As Donald Trump turns to obscenity, racial disparagement and sexual innuendo to blunt Kamala Harris’s surge in the polls, he faces a daunting obstacle: the intense hostility among Democrats to all things Republican.
How so?
Harris has consolidated support from key Democratic groups — the young, Black voters, women, Hispanics — who were lukewarm on Biden.
These voters share with their fellow Democrats a deep animosity to the Republican Party. They are inherently distrustful of Trump and highly unlikely to switch their allegiance to him.
The same logic works in reverse.
Since Biden’s withdrawal from the race, Trump’s standing in the polls has remained consistently firm in the 45-to-48 percent range — a bloc of voters seemingly impervious to criticism of their chosen leader.
Just as the overwhelming majority of Harris’s supporters won’t flip to Trump, Trump’s support is firmly entrenched, effectively creating a ceiling on Harris’s ability to extend her current modest lead.
The American electorate, as Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., and her co-authors wrote, has “calcified.” Polarization doesn’t just pull us apart; it holds coalitions together.
Barring an unanticipated development, the Nov. 5 election will be close, just as 2016 and 2020 were, with the outcome very likely to be determined by seven battleground states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona and North Carolina.
Small shifts of 1-to-3 percent in these states will determine whether Trump or Harris becomes the 47th president.
Because it is set to be so close — and because we are so polarized — the 2024 election will then be a get-out-the-vote battle between the two camps, to raise turnout among their low-propensity supporters, stressing mobilization over persuasion.
Christopher Federico, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, described in an email the boundaries on the outcome of presidential elections in our era:
The question of whether Harris — or for that matter, any major-party presidential candidate — is hurt or helped by polarization is a complex one. On one hand, the extent of polarization and sorting makes it difficult for either Democratic or Republican candidates to generate crossover voting from members of the other party. It creates something of a ceiling for each party.
On the other hand, polarization also creates a “floor” — in a highly polarized and sorted environment, the out-party is such an unacceptable option that even people unimpressed with an in-party candidate are going to defect.
According to Federico’s estimate, “most of Harris’s gains so far and in the remaining time will come from activating voters who are generally predisposed to vote Democratic.”
There are others who share this view.
Elizabeth Simas, a political scientist at Texas A&M, noted in an email that since “there are very few partisans who will switch over to the other side, elections end up being more about activation vs. persuasion. It’s about getting those who lean in favor to turn out.”
Polarization, Simas wrote,
is both a positive and negative for Harris. On one hand, it does help her in that even individuals who aren’t that excited about her as a candidate are still likely to support her if they really strongly dislike Trump.
But on the flip side, this means that there are likely Republicans who dislike Trump but for better or worse, are sticking with the party and will turn out just to defeat the Democrats.
Matthew Levendusky, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote by email that he and his colleagues have been tracking panel survey data collected by Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center on several key swing states:
When Biden dropped out and Harris replaced him, our data show that Harris held on to Biden’s supporters. But she does better overall than Biden did because she attracts people who were previously going to vote for a third-party candidate or said they weren’t going to vote. Trump’s support does not change all that much. Basically, Harris re-energized people who weren’t attracted to Trump, but didn’t like Biden.
One thing did change with the switch from Biden to Harris:
“We asked voters whether they were supporting a candidate because they liked that candidate, or whether they were opposed to their opponent. Much of Biden’s support was really anti-Trump. With Harris, that changes,” Levendusky added. While the numbers are currently under evaluation, “even in the raw data, it’s clear that voters are more excited for Harris than they were for Biden.”
But, Levendusky warned, “whether she can sustain that until people cast their ballots is less clear. The answer will depend, in part, on whether Trump and Vance can tie her to the Biden administration’s policies on inflation and immigration.”
What is clear from the polling data at this stage of the campaign is that Harris is fully competitive with Trump and far better positioned than Biden was just before he dropped out.
Adam Carlson — a Democratic polling analyst whose work I have cited before — has recently compiled demographic voting trend data comparing the levels of support for Biden in multiple surveys taken from July 1 to July 20 with levels of Harris’s support in surveys taken from July 22 to Aug. 9. Nationwide, Carlson found a net gain of 3.4 points for Harris.
