This month, GOP operatives and others close to Donald Trump have grown increasingly nervous over trends they’ve seen in recent private polling data produced by different Republican organizations and conservative allies.
It’s not just the swing-state polling or the national surveys that are causing distress lately. The anxiety-spiking numbers are coming out of Trump strongholds like Ohio and Florida, according to three GOP sources, including two people close to the former president, who have reviewed the private polls.
“They’re looking worse than they should,” one Republican operative who has seen the internal data tells Rolling Stone. “Donald Trump is not losing Florida or Ohio, but that isn’t what’s concerning … It’s a trend of softening support.”
The polling results are a mirror image of what spooked Democratic operatives — prior to President Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 contest — when both public and private polling data showed Biden shedding support in safe terrain like Minnesota, New Mexico, Virginia, and even New York. The question was never, for instance, if the president would win New York; his soft support in liberal bastions foretold doom in critical battleground states.
But within the past month, after Biden ceded the ticket to Vice President Kamala Harris, the Harris-Walz campaign has significantly cut into (or in some cases reversed) Trump’s leads, infuriating the former president with less than three months until Election Day.
Several of those signs, much to the consternation of some of the national Republican Party elite, are now popping up in Trump country.
The three sources would not allow Rolling Stone to print any of the referenced data pertaining to these solidly red states, or to publicly identify which conservative groups or GOP organs had run the recent surveys.
There is a sense among various Republican consultants that the poll numbers would not be helpful to party morale or — more optimistically speaking — merely present a snapshot of a Harris 2024 “honeymoon.” Indeed, two of the sources say they personally have not briefed the data or their concerns to Trump yet, fearing it would only upset him.
For certain veteran party pollsters, the ex-president’s ongoing 2024-related woes aren’t at all surprising.
“When you address things that voters don’t care about [such as obsessing over Harris’ crowd sizes], they punish you — and Trump’s being punished right now for not staying on message and not addressing issues people care about,” says Frank Luntz, a longtime pollster and conservative Trump critic. “This election was his to lose, and he’s losing it … And he’s incapable of changing.”
Luntz adds that, based on his own data, he sees that most voters across the nation actually rate Trump, on policy issues they care about most, “as better able to solve them than [Harris] — but they just don’t like him. And that’s playing a bigger and bigger role in her surge and his falling back. She’s even expanding the voter pool, specifically among younger women who didn’t want to support Biden or Trump, and that changes the makeup of the electorate.”
Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that “two private polls conducted in Ohio recently by Republican pollsters — which Mr. Trump carried in 2020 with 53 percent of the vote — showed him receiving less than 50 percent of the vote against Ms. Harris in the state.” (Sen. J.D. Vance, Trump’s extremely MAGAfied vice presidential pick, is from Ohio.)
And in the realm of public and nonpartisan polling, the red-state warning signs for Trump and his party are blaring.
“I was surprised that Harris is within striking distance, being only five points down,” David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, said, regarding a USA Today/Suffolk University/WSVN-TV poll of likely Florida voters released this week.
There is a long, two-and-a-half-month stretch between now and Election Day, and the presidential race between Harris and Trump remains effectively in toss-up territory. Nobody who works on or close to the Harris or Trump campaigns whom Rolling Stone has spoken to say it is even remotely likely that Trump loses to Harris in Florida or Ohio this November.
Still, at this late stage in the campaign, Team Harris is reveling in recent polling news and a palpable uptick in Democratic voter enthusiasm. Meanwhile, Team Trump is suddenly playing defense, a position they largely were not expecting to be in at this point in the election cycle.
“We are going to go to bed early on Nov. 5, as Donald J. Trump will be announced as our 47th president. Early,” Republican National Committee co-chair and Trump family member Lara Trump said a month ago, at a late-night afterparty during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. “I’m calling it at 10 o’clock at night. How does that sound to everybody?”
Among much of the Republican Party’s national apparatuses, more and more operatives are growing less cocky by the day. Several of Trump’s own lieutenants and advisers are also leaning away from premature football-spiking.
“It’s going to be a close race,” John McLaughlin, one of Trump’s top pollsters, tells Rolling Stone. “We haven’t even hit Labor Day, and Trump and Harris haven’t even debated, so there’s a long way to go. We’re up against a tougher team with Harris compared to Biden, and we’ve got to run on the record and the policies that created that 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 latest survey … we have a lot of advantages to win this race.
“The fun is just beginning,” he says.
