Last week, Donald Trump lawyer Alina Habba released a video on TikTok in which she claimed Californians she had spoken to had “had it with Governor Gavin Newsom‘s really liberal policies” before concluding: “Let’s flip California guys.”
However, recent polling shows Republicans have a mammoth task if they want to win the Golden State for Trump in November, with two recent surveys putting him 25 and 26 points respectively behind Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrat’s 2024 presumptive presidential nominee.
Since Harris, a California native, replaced President Joe Biden as the Democrats‘ 2024 expected nominee in July, Trump has fallen back in the polls, with more than a dozen surveys giving the popular vote lead to the vice president.
Speaking at a press conference on August 15, Trump took aim at Harris with regard to her time as California attorney general, claiming she had “destroyed San Francisco” and would “do the same thing to our country” if elected to the White House.
Speaking in a TikTok video published on August 15, Habba, who has emerged as a prominent Trump media advocate, said: “I am in the great city of Los Angeles and although the state is pretty liberal, I’m looking around and I was talking to some of the drivers and the people I’ve met and they all say they’ve had it with Gavin Newsom’s really liberal policies with the migrants coming in taking their jobs, ruining their streets and creating unsafe surroundings. So let’s flip California guys.”
A survey of 3,765 likely voters in California, conducted between July 31 and August 11 by the University of California, Berkeley, and co-sponsored by The Los Angeles Times, found Harris was leading Trump by 25 points, with 59 percent of the vote against 34 percent.
Harris’ margin over Trump was 7 points higher than that recorded with the university by Biden in a previous survey conducted before the president announced he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race on July 21.
Separately, Capitol Weekly polled 1,904 likely Californian voters between July 25 and 27. They found Harris had a 24-point lead over Trump, with 59 percent of the vote against 35 percent for the Republican challenger. The survey also found 5 percent of likely voters in the state would vote for independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while 2 percent support Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
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Older surveys showed Trump was on track to lose California even before Harris replaced Biden as the Democrats presumptive nominee. A Capitol Weekly poll of 1,044 likely voters conducted from July 12 to 14 put Harris on 54 percent of the vote, 21 points above the Republican candidate in second place.
A Public Policy Institute of California survey of 1,261 likely voters in the state, conducted between June 24 and July 2, put Biden ahead of Trump with 55 percent of the vote against 30 percent.
Newsweek contacted representatives of the 2024 Trump and Harris presidential election campaigns for comment via email on Monday outside of regular office hours.
A recent poll by Siena College for The New York Times found a 35-point gender gap in support for Harris and Trump. The Democratic candidate enjoyed a 21 point lead with women, while her Republican rival led men by 14 points. If elected, Harris would be the first female president of the United States in the nation’s history.