Harris’s improvement over Biden’s margins among specific constituencies has been much larger: voters 18-34, plus 12.5 points; independents, plus 9.2 points; women, plus 8.2; Hispanics, plus 6.3. While Harris’s gains are larger than her losses, she did lose ground compared with Biden among white college graduates, down 0.5 points; men, down 2.2; Republicans, down 3.9 and voters over 64 years old, down 3.9.
Multiple sources provide support for Carlson’s current analysis.
The RealClearPolitics averaging of multiple polls in battleground states found Trump up by tiny margins in three states — 0.5 percent in Arizona, 0.7 points in North Carolina and 0.2 points in Georgia; a tie in Nevada; and Harris ahead in three states, up by 1.4 points in Wisconsin, 1.1 in Michigan and 0.5 points in Pennsylvania. All these percentages are within the margin of error.
For comparison, on July 21, the day Biden dropped out, Trump led nationally by 4.3 points, and was ahead in all seven battleground states.
VoteHub, an election tracking website, followed presidential polling from Aug. 5 through Sept. 3 and found Harris going from slight underdog status to steadily building a lead over Trump.
On Aug. 5, Trump held a statistically insignificant lead of 46.4 to Harris’s 46.2. By Aug. 24, Harris had pulled ahead by 2.6 points, 48.4 to 45.8, and by Sept. 3 she led by 3.3 points, 48.8 to 45.5.
These relatively small shifts reflect the competitiveness of the race.
Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm, responded by email to my inquiry, noting that Harris has benefited from a closely divided electorate because it “was not difficult for a Democratic nominee without the concerns voters had about Biden’s age to consolidate the Democratic vote.”
McInturff provided The Times with an analysis of the state of the election based on his firm’s polling for NBC. Among McInturff’s findings:
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Harris has closed the gap on who is better on handling the issues. When voters were asked in July who would “make our economy work better, they chose Trump over Biden by 11 points; in August, they chose Trump over Harris by 1 percentage point. Similar, when asked which candidate was “competent and effective” in July, Trump led Biden by 10 points, but in August Harris led Trump by 4 points. The biggest shift was on the question, which candidate “has the energy and stamina needed to serve,” In July, Trump led Biden by 27 points, in August, Harris led Trump by 11 points.
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Crucially, Harris has substantially reduced Trump’s polling advantage on key issues that are pillars of the former president’s campaign. Asked which candidate was better on immigration and border security, Trump’s 35 point edge over Biden in July fell to 9 points over Harris in August; on inflation and cost of living, Trump’s advantage dropped from 22 to 3 points; on crime and safety, from 21 to 2 points.
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Vice President Harris’s net favorable rating has appreciably improved and now is better at 46 favorable, 49 unfavorable than Trump’s 40 favorable, 55 unfavorable.
Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, wrote by email that
Harris’s gains are coming mainly from the Democratic base. Recent polls show her picking up support mainly among younger voters, nonwhites and women. These are voting groups that Democrats depend on that were not enthusiastic about voting for Biden.
Citing Gallup Poll data, Abramowitz noted that Democrats “are much more enthusiastic about voting for Harris. Overall, voter enthusiasm is now very high, especially among Democrats.”
In a February 2023 essay, “Both White and Nonwhite Democrats are Moving Left,” Abramowitz reported that the growing liberalism of the Democratic electorate, in combination with the steady disappearance of conservative Democrats, had strengthened party unity as the Democratic electorate had become far more resistant to Republican appeals.
From 2012 to 2020, Abramowitz writes, Democrats became “as consistent in their liberalism as Republican voters are in their conservatism.” This shift, Abramowitz notes, resulted in large part from the changing character and composition of the white Democratic electorate:
The increase in loyalty among white Democratic identifiers is due largely to their increased liberalism because defections among white Democrats have been heavily concentrated among those with relatively conservative ideological orientations.
This increased loyalty has also been apparent in other types of elections including those for U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Growing ideological congruence among Democrats, especially among white Democrats, suggests that these high levels of loyalty are likely to continue in 2024 and beyond.
Even though the percentage of voters who might change their minds during the campaign season has radically shrunk — in 1988, Michael Dukakis led by 17 points after the Democratic convention only to lose to George W. Bush by 8 points, a 25-point shift — that does not mean vote switchers should be discounted.
Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote me by email: “Undoubtedly, the fraction of voters who are reliably going to vote for one side or the other has risen since 1988, but the dwindling fraction of swing voters still has an outsized influence on the election outcome.”
