81% had no idea Harris had supported
doing away with private health insurance, in favor of government-run plans. 78% never heard, or else forgot, that
81% had no idea Harris had supported doing away with private
health insurance, in favor of
government-run plans.
Harris had promoted bailing out violent George Floyd protesters in 2020, to let them back out on the street. Only 71% knew Harris had supported
efforts to defund the police by redirecting vital resources. The less Harris said, and the more she
declined to state her own proposed poli- cies, the stronger she seemed to grow. A late August analysis by The Hill/De-
cision Desk HQ gave Harris a better than even 55% chance of capturing the White House — compared to Trump’s 45%. It was a mirror reversal of The Hill’s assessment of Trump’s chances against Biden, which stood at 56%. But even Harris’ strategists knew run-
ning her campaign like a victim-witness program could only last so long. Newsmax TV political analyst Mark
Halperin explains, “Being a generic Demo- crat against Trump was what the polling
MATT TOWERY
GOP’s 2 Crucial Blunders
I
nsiderAdvantage pundit Matt Towery, one of only two pollsters to predict Donald
Trump’s stunning victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, worries the GOP has missed several critical openings this cycle that could come back to haunt them. The first big blunder, Towery says, was
the failure to proactively advertise to be sure swing-state voters witnessed the depth of the immigration debacle when it reached its crescendo in 2022 and 2023. Waiting to raise the issue in an election
year, he notes, gave the Biden administration time to launch a whole new system of relocating immigrants to the major ports of entry at taxpayer expense. This shift enabled them to proclaim that illegal crossings had dropped to their lowest level in five years, when in reality the
undocumented migrants had simply been redirected.
When InsiderAdvantage polled voters on
whether Vice President Kamala Harris had served as the border czar, only half of them answered yes — this despite the fact that in March 2021, President Joe Biden announced Harris would be “leading the effort” to stem migration across the southern U.S. border. Some 3.2 illegal immigrants were
apprehended from October 2022 to September 2023 — an increase of 434,562 from the prior year. But because Republicans and the PACs didn’t use paid media to expose the crisis, Towery says, it may be too late to remind voters of what happened. “Now they’re able to say, ‘The border is
secure.’ And, of course, the apprehension numbers are dropping and she was never at
has indicated for years was the way to beat him.
“But she can’t just be generic, because
she’s part of the administration, and be- cause she does have to convince voters she’s ready to be commander in chief. “That requires being visible on the na-
tional security issues, more so than she’s been as vice president.” In a cycle that’s already seen a deadly as-
Continued on page 71
the border.” Towery’s secondary concern also
involves advertising, and reflects the fact that through August, pro-Trump PACs were still sitting on huge sums of money. According to critics, the GOP PACs
overspent on ads early in the 2020 campaign and faded in the closing weeks. But Towery believes this year they’ve overcorrected, and were too slow to buy ad time in the key swing states so they could run hard-hitting ads defining Harris as soon as she became the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer. Towery emphasizes that his criticisms
are directed not at the Trump campaign, but rather at the PACs that raised hundreds of millions of dollars for Trump. “I haven’t seen any imaginative, interesting ads that penetrate or move public opinion, to counter the influence of the media and the stories that they run — which are 90% against their candidate and 90% in favor of Harris,” Towery tells Newsmax. “So if Donald Trump loses, that will be the reason.”
68 NEWSMAX | OCTOBER 2024
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