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‘Anxiety And Nerves Setting In’: CNN Panel Says Dems Biting Their Nails Amid Tight Harris-Trump Race

'Anxiety And Nerves Setting In': CNN Panel Says Dems Biting Their Nails Amid Tight Harris-Trump Race

A CNN panel on Wednesday discussed heightened Democratic concerns about Vice President Kamala Harris’ prospects against former President Donald Trump in November.

Trump and Harris are running neck and neck across the main seven battleground states, according to the current RealClearPolling averages. Panelists on “Inside Politics with Dana Bash” said Democrats fear they may struggle to rally sufficient voters to defeat the former president, pointing to concerns about a potential repeat of 2016, when Trump beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

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“Talk to Democrats, they‘re always pretty boastful about their ground game, and they continue to be so, but that needs to turn into votes,” CNN correspondent Priscilla Alvarez said. “So certainly some anxiety and nerves setting in as election day gets closer and those polls just remain deadlocked.”

“I think we’re all hearing this. I talked to a Democratic activist yesterday who says, ‘I feel like we‘re sleepwalking into 2016.’ There are a lot of differences,” CNN anchor Dana Bash asserted. “I mean, the differences, I think, are greater than the similarities. But the [post-traumatic stress] is real for Democrats.”

CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten noted Tuesday that if Trump beats his 2024 polling by the identical margin he outperformed against President Joe Biden in 2020, he will capture sufficient swing states to defeat Harris “in a blowout.”

“It’s also important to remember the polling from back in 2016. Obviously, there was a very big issue with polling back then not capturing the would-be Trump voter, whether they were not picking up the phone or they had a general distrust of pollsters,” senior White House correspondent Kayla Tausche said. “And while some of that still exists, pollsters have tried to re-calibrate the data, but this time eight years ago, Hillary Clinton was up by 12 points over Donald Trump. She had 50%, Trump had about 38%. And so when you look at these polls that show that Harris and Trump are still within the margin of error and you compare it to 2016, that right there is one of the main reasons why you have that anxiety.”

Harris secured the Democratic nomination in July after Biden dropped out and endorsed her, despite the vice president receiving virtually no primary voter approval. Tausche noted the “fact that she wasn’t battle-tested in the primaries” is “a source of consternation within the campaign.”

“Democrats are nervous. Some of it is 2016 and some of it is what they’re seeing from the campaign. The idea that, is this campaign spending too much time in rural white areas, standing beside Liz Cheney and not enough with the sort of low-information base voters, right?” CNN senior political analyst Nia-Malika Henderson said. “And so that is a real worry. I was texting with someone earlier this week, and I was asking, ‘What’s keeping you up at night about this campaign?’ And it is, are they going to be able to mobilize these low-information sporadic voters?”

Journalist Mark Halperin said on Tuesday that Harris is on a dismal trajectory to win the swing states based on the latest private polling he has seen. He also asserted that both Democrats and Trump affiliates he’s spoken to are aligned in thinking Trump is gaining ground in these key states.