Three Democratic senators are reportedly skipping the Democratic National Convention ( DNC) to stay in their states to try and make sure they keep control of the Senate.
Senators Jon Tester of Montana, Jacky Rosen of Nevada and Sherrod Brown of Ohio will not be at the four-day event in Chicago, Axios revealed, with CBS reporting the same, quoting “sources familiar with the matter.”
All three of these states are battleground states, so keeping control of their seats will likely be a priority for the Democratic Party.
Tester is the only one of the three who has not officially endorsed Harris as the Democratic candidate and is said to have not voted for her as the party’s nominee, according to Montana Public Radio.
Both Rosen and Brown have thrown their support behind the vice president. On July 1, Rosen posted on X, formerly Twitter: “Vice President Kamala Harris is a champion for the issues we care about, she’s highly qualified for the job, and she’s ready to lead on Day 1.
“She has my support as she works to earn and win the Democratic nomination, defeat Donald Trump, and make history as our next President.”
Harris is heading into the DNC while enjoying the lead in multiple national polls. All national poll aggregators now show she is in the lead, including FiveThirtyEight, which shows she is leading Trump by 2.7 points on 46.3 percent to his 43.6 percent.
There are still multiple pollsters who have predicted that Harris’ lead in the polls is not here to stay.
In July, Trump campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio predicted in a memo that there would be a “short term” bump in polls for Harris in the coming weeks as her entrance into the race was expected to re-energize Democrats, referring to it as a “Harris Honeymoon.”
Lead pollster for former Senator John Kerry, Mark Mellman, said that Harris’ lead is not “unreal” or “unnatural,” but it is “not necessarily permanent.”
“I can certainly imagine a situation where both candidates’ favorabilities decline a little bit,” he said.
Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women in Politics, previously told Newsweek how Harris can capitalize on the upcoming DNC.
She said: “In any presidential campaign, there are these moments where you get whole lot of eyeballs on everything they do, and she’s had kind of a string of them.”
“[Harris] will have another moment where, for four solid days, there will be tremendous coverage of her and the Democratic campaign,” Walsh added. “And this will be an opportunity for her, in many ways, to define herself, or redefine herself to the public. Not as the number two, but as the presidential candidate.”
