Despite the improving poll numbers for Kamala Harris since her debate with Donald Trump, it still looks like the election is a tossup. And while Harris is doing everything she realistically can to win over “undecided” voters, Trump is promising the moon and the sun, while his allies are doing everything they can to manipulate the system in their favor.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos:Getty
Let’s start with how political professionals view the state of the race. This interview with Dan Pfeiffer by John Heilemann dates from Sept. 5, but it is still highly relevant. And Pfeiffer, who was a top campaign and White House advisor to Barak Obama who now co-hosts Pod Save America, makes clear that the election will ultimately turn on what happens in Pennsylvania.
It’s two days after the traditional start of the fall campaign, and The New York Times has Harris at 49 and Trump at 46; Nate Silver has Harris at 49 and Trump at 45; 538 has Harris at 47 and Trump at 44. The most recent high-quality national poll, the ABC News/Ipsos poll, has Harris at 50 percent—the first time I’ve seen 50 for Kamala Harris—and Trump sitting at 46 percent among registered voters. Among likely voters, they have Harris at 52 and Trump at 46. That’s a pretty consistent picture nationally, and obviously much tighter in every battleground state. Give me your sense of just where things are today, understanding the election is held 60-some-odd days from now.
If you polled the press corps and most Democrats who are not working for the Harris-Walz campaign, 85 percent would say that Kamala Harris would win if the election were held today. If you ask the people who are actually deep in the numbers and paying really close attention to what’s happening in the battleground states, it’s closer to 50-50. And I think it’s very possible that if the election were held today, Trump would win.
Is the disparity because the reporters who are out covering the race, and Democrats more broadly, overstate the love, the enthusiasm, the vibe, and the momentum so much that it outweighs the national polling?
Dramatically. When you dig into the battleground state poll numbers, they’re all toss-ups, every single one of them. There’s not a single battleground state poll where one of the candidates is up or down by more than two points, and most of them are tied, or at one point. And when you start doing the math of what happens if one of the candidates does not win Pennsylvania, it all gets very complicated, very quickly.
What number, in your judgment, would make you comfortable? What would Harris’s lead need to be—nationally and in battleground states—that would allow you to sleep the night before the election?
There is no number like that. We hit that number in 2020, and we sweated that thing out until the Friday after the election. The polling industry has made adjustments to try to solve for the problem of underrepresenting Trump voters. But no one knows. We haven’t had an election since 2020 with Trump on the ballot to actually test these new methodologies.
Okay, so I understand why Georgia is hard for Democrats to win. It’s a Republican state, trending a little bit purple, but it’s tough. I also understand why Pennsylvania is tough. Are there particular challenges there for Harris? Why is Pennsylvania so much harder than Wisconsin and Michigan, for instance?
The fact that Pennsylvania is harder than Wisconsin just speaks to the change in politics since 2020. Remember, Biden won Michigan by almost three points, Pennsylvania by one and a half, and he won Wisconsin by 0.6 percent. Wisconsin is the one that people keep waiting to tip over into Ohio land, because Trump has made gains with Black voters, younger men, and continues to hold his margin with white non-college-educated voters.
Pennsylvania doesn’t have a particularly elastic electorate. We can’t go get a bunch of new voters, whereas Georgia has huge swaths of unregistered, very likely Democratic voters, Black voters, younger voters. There’s migration into Georgia from the rest of the South, from younger voters who profile as Democrats. And so Georgia has this growth pot, it’s growing in the right direction.
But Pennsylvania is static. Harris is still struggling to reach Biden’s 2020 numbers with Black voters, both in terms of support and turnout—in Philly, in particular. Is Harris going to bleed some non-college-educated white voters, and can she make that up with non-college-educated white women because of abortion? This is the problem with these races. There’s no one simple thing you need: You need a little bit from every single pot, and all the pots are in Pennsylvania.
Harris could reach the magic number of 270 Electoral College votes by winning the generally secure Democratic states and the three Great Lakes battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – and the one Electoral College vote that Nebraska awards by Congressional district in the Omaha area. The Republican legislature in Nebraska is considering an effort to go to a winner-take-all system used in most states.
If it does so, she would have to win one more battleground state, with Georgia and North Carolina the most promising candidates. But the Trumpian state election board in Georgia has just imposed a requirement that every ballot be counted by hand, a move that could throw the state certification into doubt and bring the Trumpian Supreme Court into play. North Carolina, on the other hand, is looking more promising after the revelations about Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson’s racist, sexist, and just plain appalling comments on a Black porn site several years ago.
But even if Harris manages to win North Carolina, as Pfeiffer pointed out, without Pennsylvania the path to 270 gets a lot more complicated.
