“It would be a miracle”: Election polls show bleak prospects for Kamala Harris

As election results emerged Tuesday evening, exit polls painted a bleak picture of Vice President Kamala Harris' electoral chances in key swing states.

CNN polls showed Joe Biden's administration's approval ratings in Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin were well below the national average. Hosts Dana Bash and Jake Tapper called Biden's numbers “brutal” as they awaited results from states his vice president needed to win to stay in the race.

“Six in 10 in Wisconsin say they don’t approve of the president,” Bash said. “You can't look at it any other way. This is undoubtedly a major headwind for Kamala Harris.

Host Audie Cornish agreed, noting that the Trump campaign “has done an effective job of tying it to Biden's track record.”

“They were in the room. “They were always there,” said Cornish, characterizing the Trump message. “You could have made a difference, but you didn’t.”

Bash and Tapper weren't the only ones in their network to point out the hill Harris had to climb. Chris Wallace pointed to a 3-1 disapproval of the job Biden has done in office and said a Harris victory would be “a miracle.”

“I have to say, I think that under the current conditions in the country – I mean, in conventional terms – it would be a miracle that Kamala Harris could win with these headwinds,” he said. “If she can overcome these numbers and still win this election, then she will have done a remarkable job of somehow differentiating herself.”

In another segment, Wallace also criticized Harris for not doing more to distance herself from the Biden administration. He brought up the vice president's visit to “The View,” during which she refused to acknowledge any differences between her and Biden.

“She said, 'I can't think of anything right away,' which might not have been the best answer,” he said.

Democratic strategist James Carville pointed out that the chances of victory in the D.C. suburbs were lower than expected and was not holding out hope for a Harris victory. When he stopped by Amazon's live election coverage and spoke with host Brian Williams, the Clinton campaign adviser said that “the early signs here are not convincing.”

On MSNBC, Steve Kornacki reported some troubling results at the county level in Michigan. He said Harris' performance so far was “very similar” to Hillary Clinton's defeat in 2016. At the time of Kornacki's analysis, Harris was winning Oakland County, in suburban Detroit, but by a narrower margin than Joe Biden in 2020. Biden won the state in the last election.

The New York Times' vaunted (and occasionally malicious) “needle” forecast has shifted toward Trump as polls closed in western states. As of this writing, Harris has to defeat Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, although Trump has a slight lead in all three states in the paper's forecasts.