This summer, Times Opinion organized a new project to follow a group of young, undecided voters through the election, and we kicked it off just before the Democratic National Convention with a wide-ranging discussion about Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The group had very specific opinions about Mr. Trump. The Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol was searing for many of them, some of whom were teenagers at the time, and they held Mr. Trump responsible. They called him a traitor, a narcissist, untrustworthy. Some worried he would fight another election loss.
And yet, the group was even more negative about Ms. Harris.
When we asked them to rate Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump on a scale of 0 to 10 (with zero being extremely negative), Ms. Harris got mostly threes — she did no better than a five. Mr. Trump got mostly fours and fives, and topped out with a seven.
But there was a difference in how the group criticized the two candidates. Most of them had doubts about Ms. Harris — how she would improve the economy, whether she supported Israel, if she was patriotic, what she knew about President Biden’s cognitive abilities. They labeled her disingenuous, invisible, fake. Most were suspicious about Ms. Harris — yet most detested Mr. Trump. They knew him.
If Ms. Harris was losing the battle against Mr. Trump in our first discussion, I thought she had a chance to win the war. When presidential races get down to the wire, the candidate who is less well-known and running as an agent of change often has the better chance to make a persuasive impression with a larger share of Americans who are on the fence or just tuning into the race — I think of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and the 2016 version of Mr. Trump in this regard — rather than the candidate who has a cemented negative image among many voters.
So as I sat inside the United Center in Chicago on Thursday night and listened to Ms. Harris’s convention speech, I wondered if it would change the minds of anyone in our group, who I’d asked to check out her speech.
Turns out it did. When I followed up with our group over the last few days, to ask if their views had shifted, five of them said they were more likely to vote for Ms. Harris after listening to her speech; three said they were less likely; and six said the speech made no impact. I also asked the 14 of them to rate Ms. Harris again; they gave her mostly threes and fours, as well as a six and a seven. No one came away from the speech giving her a lower rating than they had before. (We’ll next ask the group to rate Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump after their first debate.)
The bottom line was that over the course of the convention, Ms. Harris filled in a lot of blanks in their knowledge and understanding of her. Almost everyone praised how she talked about her mother and her family during her acceptance speech, but there were a few policy issues and positions that made a positive impact, too: Her support for abortion rights (which was important to a couple of the undecided women in the group), her pledge to combat gun violence, her descriptions of an “opportunity economy” and her remarks defending democracy.
Abigail, a 23-year-old graduate assistant in Virginia who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, and who said she was more likely to vote for Ms. Harris after the convention, called the Thursday speech “simultaneously great and shallow” — strong on biography (“I loved how she introduced herself to us”) but full of platitudes, such as Ms. Harris saying she would “stand strong” with Ukraine and NATO but offering nothing on how she would confront Vladimir Putin. But Abigail’s main takeaway was that she felt she knew Ms. Harris better:
I can now see that she can be well-spoken and that she has an inspiring American story. Before, I wasn’t sure if she was genuinely proud of our country, but now I see that she wants to defend (her vision of) American democracy, and that was powerful even if some of what she said was misleading.
All four women in our group said they were more likely to vote for Ms. Harris after the speech. Lillian, a 27-year-old who works in digital advertising in Virginia and voted for Mr. Trump in 2020, said she was “greatly inspired” by Ms. Harris’s speech, though she still wants to know more about her record and “core principles.” She gave Ms. Harris a rating of five, compared to a rating of three before the speech, and added:
Her position on Israel and the military was notable to me because it seems to go against the very little I know about her.
The biggest swing in opinion came from Ben, a 20-year-old student from Michigan, who was pretty negative on Ms. Harris before the convention. He saw her as untrustworthy; in terms of issues in the election, he was most concerned about antisemitism in America and support for Israel. “I would ask Harris to describe what makes her qualified to be president,” Ben said. Before the convention, he gave her a rating of three — but after Ms. Harris’s speech, he gave her a six. He especially liked her comments about ensuring that Israel has a right to defend itself and the resources to do so. Ben also said:
I like that she shaped her whole speech around looking forward instead of looking backward.
Still, he didn’t think her speech would affect whether he ultimately decides to vote for her.
What it made me do was compare her speech to Trump’s. I liked hers a lot better.
Chris, a 24-year-old law student in Florida and self-described “Reagan Republican” who voted for Mr. Trump in 2020, also said he was more likely to back Ms. Harris:
I particularly found the part about foreign policy and contrasting her approach towards dictators very good as well as the peaceful transfer of power. I would have liked to see more substantive policy proposals on the economy.
The young voters who said they were less likely to vote for Ms. Harris after the speech said they felt it lacked substance or included stands they disagreed with. One of them, Pierce, a 26-year-old who works in sales in North Carolina and didn’t vote in 2020, said she lacked substance on policy and sounded “rehearsed,” including on the war in Gaza. Mark, a 24-year-old chef from California who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, said he liked her condemnation of Jan. 6 and her attacks on Mr. Trump, but said that Israel and Gaza left him troubled about Ms. Harris.
She made it clear that her stance on the Israel-Palestinian conflict will not be different from Biden’s. More empty words about hoping the war ends but not willing to stop arming Israel for actual change. With that being one of my dealbreakers, it made me less likely to vote for her.
No focus group with just a handful of voters is a perfect encapsulation of the electorate, and our intent with this project is not to be predictive, but rather to put a spotlight on a demographic group that is often stereotyped or overlooked in the public eye when a presidential race intensifies. Only a sliver of the electorate is undecided at this point, and Ms. Harris’s speech showed ways to appeal to some late-breaking younger voters as well as some obstacles for her. A Harris-Trump debate could be pivotal for some of these undecided voters — and a big test for Mr. Trump to try to undercut Ms. Harris from making another good impression.
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