I’m also worried about how Trump’s apparently crazy messaging – Haitian immigrants are eating cats! – actually comes across to many potential voters.
In a piece for New York magazine by David Freelander focused on whether Trump will beat his polling expectations again, he highlights Trump's hidden appeal.
Part of what makes Trump a difficult opponent, ex-Biden hands say, is that even when he is saying ridiculous things and turning off swing voters, he is able to reach voters who do not otherwise follow politics. “Whatever else you want to say about the Trump people, they are really good at social media, they can be really good at the pure politics of dominating a news cycle, and they are really good at getting in the head of the average person,” says one former senior official on the Biden campaign. . . .
Michael Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, agreed, saying that Trump’s unique skill was to get politics to infiltrate all aspects of American life in a way most presidents do not. “It’s like people who don’t know what a line of scrimmage is, and suddenly they show up to your Super Bowl party convinced of what plays the Kansas City Chiefs should run,” he says. “Trump makes politics something everyone is talking about and something you can’t escape.”
That can cut both ways, though: Trump himself is the greatest turnout mechanism of Democratic voters ever created, which helps explain why Biden ended up with more votes than any presidential candidate in history.
Trump officials agree with Podhorzer’s analysis but say that something else is going on. As they tell it, as much as the media and Democratic elites are in a state of permanent dismay about Trump’s behaviors and outrages, they resonate with Trump’s base, the kind of voters who don’t pay that much attention to politics or answer pollsters but come out for Trump. (When he is not on the ballot, as was the case in 2017, 2018, and 2022, the GOP tends to lose and the “Trumpism without Trump” that Ron DeSantis and others in the GOP primary field attempted failed against the real thing.)
“It’s watching two different movies on the same screen,” says one Trump adviser. “The media is full of people who all think the same, and then when they see something that Trump says or does, they all think, Oh, this is terrible, and then the polling they see reinforces that. But the normal person in Wisconsin just sees something that Trump said and thinks, This is common sense, or at least says, ‘You know what, I am more concerned about my 401(k), let Trump tweet, I don’t really care.’” . . .
Consider this year: Trump has questioned Kamala Harris’s racial identity, gone to a 9/11 ceremony with a 9/11 truther, mused aloud on a debate stage about immigrants stealing pets and eating them — to say nothing of being a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist and on trial for much of the year on 91 felony charges, all after trying to overturn the last election. And still, polls show a coin toss between him and Harris.
“I think polls don’t capture the kind of turnout Trump drives in rural areas when he is on the ballot,” says (Ron) Klain, (a longtime Biden adviser.) “His core voters are very enthusiastic, and what happened in 2020 is some swing voters in suburban areas who voted for him in 2016 did repudiate him and vote Biden. But the Trump true believers remain in rural areas and small towns, and they show up in droves when he is on the ballot because they see voting for Trump as a statement of defiance that they want to make. They are MAGA and proud.”
Beyond the MAGA faithful, Trump relies on making promises he has no intention of keeping even if he could magically make them happen.
No taxes on tips! (That was so appealing in Nevada and elsewhere that even Harris decided she had to promise it, too.) No taxes on Social Security and overtime! (Actually a boondoggle for the affluent.) Cutting gasoline prices in half! (When was the last time auto fuel costs under $1.60? How ‘bout the early 1970s.) Or capping credit card interest rates at 10 percent! (So much for opposing those price controls the “Marxist” Harris supposedly plans to introduce.)
But to many long suffering low-information, modest-income voters, they sound credible. And very enticing.
Equally credible to other potential Trump supporters (Elon Musk among them) is the notion that Democrats are flooding the nation with undocumented immigrants who will vote – illegally – for Kamala Harris. As Jonathan Blitzer carefully explains in The New Yorker, it’s an age-old myth long favored by the right.
The threat of voter fraud is one of the more durable myths in American politics, probably because it has proved so useful. Lately, it has taken a radical turn: Donald Trump and his allies have combined their two principal obsessions—immigration and election “integrity”—to conjure the spectre of immigrants crossing the border to elect Kamala Harris President. “A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in,” Trump said, at the September 10th Presidential debate, “they don’t even know what country they’re in.” Gesturing toward Harris, he added, “These people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”
The fiction that undocumented immigrants are illegally voting is now the explicit position of the Party establishment. Earlier this year, the House Republicans passed a bill forbidding non-citizens to vote in federal elections, even though it’s already against the law and actual cases are exceptionally rare and statistically negligible. A Brennan Center for Justice study of twenty-three million votes cast in 2016 found just thirty cases in which state election officials suspected that non-citizens had tried to vote. A 2022 audit in Georgia determined that, in twenty-five years, roughly two thousand people lacking citizenship documents tried to register to vote, but that none cast a ballot, because of the state’s screening procedures.
