The Democrat Party has a rather significant problem on its hands.
The party seems ready to move past Kamala Harris, and the powerbrokers are starting to line up behind Gavin Newsom.
The problem, however, is that polling has flipped and is now showing Harris not only as the favorite, but a considerable one at that.
A report broke this week that Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has been gushing about Newsom and plans to throw her support behind him in the race.
A former aide spilled the beans, stating, “She’s a Gavin fan girl and she doesn’t crush on many people. I will say this: She’s hardly ever wrong. When she says she sees something, it’s a real thing.”
Newsom, by all accounts, has been a horrible governor, but results matter little in today’s political world.
He is handsome, charismatic, and he can lie with the best of them. That is what gets you elected in today’s liberal world.
Harris had been getting smoked by Newsom in most of the polling until late January, then things started to flip again.
Newsom was +6 in a late-January Echelon Insights poll, then Harris went to +9, +9, +14, and +25 in various polls that followed the Echelon report.
InteractivePolls has Harris as +4.8 on Newsom, up 8.7 points from the last poll, so this does not appear to be an outlier in polling, but a developing trend that is quickly getting away from Newsom.
And Harris is not Newsom or the Democrat Party’s only problem.
My new dark horse candidate on the Democrat side of the aisle is Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ).
After his video and subsequent issues with the Pentagon, Kelly stated that he was thinking about running, adding, “I still think it needs to be the right person for the moment, and we don’t know what that moment is yet.”
Kelly was not even on the radar, but he hit the screen at 7%, and he is still floating around that number without much juice. If he does go all-in, he has the hero factor working for him, and never underestimate that. He also has the “Donald Trump has been picking on me” narrative, and Dems love to vote for victims.
Newsom does appear to be the chosen one, and he is still getting exceptional odds in prediction markets, but he clearly has some work to do. The party has to be freaking out right now, especially in regard to Harris leading the way. They have seen this show twice before, and it did not work out well. As bad as Trump’s approval rating is right now, I think the GOP would look at her candidacy as a gift horse.
