Issues & Insights' Terry Jones calls this "buyer's remorse," but that doesn't fit. Literally no one bought Kamala Harris as the Democrat presidential nominee -- by design. Democrats never gave their voters a choice other than Joe Biden in the primaries, and then threw out 50 state contests to anoint Harris as the nominee once the cover-up of Biden's cognitive decline got exposed.

Small wonder, then, that over a third of Democrats in the new I&I/TIPP poll don't feel much "joy" over Harris as their candidate. And even more of them believe they got stuck with a weaker candidate than Democrats could have fielded:

Jones starts with the full poll result and then goes into the partisan demos:

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.

There are a few points to note here. First off, TIPP conducted this survey over two weeks ago, at a point just before the trendlines began to shift away from Harris. It's possible that Democrats feel better about Harris at the moment, but given the way the polls have shifted in Trump's direction, that seems ... unlikely. On October 4, the last date of the survey, Harris had a 2.2-point lead over Donald Trump in RCP's national-poll aggregation, a 0.6-point lead in their aggregated betting markets, and leads in a few of the key battleground states. As of today, her national-poll lead is down to one point in RCP aggregation, Trump leads all battleground states, and the betting markets have Trump up by nearly 20 points. 

That doesn't suggest a grassroots rally effect happening lately. Just the opposite, in fact, and it's hardly surprising, since Harris literally won't make a case for herself as president. Instead, Harris continues to double down on her attempts to disqualify Trump rather than address her own policy positions and how they have all reversed in the past five years. 

That cannot have gone unnoticed by Democrat voters, not even those who may still yet plan to hold their noses and vote for Harris anyway as the only alternative to Orange Man Bad. But having nearly 40% of your base feel as though they just got conned by their own party does not make for a great deal of enthusiasm, and the real risk for Harris is that they just won't show up at all.

Don't take my word for it, though. Hillary Clinton pollster Mark Penn cites Harris' lack of a positive argument for her leadership and her ties to the Biden administration to explain why she's losing the edge to Trump late in the election cycle. In the absence of a clearly articulated alternative to the status quo, voters simply trust Trump more to deliver a real change of direction on the issues that matter:

The reason Mr. Trump has a slight edge is straightforward: He dominates on the core issues that people say they care about most. He holds a 12-point lead over Kamala Harris on which candidate would do a better job on immigration, and a 4-point lead on both inflation and crime, according to the October 2024 Harvard CAPS/Harris poll. Such core domestic issues are usually what determines who gets elected, and Mr. Trump leads in all three of this election cycle’s top concerns.

The second reason for Mr. Trump’s advantage is that voters have more confidence in him on the issues of war and peace. Seventy percent of voters believe he has sufficient experience in foreign affairs, and he leads significantly in polling about which candidate would do a better job on the war in Ukraine, relations with China, and the war between Israel and Hamas.

Mr. Trump also has an edge over Ms. Harris because he has reduced the Democrats’ lead among black and Latino voters, especially among men. He has adopted a successful strategy of finding niche issues in key swing states—no tax on tips in Nevada, fracking in Pennsylvania and saving auto-manufacturing jobs in Michigan. Latino voters have particularly high levels of concern about the economy, and Mr. Trump has closed the electoral gap from a 25 point Democratic advantage in 2020 to just 12 points averaged from the past two months.

Penn argues that Harris still could win it through personal favorability, which she has improved in his Harvard-Harris polling from 38% to 49%. However, that looks like a mirage too when one looks at the RCP tracking of her favorability, a media-created mirage out of sheer necessity. Until Democrats anointed her as the nominee, she spent 37 straight months underwater, and 35 months with her unfavorable rating above 50%. For most of that time, Harris barely got her favorable ratings above 40%, and nowhere near 50% -- until the media suddenly painted her in soft terms, focused on her "joy," and never bothered to ask her a tough question. Even with the Protection Racket Media turboboost, Harris is still slightly in negative territory, 47.8/48.4. 

However, Trump's favorability has also significantly improved this year, too. He began the year sixteen points underwater, 40.3/56.0, but gradually improved to a -7.2, 45.1/52.3. That's not a great number, but it is considerably better than Trump's favorability in 2020 and especially in 2016. Furthermore, while the data doesn't specifically break out aggregations by region or state, it's easy to suspect that Trump fares better in purple states, while Harris' gains probably mainly came from blue states falling in line with Democrat necessity. Just take a look at the polls in the battleground states for indirect evidence of that trend; they're not getting redder because Harris is becoming more popular, after all. 

Could this change? Sure, but it would take one hell of a campaign to turn this around with less than two weeks to go. We haven't seen any evidence that Team Kamala has that kind of talent -- not at the top and not anywhere else, either. Anointer's remorse may become a very real story in a couple of weeks.