Poll: Over 70% of Dems and Independents Unaware of Harris’s Controversial Policy Positions

A new poll has revealed that almost three-quarters of registered Democrats and Independents are not aware of numerous intensely controversial policy positions that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has taken. The news comes as the founder of a Harris super PAC admitted that internal polling is showing a much tighter race between the vice president and Donald Trump than what recent public poll results suggest.

The poll, conducted by the Media Research Center (MRC), surveyed 800 Democrats and 400 Independents who said they voted for Joe Biden in 2020. It found that at least 70% or more were not aware of positions the vice president has taken that are widely considered to be extremely left-wing, including supporting the elimination of private health insurance, abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and decriminalizing crossing the border illegally. In addition, 75% said they did not know Harris was named the most liberal U.S. senator in 2019, and 72% did not know she had “never visited a conflict zone on the border as Border Czar.”

Curtis Houck, managing editor of MRC’s NewsBusters, called the results of the poll “stunning” during Wednesday’s “Washington Watch.” “Of the 10 things that we polled, they were no lower than 71% unaware,” he explained. “Seventy-one percent of her voters are unaware that she has flirted with defunding the police, and thought we should talk about reparations. Seventy-three percent did not know that she’s in favor of the Green New Deal.”

Houck continued, “In 2020, she encouraged supporters to donate to the Minneapolis Bail Fund to release violent criminals who rioted and destroyed those city streets after what happened with George Floyd [78% were unaware of this]. [It] goes all the way up to 86% of her voters did not know that at a CNN town hall, [she stated that] we should have a conversation about death row inmates being allowed to vote. So no matter how you slice it, no matter what issue, whether it’s the economy, the environment, crime, the border, her voters do not know what she believes in, and the fact that they’re still willing to vote for her anyway is a really dangerous commentary on the state of our politics.”

Houck went on to point to another MRC study showing a massive imbalance in the type of coverage the legacy media is giving Harris and Trump in the four weeks since President Joe Biden exited the race.

“[T]he media have given Kamala Harris 84% positive coverage [versus 89% negative coverage of Trump] on ABC, CBS, and NBC, and on the evening shows only twice mentioned her party ideology, mentioned her as a progressive,” he observed. “… There’s always some sort of label affixed to [Republicans], but they haven’t even done that for Kamala Harris. So if they’re not willing to talk about the party label, they’re not going to talk about her policies.”

Meanwhile, Reuters reported on Monday that Harris’s campaign backers are worried over the results of internal polls that do not reflect recent public poll numbers showing Harris opening up a lead over Trump. During an event hosted by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, Chauncey McLean, president of the Harris super political action committee (PAC) Future Forward, remarked, “Our numbers are much less rosy than what you’re seeing in the public.”

McLean, whose Future Forward PAC has “at least $250 million left to spend” on “a wave of advertising from digital to television,” stated that his group’s analysis has identified Pennsylvania as the most important state for Harris to win, which he anticipated will be a “coin flip.” He also cautioned that the vice president “has yet to fully rebuild the Biden coalition of Blacks, Hispanics and young voters that brought him the White House in 2020.” The race is going to be as “tight as a tick, and pretty much across the board,” he predicted.

Matt Carpenter, director of Family Research Council Action, further underscored that mainstream polling results, particularly within swing states, should be taken with a grain of salt.

“It’s not just McClean who is quietly raising concerns about the state of the Harris-Walz ticket,” he told The Washington Stand. “Former Obama campaign chief strategist David Axelrod also recently said he’s aware of polling which shows the battleground state matchups are far less favorable to the Democratic nominee than many of the big public polling operations are showing, and even suggested if the election were held today that Trump would win. So much of politics is about managing expectations, and if the Harris-Walz campaign is all polling hype, then they aren’t doing themselves any favors in hiding the true state of the race.”