Journalist Mark Halperin argued that Vice President Kamala Harris might not be leading former President Trump as mainstream polls suggest she is, and that her electoral prospects may get even worse in the coming weeks.
Appearing in a livestream on his media platform 2WAY, Halperin talked about new public and private polling suggesting that Harris is not beating Trump in the battleground states, and predicted that she could be situated in the polls as bad or worse than Biden was in those states ahead of his presidential debate in June by mid-September.
"There’s some public polling already, there’s more coming. There’s some private polling that suggests that nationally in the battleground states, she’s not ahead," Halperin said.
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The former NBC News journalist, who correctly predicted that President Biden would withdraw from the 2024 presidential race in his reporting, added that, though Harris seems to be leading in current swing state polls "on paper," her numbers are "well within the margin of error."
He added, "And there’s some battleground states now where I think Donald Trump, on this trajectory, is going to be ahead."
A recent Fox News poll of Sun Belt Battleground states revealed that Harris is up over Trump in Arizona by one point, and up two points in Georgia and Nevada, though Trump is beating her by one point in North Carolina.
However, like Halperin mentioned, these differences are within Fox’s margin of sampling error, making it hard to know whether the Democratic candidate is truly leading Trump.
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Continuing, Halperin predicted that if Trump can fine tune his anti-Harris message, he may build some momentum and overtake her in each of these states.
"And it may be, regardless of what happens in the interview and regardless of what happens in the debate – it may be that by the middle of September when things have calmed down, when the Trump campaign have had time to prey on some of the weaknesses that I suggested – that he’s ahead in all the Sun Belt states."
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The journalist also noted that Harris could very well slip to where Biden was in battleground state polls taken earlier this year – significantly behind Trump. Trump could end up "ahead in Pennsylvania, and competitive in Michigan and Wisconsin," he said, "which would be roughly where Joe Biden was before the debate, with a single path to 270 electoral votes."
"And that would be a scary position for the Democratic Party to be in from mid-September through Election Day," he concluded.
