The Scene
For the next seven weeks, Kamala Harris will try to rebuild Joe Biden’s 2020 coalition, adding where she can and compensating where she must.
Most of what Harris needs is already in place. In national and swing state polling, she leads massively among college-educated white liberals, barely gets what she needs with white adults who didn’t finish college, and wins the majority of all non-white voters.
But some of Biden’s supporters from the last election aren’t coming back, and new voters poised to participate in this year’s race appear more friendly to Trump. One question, with only partial answers in the wave of post-debate polling, is who in the 2024 electorate will make up for that.
“If exactly the same voters from 2020 came out and voted in this election, Harris would be up by a larger margin,” said Patrick Murray, the polling director at Monmouth University. Its latest national poll, released Tuesday morning, found Harris leading Trump by 5 points with the 2020 electorate. Among voters who were “extremely motivated” to turn out this year, her lead shrank, to 3 points.
In the states that will decide the election, Harris has led by less. The Democratic doom march of the 2024 Biden campaign, with the president struggling even in once-safe states like Virginia, was replaced by tight contests in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Across just two of those states — Georgia and North Carolina — Harris is running about where Biden was in September 2020. In the rest, she’s running behind.
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David and Kadia’s view
The closeness of the 2020 election in key states gave both parties handbooks on how to win them — seven states, fitting three categories.
In the “blue wall” of Great Lakes states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin), Biden easily won college-educated white voters, lost non-college educated white voters by 20 points or more, and won non-white voters by 60 points or better. In competitive western states (Arizona, Nevada), Biden hit the same margins with white voters, and won the non-white vote — mostly Hispanic — by 20 points. And in the competitive south (Georgia, North Carolina), high non-white turnout and landslide margins with those voters overcame Trump’s 60-point landslide with non-college white voters.
These are different challenges. But pollsters and Democratic officials we talked to had overlapping answers and strategies on how Harris might overcome them.
Winning the battle of the sexes. In 2020, the gender gap barely helped Biden in the most fought-over state; he won women in Pennsylvania by 11 points, and Trump won men by the same margin. Biden fell over the line with the ball because women out-voted men, and pollsters see a chance for Harris to increase her margins with female voters.
“She has a big gender advantage,” said David Paleologos, the director of the Suffolk University Poll, which put Harris three points ahead of Trump in Pennsylvania this week. That was on the strength of the female vote — she won that by 17 points, while Trump won men by 12. Eight years ago, Democrats hoped for a gender gap to boost Hillary Clinton, activating millions of women who would grab the chance to elect the first female president. It didn’t happen — but the Dobbs decision hadn’t happened yet, either. Harris has an advantage on the abortion issue in every swing state, and Democrats down the ballot are running ads on the same theme.
“In the US Senate race, Democrats are constantly hitting [former Michigan Rep. Mike] Rogers on abortion,” said Bernie Porn, the director of Michigan’s EPIC-MIRA poll, whose last survey gave Trump a one-point lead. “More women are inclined to support Harris, even if they’re hesitant on some other issues.”
Fighting for the rural vote. Few Democrats, on any part of the ballot, have slowed the exodus of rural white and non-white voters toward the GOP. In 2020, when he kept a light in-person campaign schedule due to the pandemic, Biden rarely campaigned outside cities and suburbs; in 2016, with fewer excuses, Hillary Clinton didn’t do it either.
Harris has held far more in-person events, some close to rural America; her Wilkes-Barre, Penn. rally last week plunked her on a blue dot surrounded by red Luzerne County. But most of the Democrats’ work here is unglamorous field organizing and uphill campaigning by local candidates. Rural majority-Black counties in North Carolina trended toward Trump in 2020, and local Democrats say they’re trying to reverse that. Biden lost suburban and rural North Carolina by 20 points, as Biden lost the state by less than 2 points, and there’s far more in-person organizing in rural areas now.
“We’ve been making sure that the 18 majority-minority rural counties in this state have an operation in them, and we’re working hard to make sure we’ve got candidates in those counties,” said Anderson Clayton, the chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party.
But there’s less talk about potential rural gains, and more about stemming the expected losses — a Harris victory would be won in the cities and suburbs, overwhelming the rural Trump vote. “In none of these states that we know are in play this cycle, are Democrats going to win a majority of the counties,” said Democratic strategist Steve Schale.
Firing up the under-30 set. Biden easily won the youth vote in 2020, albeit by less than Barack Obama had. In the 2008 exit poll, Obama won Pennsylvania voters under 30 by 30 points; in 2020, Biden won a new group of under-30 voters by 17 points. That support was teetering, in swing states and nationally, until he tagged out in favor of Harris.
“Younger people are super engaged in a way we just weren’t seeing previously,” said Pennsylvania state Sen. Sharif Street. “People are more enthusiastic about Vice President Harris’s future, her record, her potential.”
Harris hasn’t completely recovered with young voters in polls, though, and they’re the most finicky age group in terms of turnout. Democrats have expressed some hope that pop culture moments like “Brat summer” and Taylor Swift’s endorsement might boost registration and get Gen Zers more likely to back Harris to actually show up to the polls.
Recovering the non-white vote. One reason for the narrowness of Biden’s swing state wins was a decline in Black and Hispanic support for Democrats, and an increase in their support for Trump — not just in rural areas, but in cities. In 2012, Barack Obama got a 171,123-vote margin out of the city of Milwaukee. In 2020, Biden won the city by 146,375 votes, a pattern that replayed in every major Rust Belt metropolis. Suburban voters made up for the weakness in his strongholds.
Democrats see a chance for Harris to recover some lost votes — but not all of them. “In almost every election, African-American polling is less Democratic than the vote on election day,” said Michael Podhorzer, the former political director at the AFL-CIO, who now publishes his analyses on Substack. “A lot of that is about who shows up to vote.”
Republicans were encouraged by Trump’s 2020 improvements, and they saw the same economic data as Democrats boosting their support in 2024: Working-class Black and Hispanic voters were cutting back because of inflation, too. Older Black men, said Schale, were returning to their recent levels of support for the Democratic ticket. Younger Black men were in play; Paleologos saw close to one-fifth of them backing Trump, a number Harris would have to reduce to be safe. She simply couldn’t run far behind Biden with non-white voters.
“It’s very important to not operate from the assumption that Black men are in anybody’s pocket,” Harris said at a reporter roundtable with the National Association of Black Journalists on Tuesday.
Notable
In the New York Times, Nate Cohen sees signs of a Harris debate bump, but not enough to be safe: “If the polls erred as they did in 2020, Mr. Trump would sweep the battlegrounds.”
In the Bulwark, Daniel McGraw snapshots the five counties that could decide the race, from Detroit’s suburbs to Erie, Penn.