I have to admit, I laughed when I saw that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were tied at 48 to 48 among likely voters in the final New York Times/Siena College national poll. Despite untold sums spent on advertising, a cavalcade of wild events — from felony convictions to assassination attempts to the incumbent president withdrawing from the race — here we sit, right on a razor’s edge.
Over the past few days, other national news outlets have released polls telling the same story. CNN (where I am an on-air contributor) also had the race tied at 47 to 47 among likely voters. CBS News polling shows the contest effectively even, favoring Ms. Harris 50 to 49 among likely voters. (An exception to the pattern, polling by ABC News was a bit more bullish on Ms. Harris, at 51 to 47 among likely voters.)
And yet these polls actually don’t tell the same story. Though several of them show a dead heat, beneath the surface, they diverge in how they arrive at that result.
Let’s take two possible theories for how this election might unfold. The first theory, which I’ll call “the realignment,” is that political divides like race and economic class are being replaced by divides like gender and education level. As the Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria writes: “We are seeing a realignment in which the old categories of economic status and race are giving way to new categories such as social status and cultural divides around gender. We are likely at the beginning of this transformation of the political landscape.”
To my eye, the Times/Siena poll is the most closely aligned with the theory that this election will see a widened gender gap even as the divides between white and nonwhite, or old and young, are more muted. If you believe Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris are realigning the electorate, with Democrats shedding some young voters and Latinos even as they run up the score with women and the college-educated, this is the poll for you.
Among the three deadlocked polls, The Times’s finds the largest gender gap, with women favoring Ms. Harris by a 12-point margin and men choosing Mr. Trump by 14 points. The Times also finds Ms. Harris crushing Mr. Trump among white voters with college degrees by a 16-point margin.
There is, of course, a second theory, which I’ll call “the reboot”: that we are watching a new version of a familiar show, with the Harris team trying to reassemble the victorious Obama coalition. As The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein wrote back in July: “The Harris coalition will probably look a little less like the voting blocs Biden assembled and more like an updated version of the coalition that Barack Obama mobilized in his two victories.”
The results of the CBS News poll show generational and racial polarization still at near-2020 levels, but with a gender and education gap that looks to be more within recent historical bounds. It shows Ms. Harris poised to get roughly Joe Biden’s margins with Black, Hispanic and young voters. However, she loses ground by getting blown out among older voters and winning white voters with a four-year degree or more by only a slim three-point margin. This poll tells a familiar story of the election that, if you squint, looks like a young, diverse Democratic coalition butting up against an older, whiter G.O.P. coalition — a tale as old as 2008.
Even if both of those polls get the topline takeaway correct and the election is extremely close in the end, we still don’t know if we’re looking at a realignment or a reboot.
Unfortunately, I can’t tell you who I think will win on Election Day; the data are simply not clear enough in either direction for a reasonable, responsible prediction. What I will say is that even with two high-quality polls that look alike, where researchers have taken care to model the electorate well for their polling samples, there are different narratives one can discern about the new (or old) American political story that is about to be told.
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