Vice President Kamala Harris cleared the biggest hurdle she needed in this week's debate against Donald Trump, according to a GOP pollster who conducted a focus group with swing voters who tuned in.
Former Republican pollster Sarah Longwell conducted interviews with voters who backed Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, and she told CNN that the vice president appears to be gathering momentum with those undecided voters with less than two months to go before the election.
"A lot of groups in that category we'd seen a lot of backsliding when Biden was the nominee, people were saying they were either leaning [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] or they were going to leave it blank, and what Kamala Harris has done is just put that coalition back together," Longwell said. "This focus group was a clean sweep for Harris, both in terms of her winning the debate and in terms of vote choice – they were all going to vote for her. She had kind of gotten them over the hump, and the No. 1 word that came up that really struck me was several people organically referred to her performance as presidential, right, and this is the hump she's trying to get over. Do people see her as presidential, somebody ready for the big chair and for these voters – she got them there with this performance."
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But more importantly, she said, these voters are starting to pay more attention to the race.
"One of the things about this group as they all watched the debate and as we know, lots of Americans don't always watch these debates," Longwell said. "So the question is, can she ride this into a much more high-level narrative about how dominating she can be that sort of filters out to voters who are paying less attention."
Those lower-information voters reported they learned a lot about Trump's record during the debate, Longwell said.
"One of the things I heard in the group was somebody talking about how the fact that Donald Trump had scuttled the immigration deal was new information to him," Longwell said. "I mean, this is one of the things that debates really do is people tune in who are just really starting to get a feel for the race, and you have an opportunity to tell them things that they don't know yet, that's not filtering down, and so there was a guy in the group, he was the most skeptical of Kamala Harris, but he was saying, 'I didn't know Trump did that – I don't like that.'"
"I do think there's always there's something about American voters – they want to be courted, right?" she added. "They want to be told, these late-breaking undecided ones, but what you see is when she turns in a performance like this at the end of every election, there's a break in independent voters, they break one way or the other, and I think what she's doing doing is chipping away to the point where when it comes time to break, they've seen enough."
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