‘He’s Very Far-Left’: Pollster Breaks Down The Harris-Walz Ticket

The following is an edited transcript of a Sunday Extra edition of Morning Wire. Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley sits down with Brent Buchanan, president and founder of Cygnal Polling Group, to discuss the 2024 presidential election.

The presidential race was shaken up again this week as another candidate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, was added to the ticket along with newly minted Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris. The unprecedented, last-minute swap-in of Harris and now the addition of her largely unknown VP pick has resulted in movement in the polls – and experts projecting a very tight race come November. We sat down with pollster Brent Buchanan to crunch the numbers.

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JOHN: Joining us now to discuss the state of the race – including the impact of the addition of Tim Walz to the ticket — is Brent Buchanan, president and founder of Cygnal Polling Group. First of all, thank you so much for coming on.

BRENT: My pleasure.

JOHN: There’s a new poll out this week by CNBC that has Trump up by 2 nationally. He actually pointed to that poll in his press conference on Thursday. What do you make of the poll’s findings? 

BRENT: Well, first off, it’s a bipartisan poll of two firms, one Democrat, one Republican, and both have a profit motive to be correct because they’re not being funded to do a bunch of public polls. They do mostly private work for campaigns and businesses. I tend to put a lot more stock in those types of polls. What we really pay attention to in polling is not where is it now, but where has it come from and why did it get there? The bigger narrative, that I think is being totally missed in the media right now, is that Trump is actually still holding his own and doing well. Kamala just appears to be doing better compared to Biden because his floor was so low. It was unrealistically, artificially low in the sense that there were going to be plenty of voters who did not like the guy but showed up, held their nose, and voted for Biden anyway. It just wasn’t showing up in polling but there’s been no degradation of Trump’s ballot share in these polls since they pulled in a swap-a-roo at the top of the ticket.

JOHN: Now, you and I have talked about this before, but for those who don’t follow polling as much, how important are these national polls overall?

BRENT: They’re helpful directionally. We do one every month for ourselves that we release every other month, but we track it internally just for ourselves and our clients — not that it’s going to direct you and say here’s who’s going to win the presidential election, since we do not use a national popular vote for that. It does help you see what’s changing under the surface, however, and be able to compare what’s happening in maybe state-level polling of younger voters who are more engaged and more likely to say that they would vote for Harris than Biden, as an example. So it helps directionally to know what’s going on because of the shifts within the demographic groups, but it’s not going to be predictive at all. If anything, even a Trump Harris tie nationally is bad for Harris. When you go look at 2020, I think our last poll for Biden had him up 5 nationally and he ended up at 4.5 national lead over Trump, by about 7 million votes, and then barely won. So Democrats have to get to a 5, 6, or 7 point advantage nationally on a poll for them to do well. So, any narrative where we’re looking at a poll saying, “Well, look, Trump’s dropped nationally, but he’s still ahead or tied…” is significantly better than 2020.

LISTEN: Catch the full interview with pollster Brent Buchanan on Morning Wire

JOHN: Yeah. Can you unpack why that’s the case? Why do Republicans seem to have an electoral advantage when it comes to the national polls?

BRENT: Well, I think it’s when you look at population concentration — New York, California, Illinois, are super blue, progressive states and have very big populations. Then you look at Texas and Florida that are the biggest Republican states. Well, the margin in those two states are maximum 8%, maybe 10% for Republicans, but a margin in California is 30% to 40% for Democrats. So when you start to think about how many people are answering a national poll from these given states, you have a lot more votes and concentration on these survey responses coming from blue states. So if they can’t use their might in those responses to get a national poll to be 5%, 6%, or 7% democratic advantage, then you can start to see where there are structural issues with voters that have to be persuaded in the middle that the Democrats, that if they’re not persuading them nationally, they’re probably also struggling to persuade them in state or district specific polling.

JOHN: Now, to put a finer point on what you mentioned earlier, you said Trump’s ballot share has actually not diminished – despite the switch at the top. Are you saying that Trump is in just as strong a position now – or is it that while the Harris support is higher than Biden’s, Trump has just not lost any support?

BRENT: It’s the latter there. I think this is a more realistic view of the presidential election. And, and I’m convinced that it would have ended up close to this had Biden stayed the nominee, because at the end of the day, a voter is going to walk in and either be willing to or not willing to vote for Trump. The election is more about Trump than it is about Biden. Now, Harris changes that calculus some because she’s a new entity that’s completely untested and has been able to avoid even talking to the press for 18 days. But, she’s essentially a generic Democrat, that’s the way I look at her. If you’re willing to vote for a Democratic candidate, you can put all your hopes and dreams on her because we don’t really know a whole lot else about her. Now, when it comes down to defining her, which is going to happen, I would say by mid-September, if we have this conversation five or six weeks from now, it’s going to be a different conversation because she won’t be in that honeymoon “hopes and dreams” phase she will be a defined candidate in and of herself, she can’t avoid it forever. I think a 2 point national race is a more believable number in where we would have ended up even with Biden. It was just never going to look that way because people were embarrassed to say they would vote for Joe Biden.

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JOHN: Well, this historic sequence of events gives us the shortest amount of time we’ve had to define a candidate ahead of an election. Now, Harris has picked Tim Walz. There’s been a lot of focus on him this week. There’s excitement from some Democrats. Republicans are also excited about this pick for various reasons. As far as polling goes, what does Walz bring to the table? 

