New Poll Says Harris Could Flip Crucial Trump State

The momentum behind Kamala Harris has been so major that it may turn Florida blue again in November.

The Democratic presidential nominee is closing the gap on the Sunshine State’s solidly red status, according to a USA Today/Suffolk University/WSVN-TV survey of 500 registered voters released Tuesday. The poll results suggest Harris is just five percentage points behind Donald Trump—a far cry from the 19-point advantage that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had over Democrat Charlie Crist in 2022.

The USA Today poll showed Trump receiving the support of 47 percent of surveyed potential voters in Florida, while Harris gained the support of 42 percent. That five-point difference is within the poll’s margin of error.

Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. trailed behind with 5 percent, while another 5 percent were undecided or refused to disclose their preference.

Another poll conducted by Civiqs indicated that the number of Democrats feeling positive about the upcoming election had shot up since President Joe Biden exited the race, with approximately 34 percent of the party reportedly feeling hopeful. The number of surveyed participants feeling negative—including “scared,” “depressed,” and “angry”—had all gone down.

That could be why former Texas Representative Beto O’Rourke believes that the Lone Star State could also be coming into play for Harris—or, at the very least, that her candidacy would motivate enough Texas Democrats to vote downballot in other contentious races.

“The thing is you now see Democrats smiling,” O’Rourke told MSNBC Monday. “There is joy in our party. There is electricity moving through our system. And yes, places that I think were written off are now in contention.”

“I think Harris-Walz rise or increase the chances that we’re going to be able to win these races,” O’Rourke continued, referring to the House race between Democrat Michelle Vallejo and Republican Representative Monica De La Cruz, as well as Democratic Representative Colin Allred, who’s gunning for Senator Ted Cruz’s seat.

“Who knows, but Joe Biden lost Texas by only 5.5 points in 2020. It’s been moving faster into the blue column than any other battleground state. Anything, I think, is possible in this year, and with the energy that those two are bringing to the ticket, I think that Texas could possibly be in play,” O’Rourke said.

Representative Ilhan Omar’s Democratic primary opponent Don Samuels has had quite the week leading up to polls opening in Minnesota on Tuesday—including openly courting Republican voters and getting caught possibly breaking campaign finance laws.

In a WhatsApp group chat titled “Zionists for Don Samuels,” Alexander Minn—who has been a director of strategic engagement for Samuels’s campaign since 2022—openly discussed campaign strategy with its many members, The Intercept reported on Sunday. Minn is no longer with the campaign, according to Samuels’s campaign manager, Joe Radinovich.

This chat of wealthy pro-Israel donors included businessman Michael Sinensky, who said he’d worked with a super PAC called Make a Difference MN, which he proudly claimed had taken on the role of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in the race.

“I’ve heard dozens of questions of where is AIPAC,” Sinensky wrote in the chat. “We are fucking AIPAC now.”

AIPAC has funded the victorious primary challengers of two other progressive lawmakers in the Squad, Representatives Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, both of whom were critical of Israel and its U.S.-backed military campaign in Gaza, which has killed nearly 40,000 people. Both lawmakers were knocked out in their primary races, against the tidal wave of pro-Israel funding and opponents who supported Israel.

Omar seems to be the next target from the list of lawmakers who have called for a cease-fire and criticized Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Last month, she called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “war criminal who is actively committing genocide against the Palestinian people while putting the lives of the hostages and the stability of the region in jeopardy.”

Sinensky, who argued that Zionists ought to be supportive of “alt right Christian Neo Nazis on the PRESIDENTIAL LEVEL” in the group chat, later alleged that Omar was antisemitic in a statement to The Intercept. Minn also claimed that she was a “purveyor of hate against Jewish people.”

In the chat with Minn, Sinensky claimed that he’d worked with Make a Difference MN to raise $120,000 since the end of July to support Samuels’s bid. Campaign finance laws strictly prohibit political campaigns from coordinating with super PACS.

While Minn tried to make clear the legal boundaries preventing his coordination, he still discussed raising six-figure sums for Make a Difference MN. Minn also said that his campaign was “in regular communication with AIPAC.”

