There’s plenty to chew on in the latest national NBC News poll, but one of the questions that stood out for me related to favorability ratings.
Respondents were asked to give their feelings about a variety of prominent public figures and institutions, and only three people had higher favorable ratings than unfavorable ratings:
Tim Walz: 40% positive, 33% negative
Taylor Swift: 33% positive, 27% negative
Kamala Harris: 48% positive, 45% negative
To be sure, those numbers don’t total 100%, because some people either didn’t have an opinion either way, or because they were unfamiliar with the person referenced in the survey. What’s more, the Democratic vice president’s favorable numbers were notable, in part because they’ve improved significantly as voters have started to see and hear her more.
But I also found myself marveling at Walz’s level of support.
After the Minnesota governor joined his party’s national ticket early last month, his Republican detractors did exactly what everyone expected them to do: The GOP tried to smear Walz in ugly ways. In one especially egregious example, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer appeared on Fox News and suggested that it’s “very possible” that China has been “grooming” the Democrat for decades.
That was absurd, but it wasn’t an isolated incident. As regular readers might recall, the smear of Walz’ military service was ugly and wrong; the Somali flag story was idiotic; the tampons story was worse; and practically every other line of attack the GOP came up with proved to be false or exaggerated.
But the evidence also suggests that these attacks simply haven’t worked. There’s still a slice of the population that’s unfamiliar with Walz, but among those who know the Minnesotan, he’s faring quite well.
The same cannot be said about his Republican counterpart. Sen. JD Vance, who joined his party’s national ticket a few weeks before Harris tapped Walz, has struggled over the last several weeks with weak poll numbers, and the NBC News poll was no better: 32% gave the Ohioan a positive rating, while 45% gave him a negative rating. Among all of the people included in the survey, no one finished below Vance. Of course, it could’ve been even worse for the senator: The NBC News poll also asked about Project 2025, and it was at the very bottom of the results: 4% positive, 57% negative. (Click the link for information on the survey’s methodology. Its margin of error was plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.)
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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