In part, this outsized influence results from the closeness of recent elections, magnifying the importance of each ballot cast. At the same time, Hopkins wrote,
That’s partly because, as Seth Hill, Greg Huber, and I demonstrate in this 2021 article, “Not By Turnout Alone: Measuring the Sources of Electoral Change, 2012 to 2016,” a voter who swings between parties has twice the influence on an election outcome that a voter who consistently sides with one party but only inconsistently turns out to vote.
Hopkins cautioned against putting too much stock in polls:
Response rates even to high-quality surveys can drop below 1 percent, and as my co-authors and I show in a recent article, “Getting the Race Wrong,” key subgroups such as Black voters seem to be particularly hard to poll.
In the last two presidential elections, Pennsylvania has been decided by less than 1.2 percentage points, and even high-quality surveys just won’t have the precision to tell us who will win in states that are likely to be razor-tight.
The political scientists and election experts I contacted were virtually unanimous in anticipating a very close election, reflecting a similarly close divide in partisanship.
Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia and director of the university’s Center for Politics, emailed me the center’s analysis of the 2024 presidential election:
We have the Electoral College at 226 Safe/Likely/Leaning to Harris, 219 Safe/ Likely/Leaning to Trump, and 93 electoral votes worth of tossups (seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin).
Every other electoral vote beyond these seven states is rated as Likely or Safe for one party or the other — the only electoral vote in the Leans category (as Leans Democratic) is the single electoral vote in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District.
A number of poll-based forecasting models suggest that the race is basically 50-50 or maybe there’s a small edge to Harris.
There are indications that the election is in some ways shaping up to be a replay of 2020.
Robert Stein, a political scientist at Rice University, argued in an email that “Harris’s entry as the Democratic nominee has largely returned the 2024 election to one that looks very much like the 2020 election: a very close race.”
There is little doubt, Stein wrote, “that Harris’s candidacy has been significantly strengthened by increased support from base Democratic voters.” Still, Stein argued that
There is little evidence in the polls that Harris gained any support with Trump supporters. For example, there is no change in the share of voters supporting Harris and the Democratic ticket among non-college educated white voters and voters who identify the economy and immigration as the most important problem. Support for Harris among self-identified Republicans remains small and unchanged.
Stein contended that the restoration of competitive status in Georgia and North Carolina is “due to the return of many Black voters who were uncertain and even uncomfortable voting for Biden.”
One thing stands out: Virtually every trend since July 21, the day Biden dropped out, has been favorable to Harris.
For Trump, this means that he must reverse that trajectory if he is going to have a chance of winning a second term.
As my Times colleagues Ken Bensinger, Karen Yourish and Michael Gold reported on Aug. 29 in “Trump Keeps Turning Up the Dial on Vulgarity. Will He Alienate the Voters He Needs?” Trump has responded to this challenge by directing
a seemingly constant fusillade of invective at a challenger who happens to be Black, South Asian and female. In a little over five weeks, in speeches, social media posts and interviews, Mr. Trump has called Ms. Harris a “wack job”; a “communist”; “dumb as a rock”; “real garbage”; “a bum”; and, employing a phrase he applies almost exclusively to women, “nasty.”
In early August, he reposted an image depicting Ms. Harris as a dung beetle with her face covered in what appears to be blackface while astride a coconut. And he has made or amplified innuendo-laden references to his opponent’s long-ago relationship with the former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, suggesting she traded sexual favors to accelerate her political career.
For Trump, there is much more at stake in the November election than winning a second term in the White House. If he loses, he faces the prospect of going to trial on the multiple criminal charges that have been filed against him (and already faces sentencing in the case brought by the Manhattan D.A., Alvin Bragg).
Last year, Politico calculated that if Trump were convicted and given the maximum sentence on each charge, “he would face a whopping 641 years in prison.”
It is inconceivable that any judge would sentence Trump to the maximum on all charges. But the scope of Trump’s indictments clearly raise the possibility that, if found guilty, the former president, who is 78, could spend the rest of his life — or at least a healthy chunk of it — behind bars.
In other words, Trump has a huge incentive to do whatever it takes to defeat Harris, making it a virtual certainty that his recent attacks are mild compared to the desperate measures he is quite likely to adopt as he struggles to stay out of jail.
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