“Several members of my campaign staff, myself included, have intimate relationships with active and Former executive member of AIPAC,” Minn wrote in a message on July 24.

In the “Zionists for Don Samuels” chat, Minn also discussed strategies to attract Republican voters, to bolster support for Samuels. While Radinovich claimed that he “doesn’t think winning a primary with Republican voters in an 80 percent Democratic district is a strategy that would be successful,” it seems that Samuels has moved forward with outreach to conservative voters anyway.

Samuels appeared on Fox News Monday night, speaking about a fundraising surge he’d experienced since Bush was knocked out of her primary only a week ago. He called Omar “divisive and combative.”

“She picks a side including simply trying to divide her constituency and ignores the other side,” he said, claiming she had taken “contrarian actions” apart from her Democratic colleagues.

Samuels said he’d gone from 100 volunteers to 13,000 volunteers. When asked why he had decided to challenge Omar, he did not mention Israel.

More than 1,400 people have been charged with federal crimes as a result of the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, with over 540 of them receiving jail time. But one lucky defendant who was indicted in May is getting a nice overseas vacation.

The Miami New Times reports that Barbara Balmaseda, a Florida woman and GOP strategist, received permission on July 19 from U.S. District Judge John Bates to go on her honeymoon to Spain and Italy for two weeks beginning on August 29 and ending on September 13.

Balmaseda was arrested in December and indicted by a federal grand jury on May 22 on five charges related to the riots, including corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding, knowingly entering and remaining in a restricted building, and engaging in disorderly conduct in a Capitol building with the intent to impede a session of Congress.

One of those charges was a felony, which Bates mentioned in his decision.

“Particularly relevant to the Court’s conclusion are (1) the uncertain status of defendant’s sole felony charge … (2) defendant’s ties to the United States and apparent lack of ties outside the United States; and (3) defendant’s compliance with her conditions of release to date,” wrote Bates.

Prosecutors disagreed, noting that Balmaseda did not have to post bail and is under neither home detention nor a GPS monitor, and that other January 6 defendants have had overseas travel requests denied.

“The Government acknowledges that Ms. Balmaseda’s honeymoon abroad would be a nice trip to celebrate her marriage, but that does not mitigate the severity of Ms. Balmaseda’s actions before, on, and after January 6, 2021 and the interest in having recourse if Ms. Balmaseda violates her conditions,” prosecutors Matthew Graves and Taylor Fontan wrote in a motion to deny Balmaseda’s request.

According to the FBI, Balmaseda created a Telegram chat that included Florida state Senator Illena Garcia and some Miami-area Proud Boys in the months before January 6, and on the day of the riots, climbed on equipment set up for President Joe Biden’s inauguration while wearing a pink gaiter.

So why was Balmaseda’s request granted? Is it because Balmaseda is well connected? What Bates didn’t mention is that, despite having ties to the Proud Boys, Balmaseda also interned for Senator Marco Rubio from 2018 to 2019, helped to organize Ron DeSantis’s 2018 run for governor of Florida, and was a campaign manager for Garcia’s successful Florida state Senate run in 2020.

Other January 6 defendants can’t say they similarly got to go on their honeymoon abroad. Maybe Balmaseda will also try to use her connections to escape serious punishment or, if Donald Trump wins in November, will try to score a pardon.

Rupert Murdoch is sending Donald Trump a hidden message through his editorial boards: Trump, you are looking like a loser.

Through his media companies the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, the billionaire business magnate seems to be trying to communicate to Trump that his 2024 campaign isn’t looking so hot. Though Murdoch himself isn’t penning any op-eds, his newspapers’ headlines highlight anxieties from inside the backrooms, The Daily Beast reported.

“Trump Meets Half the Moment in His RNC Speech,” read a WSJ editorial published just hours after his speech at the Republican National Convention. “Trump or Harris? It’s a Tossup for Many CEOs,” read an article at the top of the politics section on Tuesday. “Does Donald Trump Still Have It?” yet another WSJ opinion piece published Sunday asks.