Facts won’t deter Republicans on this point, however, for the same reason that Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, keep repeating their scurrilous lies about Haitian immigrants eating the pets of Ohio: white anxiety about a diversifying country has become one of the Party’s greatest assets. This spring, when the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, said that “illegals” were voting and Democrats were abetting them, he was forced to admit that he had no real evidence. But, he said, “we all know, intuitively.”
It’s challenging to put yourself into the mind of an undecided – or at least an undeclared – voter. Among the better efforts to do so, I think, is yesterday’s New York Times analysis, reported by four reporters, led by the always thoughtful Jonathan Swan.
Devon Howard, an undecided voter from Las Vegas, has grown frustrated by how much former President Donald Trump has divided the country, but he has also been unimpressed by Vice President Kamala Harris.
Credit...
Adam Perez for The New York Times
Mr. Howard hasn’t decided whom he’ll vote for — or whether he’ll vote at all. He has grown frustrated by how much former President Donald J. Trump has divided the country — though he voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 — but he has also been unimpressed by Ms. Harris. Mostly, he and his friends try to tune out the daily bombardment of political news.
His sourness about the economy, the direction of the country and his own personal finances reflects the feelings of millions of Americans. They’re the so-called undecided or persuadable voters in the seven battleground states who will decide the outcome of the 2024 election. . .
While Ms. Harris quickly gained in the polls after she announced her candidacy — drawing back Democrats who were unhappy with President Biden — she is still viewed skeptically by many undecided voters. Polling shows these voters care more about the economy than any other issue. They have lower incomes than the electorate overall, and they’re pessimistic about the country’s future. They are highly transactional. What they want to know from the candidates, above all else, is: What will you do for me?
Contrasting Challenges
The allegiances of this group of voters — roughly three million voters in the seven states — has shifted from poll to poll. They leaned slightly toward Ms. Harris in late August in battleground-state polls by The New York Times and Siena College but have swung more toward Mr. Trump in more recent Times/Siena national polls.
These voters are up for grabs, and both campaigns are building their media strategies around appealing to them.
Interviews with more than two dozen voters in four of the seven key battleground states — Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin and North Carolina — show that Mr. Trump’s challenge with this group remains his divisive personality, while Ms. Harris must reassure voters that she has a plan to make their lives more affordable again.
So where are we as early voting gets underway and Election Day is six weeks away? The latest polling show Harris edging ahead (even Nate Silver is now giving Kamala slightly positive odds), but with too many unknowns to make any sort of safe prediction. Here’s what the most recent NBC News poll found in a survey released this weekend.
The latest NBC News national poll shows Harris leading Trump 49%-44%, within the margin of error, while Trump holds advantages on the economy, inflation and the border.
By Matt Murray
A double-digit increase in popularity, rising Democratic enthusiasm and an early edge for representing “change” have vaulted Vice President Kamala Harris forward and reshuffled the 2024 presidential contest, according to a new national NBC News poll.
With just over six weeks until Election Day, the poll finds Harris with a 5-point lead over former PresidentDonald Trump among registered voters, 49% to 44%. While that result is within the margin of error, it’s a clear shift from July’s poll, when Trump was ahead by 2 points before President Joe Biden’s exit.
But the transformation in the presidential contest goes well beyond the horse race. For starters, Harris’ favorability has jumped 16 points since July, the largest increase for any politician in NBC News polling since then-PresidentGeorge W. Bush’s standing surgedafter the9/11 terrorist attacks.
Still, Trump holds important advantages on the economy and inflation, although those leads are smaller than they were when Biden was still in the contest. Two-thirds of voters say their family income is falling behind the cost of living, (TR note: not actually true, it’s probably closer to 20 percent) and voters ranked the cost of living as their top concern in the election.
What’s more, the poll shows that some of Trump’s erosion has come from Republicans who aren’t die-hard supporters of the former president — but who could come back home to him, like they did in 2016 and 2020.
“We have seen this movie before,” said McInturff. “They can get squishy on Trump, and then in the end they come back and they vote the way they’re going to vote on a Republican-versus-Democrat preference for Congress.”
Overall,the 2024 presidential race looks a lot like it did four years ago, both pollsters agree, with the Democratic nominee more popular than the Republican candidate, the electorate still deeply polarized, and the final result unclear.
And a late postscript: this morning’s NYT polling shows Trump moving ahead in Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia.
Hold on, it’s going to be a wild ride.
Meanwhile, time for a break. And for the next Redburn Reads, I promise to devote my attention to something other than politics.
