans, those saying “agree” totaled a hefty 80%. Indies again sat in the middle, at 45%, while among Dems it was 37%.
Will the solid one-third of Democrats who remain angry with their party over how Harris became the nominee cost them the election? Will they still vote anyway, or just stay home?
The Democratic Party apparatus shows signs of deep concern with how Harris’ campaign is turning out.
In a revealing post on X titled “The Scent of a Harris Panic in the Air,” historian and columnist Victor Davis Hanson does a deep dive on all the things ailing the Harris campaign. For Dems, the picture Hanson paints can’t be comforting:
The 2024 race is still close.
But then so was the 1980 Carter-Reagan race at this same juncture. Indeed, incumbent president Carter was then comfortably up in the last two October Gallup polls — before utterly and suddenly evaporating on Election Day.
But in the last seven days, there seems a sense of panic in the Harris campaign.
How do we know that?
Why are Democratic pundits — from Axelrod to Carville — blasting the Harris campaign and otherwise warning of bad things to come?
Why are some of the once Democrat sure-thing senate races — e.g., in Ohio, Wisconsin, and even Michigan — tightening up?
Pundit poll-watchers are suggesting that Trump is close, even, or slightly ahead in the swing-state polls, suggesting that he is nearing a margin that could cancel out anticipated “ballot irregularities”.
The expected October Harris-Biden surprises—the opportune Fed interest rate cut, the transparently desperate Jack Smith beefed-up re-indictment, the current new Hollywood Trump-hit movie, the desperate Zelensky fly-in to Pennsylvania, the election-cycle customary Bob Woodward unsourced gossip book — seemed so far to have had no effect.”
Even in the mainstream media, some have taken notice of the growing issues with the Harris-Walz ticket. CNN’s Harry Enten notes that Donald Trump’s net favorability rating has risen from -27 in 2016 to -12 in 2020 to -9 today, prompting a series of sharp attacks by Harris recently against Trump.
“Look, she’s still more popular than Trump, but Joe Biden was more popular than Trump — much more — and barely won, and Hillary Clinton was more popular than Donald Trump and lost,” Enten said. “Being more popular than Trump isn’t enough. (Harris) wants to continue to see her favorability rise, but in fact, it’s going in the wrong direction at this point.”
In its most recent poll reading, the RealClearPolitics Poll Average shows Harris with 49.2% to Trump’s 48.3%, a skinny 0.9 percentage point edge, the lowest since Aug. 12.
Harris, to be blunt, hasn’t turned out to be the candidate the Democratic Party powers-that-be hoped. She had a surge in support after her debate against Trump, topping out at a 2.2 percentage point advantage on Oct. 2, but since has seen her support decline.
In the latest TIPP Tracking Poll, Trump held a two-point lead over Harris, 49% to 47%, after Harris held as much as a 4-point lead in recent weeks.
Are Democrats part of that big swing? As our own I&I/TIPP Poll strongly suggests, a third of Democrats remain upset with the quality of their party’s candidate this year — and with the fact that they had no say in making Kamala Harris their candidate in the first place.
I&I/TIPP publishes timely, unique, and informative data each month on topics of public interest. TIPP’s reputation for polling excellence comes from being the most accurate pollster for the past five presidential elections.
Terry Jones is an editor of Issues & Insights. His four decades of journalism experience include serving as national issues editor, economics editor, and editorial page editor for Investor’s Business Daily.
