This month, the Republican Party Republican operatives and others close to Donald Trump have become increasingly nervous about trends they have observed in recent private polling data produced by various Republican organizations and conservative allies.
The recent unease isn’t limited to swing-state or national polls. The numbers are starting to show signs of improvement in Trump strongholds like Ohio and Florida, according to three GOP sources, including two people close to the former president who have reviewed the polls privately.
“They look worse than they should,” says a Republican operative who has seen the internal data. Rolling Stone“Donald Trump isn’t losing Florida or Ohio, but that’s not what’s worrying… it’s a trend of declining support.”
The polls reflect what worried Democratic operatives—before President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race—when public and private polling data showed Biden losing support in safe states like Minnesota, New Mexico, Virginia, and even New York. It was never a question, for example, whether the president would win New York; his weak support in liberal strongholds spelled doom in battleground states.
But over the past month, after Biden conceded the ticket to Vice President Kamala Harris, the Harris-Walz campaign has managed to significantly reduce (or in some cases reverse) Trump’s lead, angering the former president less than three months before Election Day.
Many of these signs, which have angered some of the national Republican elite, are now beginning to appear in Trump country.
The three sources will not allow Rolling Stone Print any reference data related to these solid red states, or identify the conservative groups or Republican Party bodies that have conducted recent polls publicly.
There is a sense among various Republican advisers that the poll numbers will not be helpful for party morale or, more optimistically, merely provide a preview of Harris’s “honeymoon” in 2024. Indeed, two sources say they have not yet personally briefed Trump on the data or their concerns, fearing that doing so would only upset him.
For some veteran pollsters in the party, the former president's continued troubles in the 2024 election are not at all surprising.
“When you address issues that voters don’t care about [such as obsessing over Kamala Harris’ crowd sizes]“They’re punishing you — and Trump is being punished now because he didn’t stick to his message and didn’t address the issues that people care about,” said Frank Luntz, a longtime pollster and conservative Trump critic. “This was his election, and now he’s losing it…and he can’t change it.”
Luntz adds that based on his own data, he finds that most voters across the country already rate Trump, on the policy issues they care about most, “as more capable of solving them than anyone else.” [Harris] “But they simply don’t like him. And that plays a bigger and bigger role in her rise and decline. She’s also expanding her voter base, especially among younger women who didn’t want to support Biden or Trump, and that’s changing the makeup of the electorate.”
Over the weekend, The New York Times In 2020, it was reported that “two recent private polls in Ohio by Republican pollsters—which Mr. Trump won in 2020 with 53% of the vote—showed that he had less than 50% of the vote against Ms. Harris in the state.” (Sen. J.D. Vance, a Trump-backed vice presidential candidate, is from Ohio.)
In the world of public, nonpartisan polls, warning signs are looming about red states for Trump and his party.
“I was surprised that Harris came within striking distance, only trailing by five points,” said David Paleologos, director of the Center for Political Research at Suffolk University. USA TodayThe Suffolk University-WSVN-TV poll of likely Florida voters was released this week.
There’s a long two-and-a-half-month window between now and Election Day, and the presidential race between Harris and Trump is still in a dead heat. No one working on or near the Harris or Trump campaigns is Rolling Stone One candidate said it was “at least remotely likely” that Trump would lose to Harris in Florida or Ohio in November.
But at this late stage of the campaign, Harris’s team is enjoying the latest poll news and a tangible uptick in Democratic voter enthusiasm. Meanwhile, Trump’s team is suddenly playing defense, a position it largely did not expect at this point in the election cycle.
Just a month ago, at a late-night party after the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Lara Trump, co-chair of the Republican National Committee and a member of the Trump family, said, “We’re going to bed early on November 5th, when Donald Trump will be announced as our 47th president. Early.” “I’m going to announce it at 10 p.m. What does that look like for everybody?”
In many of the Republican Party’s national apparatuses, a growing number of staffers are becoming less arrogant by the day, and many of Trump’s aides and advisers are also leaning away from hasty, inappropriate statements.
“It’s going to be a close race,” says John McLaughlin, one of Trump’s leading pollsters. Rolling Stone“We haven’t even gotten to Labor Day, and Trump and Harris haven’t even debated, so we’ve got a long way to go. We’re up against a much tougher team with Harris than Biden, and we have to run the race based on the record and the policies that have created this lead over Biden. We have to make that case. With 75 percent of all voters telling us the country is on the wrong track in our most recent polling … we have a lot of leverage to win this race.
“The fun is just beginning,” he says.
