Chauncey McLean, the president of Future Forward, a super PAC supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, recently expressed that the Democratic presidential nominee’s performance may not be as positive as public polling suggests. McLean made this statement during an event in Chicago affiliated with the Democratic National Convention. Future Forward has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to support Harris’s election.
Harris is currently enjoying a surge in the polls, leading Republican Donald Trump by 46.6% to 43.8% according to a compilation of national polls by FiveThirtyEight. The Vice President has also pulled ahead in several battleground state polls. Future Forward has established an extensive polling operation that developed and tested approximately 500 digital and television advertisements for Biden and around 200 for Harris. They have conducted surveys with over 375,000 Americans since July 22nd when Harris was named the presumptive Democratic nominee.
McLean revealed that Future Forward has a budget of a quarter of a billion dollars to spend on advertising between September 2 and Election Day on November 5th. The super PAC’s president acknowledged that the recent increase in Harris’s popularity stemmed from young minority voters, which has made Democrats more competitive in states like Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina.
Pennsylvania remains a critical state for Future Forward, with McLean referring to it as a “coin flip.” He emphasized that Harris must win at least one of the following three states: Georgia, Pennsylvania, or Florida. Although McLean acknowledged some concerns among insiders in the Kamala Harris campaign about their current standing, he remains optimistic about the Democrats’ chances in November.
Republican Senator JD Vance, who is Trump’s running mate, recently claimed that the poll numbers for Harris are “stagnating and leveling off.” Vance based this statement on internal data from the Kamala Harris campaign but did not provide specific details to support his claim.