‘Out of touch’: Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom ‘deeply unpopular’ with average Americans

Well, Democrats are not all that happy with Kamala Harris as she keeps teasing running again in 2028. Republicans are saying go for it, please do it. But Kamala Harris, I should say, some Democrats have suggested that Kamala actually picked the wrong race and that she should have been really settled for being governor of California. So Matt Bennett, who's the co-founder and executive vice president for the center-left group Third Way, told the New York Times that it's conceivable that she could craft a message in Kamala Harris, but she has a lot of explaining to do. Look, what do you make of this, that Democrats are not all that happy about her re-election, potential re-election, potential run for re-election? Potential run. But I mean, Kamala Harris hasn't won an election since she was running for Senate in California before she was the vice presidential nominee for Joe Biden. She's a pretty poor campaigner and poor candidate. So it's not really a surprise to me that she would forego what at the time looked to be a really competitive campaign for California governor. Obviously, we've seen some stumbles on the Democratic side there, and that race was probably way more winnable for her than she probably thought when she was first looking at it. But this is someone who got 2%, 3% in the primary and was picked by Joe Biden because he promised voters that he was gonna put an African-American woman on the ticket, and there just weren't a ton of those in the leadership of the Democratic Party at the time. But yeah, there's a lot of bad blood there. I mean, from the way that she talked about folks on the Biden team and in the party establishment on her book tour to the over $22 million in debt that she left the DNC with after a billion-dollar campaign, where I think a lot of folks were parsing through those numbers and wondering how well spent was this absolutely massive investment that donors made into her race. And if the Democrats underperform in November, a key part of that calculus is gonna be the financial hole that Kamala Harris left the party in. That's one of the few checks in the box for Republicans right now is just that they have a massive cash-on-hand advantage because they were way more conservative with their resources when it came to the election season in 2024. Yeah, but it's interesting because from the polling that I've seen, there seems to be a fair bit of support for Kamala Harris. So if she was to run again in 2028, you kind of look at the two frontrunners with the Democrats, and it's Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom. What's your prediction around these two and what's likely to happen come 2028? Both of them are gonna start with an advantage because those are the only two Democratic candidates that have any sort of national presence. Kamala Harris, having been the Democratic nominee, a majority of folks know who she is, and that's always an advantage when you're this far out from the election. And certainly Gavin Newsom has been all over the news as well. But I just think both of those leaders represent a segment of the Democratic Party that I think is really out of touch and deeply unpopular with the average American. And I find it highly unlikely that if and when voters are going to the polls ahead of 2028, that either of those candidates are gonna capture what I think is a real kind of populist anger and resentment in both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. And two out of touch California establishment politicians, I mean, my goodness, Republicans could be so lucky as to run against either one of those candidates. I just, I don't think we're gonna get that lucky. But I've been wrong before. We saw Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, so. Well, it's been put to me, no Californians, no Gavin Newsom, no Kamala Harris. And of course, we've spoken about Karen Bass on this program as well. Very interesting to get your insights there, Nick Weinstein, Signal principal and pollster. Thank you so much. Yeah, my pleasure.