After a good couple of months of presidential campaigning, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) seems to finally be establishing a foothold into the national Democratic party political scene.
CNN reports on some good news for the Senator from a recent poll:
An 8-point jump in support for California Sen. Kamala Harris stands out in a new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS that shows a field of four in double digits in the race for the Democratic nomination for president.
Former Vice President Joe Biden (28%) and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (20%) continue to hold the top slots in the large Democratic field. Harris now stands at 12% support among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, up from 4% in December, and the latest entrant to the field — former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke — stands at 11%.
Harris’s rise comes across the board — there is no major demographic group in which she lost support since December — but her gains are more pronounced among Democrats (+10 points) than independents (+5), liberals (+10) more than moderates or conservatives (+7), women (+9) more than men (+6), and racial and ethnic minorities (+10) more than whites (+6).
You can view more detailed information about the polling numbers here.
Not only does this poll show Harris’s numbers slowly but steadily rising, but other ones taken over the course of the past two months since she announced do as well.
Also, as the Washington Post points out, even if you take into account Beto O’Rourke’s massive fundraising haul after he announced and the blitz of favorable media stories that followed, more people were interested in finding out more about Harris:
When comparing the splash each candidate made on Google after announcing their candidacies, the high-water mark still belongs to Harris.
We looked at this shortly after Harris announced, noting that the amount of Google search interest she generated after her announcement had easily surpassed the candidates who announced before her. This is a vague metric, certainly, but it seems likely that it’s the best one for getting a sense of how much interest there has been in the candidates overall. After all, if you hear about a candidate, you may be driven to go seek out more information about them. Even someone you know well, it’s faster to search Google for their campaign websites than to try to guess what it might be.
Google provided The Washington Post with U.S. search data since Jan. 1. It pools similar searches — “Bernie,” “Bernie Sanders,” “Sanders,” etc. — into buckets, which it then tracks. Search totals are relative to one another, with 100 being the peak interest in any of the candidates. That peak came with Harris’s initial announcement.
Interesting Google trends on interest in Kamala Harris after she announced her candidacy (via WaPo https://t.co/V9QzTcWCGJ) pic.twitter.com/qQMkmVXLoD
— Sister Toldjah 😁 (@sistertoldjah) March 20, 2019
NBC News and other mainstream media news outlets were on to this as well last month, before O’Rourke entered the race.
Google Trends Primary: Kamala Harris' launch appears to have generated the most searches, edging out Bernie Sanders. https://t.co/xrylba2XER pic.twitter.com/Kq1DhGNLrj
— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) February 22, 2019
Kamala Harris is blowing away 2020 Democrats in the fight for attention:
• Stories about her generate more buzz
• 2x as many Google hits as next closest hopeful
• Most Instagram engagement
• Most Twitter engagement
• Dominating in follower/fan growth https://t.co/vUa6btaaAi— Neal Rothschild (@nrothschild3) February 14, 2019
Of course, it’s still too early in the race to be able to reliably predict where the candidates will stand in polling long-term. But at this point the fundraising numbers and polling numbers still show the two candidates reaping the most benefits are the two who have their “straight white male privilege” going for them: Former Veep Joe Biden, who is likely to announce soon, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Is this just a minor hiccup in the Democratic Party Diversity Olympics or will this same story play out in the coming months? Stay tuned.
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—Sister Toldjah is a former liberal and a 15+ year veteran of blogging with an emphasis on media bias, social issues, and the culture wars. Read her Red State archives here. Connect with her on Twitter.–
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