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Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket has led to an increase in the party’s polling numbers, but some experts remain skeptical of her newfound lead.

“If the polling errors are anywhere close to what they were in 2016 and 2020, then Trump is in the lead right now,” Democrat strategist Julian Epstein told Fox News this week.

The comments come as the RealClearPolitics polling average shows Harris with a narrow 1.5-point lead over former President Trump nationally. This represents a notable shift from the three-point lead Trump held over Biden the day before the president exited the race, Fox noted.

However, Harris’s lead is much narrower compared to the gaps Trump faced at similar points in 2016 and 2020. In those years, Trump trailed Hillary Clinton by 6 points and Joe Biden by 7.1 points at the same stage. Despite these deficits, Trump outperformed his polling numbers in both elections, a fact that Democrats are keenly aware of as they approach the final stretch of the 2024 campaign.

A Politico report from last week highlights that while recent polls from Democratic firms show Harris with a lead, there are notable warning signs. These polls reveal that Trump is leading in key characteristics that could influence voters. Additionally, Harris is nearly tied with Trump in battleground states, indicating she is underperforming compared to her national numbers in the states that will be critical to the election outcome, Fox added.

“It’s still a very tough race, and that feels consistent with everything we know,” Margie Omero, a partner at the Democratic polling firm GBAO Strategies, told Politico.

Democrat pollsters are also reportedly concerned about the same kind of errors that occurred over the past two election cycles, though the party’s leading firms met following the 2020 election in an attempt to diagnose the problem and fix it.

“I spent a ton of time and analysis trying to dig into those problems. And I feel much better educated about those problems,” Nick Gourevitch, a partner at Global Strategy Group who participated in the Democratic “polling autopsy,” told Politico. “I don’t think there’s any pollster in America who can sit here and say… that they’re 100% sure that they fixed any issues in polling. I think that would be silly.”

Democratic pollsters, aware of reality, have urged caution despite Harris’ quick rise in recent weeks.

“Every year, we’ve had different curveballs. This is a difficult industry,” John Anzalone, the lead pollster on Biden’s 2020 campaign, told Politico. “Something’s gonna happen in 2024. You and I, right now, don’t know what that is.”

Epstein, meanwhile, sees a number of reasons why Democrats should worry, pointing out that Harris is still “underperforming in the Rust Belt battleground by significant numbers” and “with working-class voters and Black voters.”

“The idea that Harris doesn’t have to specify policy or go before the news media is a strategy born of conceit and foolhardiness and will ultimately backfire,” Epstein speculated.

A former top official for President Biden has also trashed one of the few policies Harris has proposed: The imposition of price controls on food makers and grocers as her solution to inflation.

Last week, Harris unveiled the socialistic proposal which, if implemented, would enable the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general to impose substantial fines on grocers and suppliers if their prices are deemed excessively high. The Biden-Harris Administration has consistently attributed the nation’s inflationary pressures to “corporate price gouging” rather than their economic policies of high spending during times of disrupted supply chains.

Onetime Biden White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” hosts on Saturday that “inflation came from a lot of places.” He added: “And I think having a federal price gouging law was not going to solve inflation. But consumers deserve not to be gouged. That’s just fair.”

“But where’s the evidence of gouging, Ron? When supply goes down, demand goes up — we’ve seen this movie before. I was around for Nixon’s price controls,” co-host Joe Kernen pushed back. “It’s the worst thing you can do. If you artificially control a price and keep it low, then competitors don’t come in to increase the supply and it just exacerbates the situation.”

“I agree, I think what we really need to do is to further smooth out supply chains…fix the supply chain problems we did in the Biden-Harris administration with improving the efficiency of our western ports to make them operate more efficiently and get goods into our country more quickly and avoid things like the freight rail strike that President Biden prevented,” Klain said.

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