The more you get to know Kamala Harris ...

Two big media polls dropped today, and both of them look like bad news for Democrats -- especially Harris. Despite the shrieking hysteria coming from the campaign and the media (but I repeat myself!) about how dangerous Donald Trump is, voters like Trump more ... and Kamala less. 

Let's start with the Wall Street Journal poll, where Trump has "opened a narrow lead" among registered voters, who usually lean a bit more Democrat. Duane mentioned this poll at the end of his post about the CNN town hall, but it's worth exploring a little further:

The national survey finds that Trump is leading Harris by 2 percentage points, 47% to 45%, compared with a Harris lead of 2 points in the Journal’s August survey on a ballot that includes third-party and independent candidates. Both leads are within the polls’ margins of error, meaning that either candidate could actually be ahead.

The survey suggests that a barrage of negative advertising in the campaign and the performance of the candidates themselves have undermined some of the positive impressions of Harris that voters developed after she replaced President Biden as the presumed and then confirmed Democratic nominee. 

Views of Harris have turned more negative since August, when equal shares of voters viewed her favorably and unfavorably. Now, the unfavorable views are dominant by 8 percentage points, 53% to 45%. Moreover, voters give Harris her worst job rating as vice president in the three times the Journal has asked about it since July, with 42% approving and 54% disapproving of her performance.

When given only a choice between Trump and Harris, Trump has a three-point lead. That may reflect his growing favorability; respondents gave him a 52/48 approval rating for his term, a sharp contrast from Harris' -12. Trump also has large leads over Harris on most of the specific issues in the election, leads which have grown in the two months since the last WSJ poll. He now has a 12-point lead on the economy, up from 8 in August, and a 15-point lead on immigration over Harris, more than double the 7-point lead in the last poll. Even on abortion, which Democrats hoped would dominate the election cycle Harris' lead has shrunk from 20 to 14 points.

This lines up with the new poll from CNBC, also of registered rather than likely voters, which puts Trump ahead 48/46 over Harris nationwide. They also show Trump slightly ahead in battleground states by 48/47, from which they interviewed an additional 400 respondents to get a substantial sample of 586 RVs. CNBC calls this a dead heat, but ...

Both nationally and in the battlegrounds, economic issues remain the most important concerns for voters. Trump holds commanding leads among voters who prioritize the inflation, the economy and addressing the needs of the middle class. By a 42% to 24% margin, voters say they will be better off financially if Trump wins, with 29% saying their financial position wouldn’t change no matter who is elected. Voters who say inflation and the cost of living and the economy overall are the top issues favor Trump by 13 points. Inflation has remained the top issue throughout the election cycle. ...

The survey also showed Trump has a 35-point advantage among voters most concerned about immigration and a 19-point edge on the issue of crime and safety.

Harris has a 30-point lead on abortion, twice that seen in the WSJ poll, but with no appreciable impact on the toplines. What does that tell us? Abortion is likely a "second tier issue," as CNBC puts it, and that's especially true on "climate change," where Harris leads by a whopping 60 points. Most interesting in these second-tier issues, however, is "protecting democracy," where Harris only leads Trump by nine points despite her almost total obsession with that messaging over the last three weeks. 

And that might have a lot to do with what CNBC found about voter assessment of Harris and her "joy":

His -13-point net favorability rating (positive minus negative) from August has improved to -6 nationally. Views on Harris are only a bit less negative at -10, compared to -8 in August. (She had risen to +3 in September in the NBC poll, but now appears to have given up her post-convention gains.) 

Gee, how did Harris manage to give up those post-convention gains? Might it have something to do with never giving voters a positive case for her leadership and an explanation of her policy shifts? Unrelenting personal attacks on Trump? Both?

Harris has also slipped in the demos she needs most, especially in battleground states:

The gender gap remains the most glaring split, but Trump’s net +17 support among men is larger than Vice President Harris’ +12 among women. Harris maintains a large 27-point lead among voters of color but lost 10 points compared to August. ...

Harris has an 8-point lead among women over 50 nationally, but is even with Trump with the group in the battleground states.

What about the meta-polling? These two polls, along with yesterday's HarrisX/Forbes poll and another from Rasmussen, give Trump four leads in a row in the RCP aggregation. Those drop Harris' aggregate lead to just 0.2%. On this date in 2020, Joe Biden had a lead of 8.1 points; Hillary Clinton led by 5.5 points on this date in 2016. Trump still leads the aggregated battleground surveys by 0.9 points and has a lead in every battleground state too. 

Given the wide misses in the last two Trump election cycles in battleground-state polling, that's very bad news for Democrats. Harris' falling favorability not only indicates that there won't be a rebound in the final days of the campaign, it offers some pretty compelling evidence that their shrieking hysteria may well have provided Trump the boost he needed to win a second term.