“Trump Is Looking Like a Loser Again,” editor-at-large Gerard Baker wrote in a column on Monday. “The Trump of the past few weeks has looked and sounded more or less exactly like the Trump of nine years ago. This is the problem. It is this Mr. Trump who lost the presidency in 2020. It is this Mr. Trump who lost the House in 2018 and the Senate in the Georgia runoff election in January 2021.”

The relationship between Murdoch and Trump has been rocky for several years, especially after Murdoch personally greenlit the Fox News call that Trump lost Arizona in the 2020 race. When Murdoch said Trump went too far on his election conspiracies, as did some Fox hosts, Trump called the businessman a “MAGA hating globalist” who was “abetting THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA.”

Even though Fox was later forced to pay up big time with a $787 million defamation for parroting Trump’s false election claims, Trump continues to bash Fox News whenever he gets the chance.

Trump and Murdoch had allegedly not been in touch since the 2020 election until a few months ago, when Murdoch reached out to suggest Trump select North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum for his vice president. Perhaps the businessman saw what is now becoming clear about J.D. Vance: He’s bad for the brand.

As Murdoch showed face at the Republican National Convention last month, Donald Trump Jr. took the opportunity to slam him, telling Axios, “There was a time where if you wanted to survive in the Republican Party, you had to bend the knee to him or to others. I don’t think that’s the case anymore.”

Donald Trump is still obsessed with his crowd size—and his buddies are only too happy to back him up.

On Monday night, Trump claimed that 60 million people were listening to his one-on-one conversation with Elon Musk, despite the livestream’s own data tracker indicating that just a fraction of that—roughly a million people—had tuned in. Moments later, Musk amended Trump’s verbiage to project that 100 million people would listen to the glitched-out interview “over the next few days [and] weeks.”

But outside of the X Space, Trump’s allies took the crowd space lie to the moon.

“The president going on X with Elon Musk last night—which got almost, I think, 1 billion views now, is a perfect example of how you combat the disinformation being pumped out by the Democrat media cabal and the Kamala Harris campaign,” conservative strategist Roger Stone told Newsmax Tuesday.

It’s possible Stone was referring to a stretched data point elevated by Musk late Monday night, claiming that the discussion’s audience had reached one billion people—if you lumped in the livestream audience with the aggregate views of every single post made in relation to or mentioning Trump’s talk.

But whether it comes from his allies or the GOP presidential nominee himself, the X crowd nonsense is just another indicator that Trump can’t stop obsessing over his dwindling crowd sizes—and Harris’s growing popularity. Last week, Trump spent some of his spontaneous Mar-a-Lago presser boasting about his attendance numbers, including claiming that his January 6 crowd size was bigger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington (photographic evidence proves it wasn’t even close).

On Truth Social, Trump lamented that the “fake news … refuse to mention crowd size” when he believes he has more attendees. He also pushed a baseless conspiracy that Harris’s campaign had turned to A.I. to distort her crowd numbers. And on Sunday, the bloviating populist seemed to completely lose it over the issue, claiming online that Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “cheated” at Detroit Metropolitan Airport and that the 15,000 supporters who showed up to see them arrive “DIDN’T EXIST.”

In 2016 and 2020, Trump relied on the visual logic of his loaded rallies—and, by extension, the lackluster crowds attending his opponents’—as evidence of his titanic popularity among everyday Americans. But Harris’s ability to meet and even exceed Trump’s numbers has really rattled him, along with the conservative establishment. Late last week, news of Harris’s massive crowds reached the top of the Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, paired with the headline: “HARRIS CROWDS ROIL MAGA.”

Other top stories on the site hinted at more chaos inside Team Trump, including concerns that Trump is “panicking” and that the short-notice afternoon press conference at Mar-a-Lago, which reportedly only permitted the attendance of reporters hand-selected by Trump’s team, was evidence of Trump losing faith with his campaign. Trump’s return to X on Monday—the first time the Republican had posted in earnest to his account since he was banned following the January 6 riot—was seen as further evidence that the campaign had reached a “break glass” moment amid GOP panic over Harris’s surging lead.