From abortion to the border, Trump is more moderate than Harris, and voters know it

On the eve of the first showdown between Trump and Harris, the latest national poll by the New York Times and Sienna College confirmed that not only is the sugar high of brat summer over but that Harris has failed to cast herself as the moderate.

Much has been made of the top-line finding that Trump, who has trailed Harris in national polling for most of the past month, is actually 1 point ahead of her among likely voters. But what’s more intriguing is why the tide is turning back in Trump’s favor.

The former president has focused on Harris’s record as the most liberal member of the Senate and has tethered her to Joe Biden’s presidency. Trump has thus succeeded in reminding voters that he, not Harris, is the election’s moderate and that Harris would simply extend and exacerbate the doctrine of her declining boss.

Tea New York Times asked voters about specific areas of policy and which candidate would perform better in that arena, but as importantly, the poll asked overall whether respondents consider Trump too conservative or Harris too progressive.

Less than a third of the likely voters polled said Trump is too conservative, with another 10% saying he’s not conservative enough. Nearly half said Trump is “not too far either way.” Compare that to the 47% of respondents who said Harris is too progressive, with just 41% reporting she’s not too far either way. The data become more dire for Harris when broken down by demographic.

For example, more Hispanics reported that Harris is too progressive (39%) than those who said Trump is too conservative (32%). Harris is roundly viewed as more extreme than Trump by every age demographic except for voters younger than 30.

The voters are correct. By any objective measure, Harris is the one who deviates from median public opinion, not Trump. To use the issue that still favors Democrats, consider the example of abortion.

Both as senator and vice president, Harris has endorsed legislation that would federally codify legal abortion up until the point of birth — barely 1 in 5 voters supports protecting abortion access in the third trimester, with 70% saying late-term abortion should be legal.

Trump has fully taken abortion off the table as a federal issue, incurring friendly fire from social conservatives thanks to his promise to outright veto any federal bill restricting abortion at all. He has criticized Florida’s six-week ban, which is opposed by 59% of voters polled by Gallup, but he also announced his opposition to the Sunshine State’s Amendment 4, which would legalize those wildly unpopular late term abortions. One gets the sense that Trump agrees with that median public opinion that Democrats once claimed to endorse: that abortion, far from being an affirmative good, should be safe, term-limited, and rare when legalized at the state level.

Likewise, voters don’t buy Harris’s effort to distance herself from Biden’s failures. The majority of likely voters polled by the New York Times said they believe Harris should receive at least some blame for rising prices, the border crisis, and the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal.

And it’s not just these major events that voters hate. Virtually all voters said the next president should constitute an overall major change from Biden, with just 3% saying he or she should represent no change. And like him or not, the majority of voters reported that Trump represents a major change from the status quo and that Harris represents “more of the same.”

On the issues that matter, Trump still has the lead. In new Pew Research Center polling that finds the pair tied nationally, voters still ranked the economy the single most important issue in the election, the issue where voters still give Trump a double-digit margin over Harris. Harris only has a lead over Trump on two issues that have nothing to do with policy — “effectively address(ing) issues around race” and “bring(ing) the country closer together” — and abortion and healthcare, the latter of which she leads by only a 2-point margin.

Why do voters not trust Harris’s attempt to pivot away from the failed policy of his administration? Because for every tacit denial or attempt to pussyfoot away from her past via unnamed campaign staffer or unsigned press release, another Harris ally lets the mask slip. Consider socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who partnered with Harris in the Senate to push nationalizing the healthcare system and energy industry with their co-sponsorships of “Medicare for All” and the Green New Deal. When Sanders was asked about Harris’s obvious 180s, he promised she was sticking to her progressive plan.

“I think she is trying to be pragmatic and do what she thinks is right in order to win the election,” he said.

And this is how to understand Harris’s promise that her values ​​have not changed: Her desire and eagerness to gain power has never wavered.

In no place is this more obvious than her policy proposals on her website. Despite running for the presidency once before, Harris couldn’t simply poach from her past repertoire of proclamations to abolish private health insurance and fracking. Instead she had to construct a series of word salads to claim that she endorses Trump’s tax cuts, Trump’s border wall, and basically everything but Trump himself. But even then, she betrays her true intentions. After a long diatribe about Trump being responsible for killing a border deal that would have mandated law enforcement admit 5,000 illegal immigrants per day, Harris concedes her true intention is to put the over 10 million illegal immigrants her administration has allowed into the country on “an earned pathway for citizenship.”

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Voters don’t haste the scripted and rebooted Harris shined and slobbered over in the media, but they don’t trust her. And with a renewed focus on what Harris has done rather than who she is, Trump can cement the emerging understanding that Harris is anything but an agent of change from the status quo and the cipher of the center.

During Tuesday’s debate, he simply needs to expose Harris’s accusations for what they are: admissions of guilt. She is indeed the extreme candidate, and she’s the one that will double down on the catastrophic policies of the last four years. Trump doesn’t even have to “Make America Great Again” then but simply promise to undo the damage of the Biden and, yes, Harris administration.