CNN’s Enten Warns Dems Face Uphill Battle Because Trump Is ‘More Popular Now than He Has Ever Been’

ENTEN: “Let‘s take a look here just first at the favorable views of Donald Trump. We know that Donald Trump has historically been unpopular, but take a look now, after the Republican National Convention, in the ABC News/Ipsos poll, he recorded his highest ever favorable rating at 40 present. That’s not a one-off. Take a look at the Quinnipiac University poll, 46 percent. That’s the highest ever in that pollster. The fact is Donald Trump is more popular now than he ever has been before. So, yes, Democrats can make this switch roo but they’re still going to have to beat Donald Trump, a Donald Trump, who is stronger, Sara, than he has ever been before.”
SIDNER: “It will be interesting to see how voters respond to all of this. Now, how is he doing relative to Harris who did run —“
ENTEN: “Yes.”
SIDNER: “— at one point? What are those numbers look like?”
ENTEN: “Yes. So let’s take a look here, right? We’ve been focusing so much on how Harris was doing better than Biden in the polling. And that’s true. If we take a look at the national average, what do we see? We see Donald Trump up by one — that’s within the margin race, right? That’s a close race. But remember, of course, in the national popular vote, Democrats tend to do better there than they’ve done in the Electoral College, at least when Donald Trump has been running for president. So last time around when Joe Biden barely won in the Electoral College, he actually won the national popular vote by four points. So at this point, Donald Trump is running five points better, 5 — that’s a five of some sort, five points better than he was four years ago against Joe Biden. So at this particular point, whether you look at the favorable ratings, whether you look at the horse race polling, we see that Donald Trump is doing significantly better than he was doing for years ago at this point. Kamala Harris is going to have to do better than this, of course, if she wants to win the popular vote, but more than that, if she wants to win the Electoral College, which she’ll likely have to outperform how she’s done nationally, because the fact is, if you’ve got a tie it in the national popular vote, that is probably not good enough if you’re Kamala Harris and you want to win the election against Donald Trump.”
SIDNER: “Give me some sense of what the biggest thing that could create change here. And also we have to be clear, there hasn’t been time for a poll since Kamala Harris announced.”
ENTEN: “That’s correct.”
SIDNER: “It just happened?”
ENTEN: “Yes. So this — all this polling was taken before Kamala Harris actually became the likely and now presumptive Democratic nominee, given those delegates that have lined up behind her. But keep in mind this. Donald Trump versus Joe Biden never changed. It was the least vallow race on record. Even after that first debate, you saw a movement of a point or two. Of course, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are basically universally well-known. So I want to take a look here. No opinion of the candidate. For Donald Trump it was 9 percent in the ABC News/Ipsos poll that came out over well the weekend. But look at this. For Kamala Harris —“
SIDNER: “Yeah.”
ENTEN: “— nearly a fifth of the electorate had no opinion of her. And those opinions in all honesty, probably weren’t that well baked in. And they just knew Harris as Biden’s VP. There are a lot of folks that are going to be taking a second look at Kamala Harris over the next week, over the next month, all the way up until the election. And the truth is that presents Democrats with a major opportunity, right? Because —“
SIDNER: “Right.”
ENTEN: “— it could be that their perception of Kamala Harris are proven wrong based upon her campaign rhetoric and her campaign actions, but they can be proven wrong either way. She could be much better than they think or she could be worse than they think. There’s still a lot to be determined here. Sara, we start off this segment saying how crazy the last less than a month has been.”
SIDNER: “Yeah.”
ENTEN: “This is truly unprecedented. We can look at the numbers now, but the real thing to look at going down the road is looking at those trend lines, because the fact that this is a race that is truly up for grabs.”
SIDNER: “Just want to let you know that my friends just took a drink because they had this thing about the word unprecedented, and now that you — that you’ve said it and they just —“ (Laughter)
ENTEN: “You know I — I — you know, sometimes there’s a word that get used over and over and over again, but in a year like this, the word of the year, probably according to Webster‘s by the end of it will be ‘unprecedented.’”