A wide slate of potential running mates for former President Donald Trump is in Florida this weekend while he works to narrow down his shortlist, but that just shows "how deep the bench is right now," pollster Jim McLaughlin told Newsmax Saturday.
"I don't know. And I'm not gonna pretend to know" who Trump's pick will be, said McLaughlin, appearing on Newsmax's "The Count" with GOP strategist Luke Ball. "Kamala Harris might be the only politician in the country who's actually more unpopular than Joe Biden. And that's the dilemma that the Democrats find themselves in."
McLaughlin added, though, that in a Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll of grassroots conservatives, more than 70% said they wanted "either somebody of color or a woman or both."
"It was really interesting when they were choosing the candidates," he said. "It shows the real diversity that's on the Republican side right now."
Ball agreed with McLaughlin that he wasn't going to try to guess who Trump will pick, but the wide slate of potential candidates shows "all of the sheer talent in the Republican Party."
"It is so refreshing to see the GOP coalesce behind Donald Trump," Ball said. "I believe that a lot of these names — even if they don't get picked as a vice presidential candidate — are going to find themselves somehow in a Trump 2024 administration."
Meanwhile, the polls are showing Trump in the lead over Biden, including a new Rasmussen survey putting the former president ahead by 10 percentage points, and McLaughlin said that the reason for that is because of Biden's failures.
"Forget my polling," he said. "You see the Rasmussen poll that has Donald Trump up by double digits. I believe, too, they came out with another track today that with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the race, Donald Trump is actually winning by 12 points."
Further, the Emerson College poll this week showed Trump ahead in all swing states, said McLaughlin.
"Think about that CNN poll, which didn't get a lot of press last week," he added. "You have 61% of Americans who said Joe Biden's presidency is a failure on all the issues that they care about most. He's failing. Whether it's immigration, whether it's national security, whether it's inflation, he is failing."
The ongoing college protests are also hurting Biden and Democrats because they show "the extremists are on the left," said McLaughlin.
Ball, meanwhile, said that he does not think young voters will back Biden.
"Joe Biden is tired, cold, and weak," he said. "He's like a NyQuil slushy. He does not appeal to this next generation of Americans."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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