BRENT: Well, he does not bring name identification to the ticket in the same way that JD Vance did not bring name identification. So, it’s not like you’re picking somebody who is already defined. You’re making a choice. You know, when I saw the JD Vance choice, it looked like a selection being made to dive further into opportunities within Rust Belt states, but also kind of cast a vision towards legacy of Trump’s movement and his ideology and the things he believes in and wants to advance in policy. When you look at Walz, it doesn’t appear to be the same choice by Kamala Harris. I was the pollster on Dr. Scott Jensen’s race, who was the Republican nominee against Walz in ‘22. So, I’m very familiar with Governor Walz because I saw the opposition research book on him two years ago when I was involved in the campaign against him. He is one of the most progressive and liberal governors in the country. So if you’re Kamala Harris looking at him — and I don’t want to put myself in her shoes because that’d be a scary place — but I think she really liked his sharp tongue. If I had to distill it down to why she picked him, he looks like a midwesterner, he talks like a midwesterner, but he has a really sharp tongue and he can be an attack dog for you on Donald Trump and JD Vance. I think they just set aside the very Left of center — not even center — just Left views and policies that he has. And they’re now going to have to defend that. But if you’re the Kamala Harris campaign, she’s already the most liberal senator. So what do you have to lose in that sense?

JOHN: So, you’ve seen the opposition research on Walz. What are his weaknesses?

BRENT: Well, he may be an affable person, but from a policy standpoint, he is very far-Left. He has gone so far as to change the definition of sexual orientation to include pedophilia. There’s just a lot of things that normal Americans would look at and say, “That is really out there.” I think he opens up the door for culture wars in the sense of some of the things he’s done around abortion — allowing it up to and after the point of birth. Many people would say, “I’m not for no abortion, but I’m definitely not for abortion at any and all times.” I think that’s just an example of whatever the center view is on a policy topic, he is much further from that center than say Trump or Vance would be to the Right of that given issue. He’s been able to get away with it because he has a complicit media in Minnesota that’s never really called him to account on anything. I saw that in the ‘22 campaign. And he also is getting a free pass from the media this go round but it doesn’t take a whole lot to look into the guy’s record, especially once he was able to take over the legislature. So, in ‘22, [Minnesota] Republicans lost control of the [state] legislature and he has a lot of issues around gun control and his management of COVID. I mean he set up a hotline where you could call and rat out your neighbor if they went outside during the COVID lockdowns. I could go on and on with the things that are just complete nonsense that he believes, that are very much out of the norm of probably 90% of America.

JOHN: Do you believe the stolen valor accusations against him will have an impact? Have we seen that in the past where that’s really done damage to a candidate?

BRENT: It would to a Republican because the media would pile on. I don’t think it’s going to have the same impact on Governor Walz simply because it takes a little bit of nuance to explain the issue. And also, Republicans right now have all the policy points on their side. They’re running against the most progressive leftist ticket that has ever existed in American history. And we don’t have to go label and name people when we can use their own words and beliefs to expose them to America. And Americans will look at them and say, “Yeah, that’s not even close to what I believe.”

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JOHN: Trump was well-positioned in his race against Biden, but has done some shifting in terms of his message against Harris. Do you think the Trump campaign has taken the right approach to attacking this new opponent?

BRENT: Anytime you have a shift in your North Star, it’s going to take some calibration to get to the new destination. And you can tell that the Trump campaign was prepared for this, for the swap out. I’m not sure her coming out with the messaging she did was exactly what they thought she would do. She’s cast an eye for the future and tried to build consensus and tried to ignore the last 50-something years of her life as if it didn’t exist — as if she didn’t believe any of those things. So that definitely throws you off kilter. But it was almost getting too easy with the Biden campaign because the poor guy was just so inept. It almost makes Trump’s job easy. Now it’s going to be a fight, and hopefully it gets to a fight on policy and past beliefs on policy points because that’s to Trump’s benefit.

JOHN: Right, there’s been some criticism about attacking from an identity perspective. Final question, Trump brought this up in the press conference Thursday. He’s sort of thrown the gauntlet down to debate her. She’s agreed to at least one. How important are these debates in helping define these particular candidates?

BRENT: There’s nothing Donald Trump can do or say that is going to change somebody’s opinion of him. Because if he says something that is perceived as kind of off the wall, it’s like, well, that is Donald Trump. If he has a zinger or comes on strong in a policy position, people say, “Yeah, I already knew that.” I always tell clients that debates are an opportunity to walk out the same way you walked in. That’s the best case scenario. Debates essentially create risk opportunities, especially for the less defined individuals. So I think it’s great that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris agreed to a September 10 ABC debate because I don’t think Kamala can do well without a script or a teleprompter in front of her. All the videos that you see with her babbling on about nonsense are when she was allowed a microphone without a script or a teleprompter. So it’s kind of hard to believe that she’s going to be able to walk out of that debate viewed the same way she walked in because Trump cannot make unforced errors in that it’s just not possible. Nobody’s going to view him differently if he does make what is perceived as an error. But she has a lot of risk walking into that scenario, to say something that will be used against her or make people view her differently. I think if Trump stays on his trajectory and really holds to message on policy and contrasts — here’s the America that you’ll get to live in if she is in charge and here’s the America you’ll get to live in, and you already got to experience under me before COVID, if I’m in charge — that choice becomes very easy for the American public.

JOHN: Great. Thank you so much for talking with us. We’ll talk again soon.

BRENT: Thank you, John.

JOHN: That was Brent Buchanan from Cygnal Polling Group – and this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.

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LISTEN: Catch the full interview with pollster Brent Buchanan on Morning Wire