Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned in a Friday column for Fox News that Vice President Kamala Harris could be a “shockingly better” presidential candidate than Republicans expect.
On Friday, Harris scored her fifth polling win in 24 hours, narrowing former President Donald Trump‘s lead with just over 100 days left until Election Day. A poll released by The Wall Street Journal that was conducted between July 23 and 25 among 1,000 registered voters found that Harris had all but eliminated Trump’s lead, with the vice president trailing the former president by a 49 to 47 percent margin in a head-to-head matchup. The poll has a 3.1 percent margin of error.
President Joe Biden, who dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris on Sunday, was losing to Trump by 6-point margins in both head-to-head and multi-candidate versions of a Wall Street Journal poll taken earlier this month.
In his Friday column, “Take it from me, Republicans: Kamala Harris is a strong candidate. Don’t underestimate her,” Gingrich, a Republican from Georgia who was House speaker from 1995-1999, laid out the issues that he believes Harris is “well to the left of President Biden,” including illegal immigration and corporate taxation.
However, he closes with several warnings to his GOP colleagues about Biden’s vice president turned presumptive Democratic nominee.
“However, Harris will turn out to be a much better candidate than Republicans think. As District Attorney and Attorney General of California, she was an effective litigator. In the Senate, she was an aggressive interrogator, especially with U.S. Supreme Court nominees,” Gingrich wrote. “She reminds me of some athletes who are great at game time but mediocre in practice. The vice presidency was practice, and she loafed through it, letting her laugh be a primary symbol. Now she will be in the real game. She may be shockingly better than Washington Republicans expect.”
