A new poll suggests that President Donald Trump has retained a strong lead over Vice President Kamala Harris among independent voters, a crucial bloc that could decide the 2024 election.
Just The News reports that the new poll, released by Rasmussen Reports, shows the former president with an 11-point lead among independents, with 51% supporting Trump and just 40% supporting Harris. In the same survey one week prior, President Trump’s lead among independents was 9 points.
The poll overall found that 49% of likely voters support Trump while 46% support Harris, with the latter gaining one point compared to the previous week’s survey.
The Rasmussen poll was conducted on August 15th and between the 18th and 21st, with a sample size of 1,893 likely voters. The margin of error is 3 points.
As the race remains a tossup, independent voters could prove to be the most important voting bloc in the November election. In 2016, Trump won independents against Hillary Clinton by a 6-point margin, with 47% to Clinton’s 41%. In 2020, Joe Biden then won independents by 13 points, with 54% to Trump’s 41%.
Polling for 2024 thus far has consistently shown Trump with a lead among independents, often in the double-digit range; this trend has not changed even after Biden’s stunning withdrawal from the race in July, at which point he was replaced as the Democratic nominee by Harris.
The results of this latest poll also confirm a trend suggesting that the “honeymoon phase” that Harris was experiencing after becoming the new nominee has already passed. After a brief polling bump, her momentum faded ahead of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, which was described as lackluster and had been plagued with programming and scheduling issues as speeches ran long and thus resulted in the main speakers of each night speaking well past their designated primetime slots.
Harris’ selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D-Minn.) as her running mate was also considered a major factor in her momentum fading, primarily due to Walz’ far-left record as governor during the race riots of 2020, as well as the re-emergence of accusations of stolen valor by Walz, who fled his Army unit in 2005 upon realizing that they were soon to be deployed to Iraq, and subsequently lied about the rank with which he supposedly retired.
If these voters are truly independents, I wonder why the spread isn’t bigger, given what we have seen during the Obama/ Biden & Biden/Harris administrations. Faults, he may have but Trump has never displayed a single fascistic tendency during his stint in public life.