Ten Questions That Will Determine Who Wins the Presidency
An update on the state of play in the presidential race and more.
There wasn’t really one big story or change in the presidential race this week.
It started with a combination of more fallout from Donald Trump’s debate lies about immigrants eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio, as well as news about the assassination attempt against him. Then we got a lot of high quality swing state polling, and Thursday ended with bombshell revelations about Mark Robinson, Republicans’ disastrous gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina.
What does it all mean?
The polling for the week was largely good news for Kamala Harris. She didn’t lead in every poll, but she led in more of them than Donald Trump did. The combined picture they paint is one in which she has a narrow lead in most, if not all, of the seven critical swing states. Now that does not by any stretch mean she’s a lock to win.
For starters, as I covered a few weeks back, there is a chance that the polls are missing critical Trump voters (largely white working class voters who don’t show up for non-presidential elections or only vote when Trump is on the ballot). According to Puck’s Tara Palmeri on Thursday, his campaign is touting polls showing Trump ahead narrowly, both nationally and in swing states. The pollster conducting those polls is very good (and purportedly had more accurate numbers in 2016 than did other pollsters).
Secondly, given the small margins, it wouldn’t take a lot for Trump to flip many of the states even if Harris is ahead as of Sep. 20.
So the race is far from over.
Nonetheless, you’d rather be Harris than Trump. Why? There are two distinct sets of swing states: the Sunbelt ones (North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona) and the Rust Belt ones (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan) and Trump doesn’t have a clear lead outside of the margin of error in any of them. He needs to win states in both buckets to win the presidency, whereas Harris only needs to win the Rust Belt bucket or the Sun Belt one.
Because the two sets of states are very different demographically, it’s less of a sure thing that all seven will break in the same direction. This is one reason Nebraska Republicans are trying to change how the state’s electoral votes are allocated, which would cost Harris one electoral vote. That would mean that if she carried all three of the Rust Belt swing states, but lost the Sunbelt ones, the race would end in a 269-269 tie, and the House of Representatives would decide the outcome, likely in favor of Trump.
It’s worth touching on the scandal engulfing Robinson — I have as good of a chance of becoming North Carolina governor as he does at this point. The scandal probably won’t in and of itself cost Trump North Carolina, the one swing state he won in 2020. Yet, it’s plausible to think it could hurt a little bit at the margins, especially given that Trump has fulsomely praised Robinson. In a razor thin race, that could matter. If Harris were to win North Carolina, it’s really hard to envision Trump winning the presidency.
There is an additional problem for Trump: a new AP/NORC poll found that 52% percent of respondents who were registered voters had a favorable view of Harris vs. 44% who had an unfavorable view. By contrast, only 37% had a favorable view of Trump vs. 60% who had an unfavorable view. It’s one poll, but if there is a significant gap in favorability between Harris and Trump, it’s going to be hard for him to win. The problem is that most people (at least the ones who haven’t been on a desert island for the last nine years) have firm opinions about Trump. It’s not going to be easy for him to raise his favorability.
Again, none of these obstacles are insurmountable, and if tomorrow was Election Day, I’d predict that Harris would win, but with the cautionary note that a polling error anything like 2016 or 2020 would tip the race to Trump.
Here are the 10 crucial things I’m watching for over the next few weeks:
Can Harris close the gap on which candidate voters think would do a better job handling the economy? She has trailed on that count in most polls, usually by a significant margin, and the economy is the most important issue in the race. It will be hard for her to win while losing big on this question. In fact, the best polls for her this week showed a much narrower gap in favor of Trump. That could be a sign she’s making gains in this area, which could propel her to the White House.
Conversely, can Trump close the favorability gap — either by driving Harris’s negatives way up or softening his own image? The latter seems impossible, but in 1988, an unpopular George H.W. Bush won the presidency by making voters hate his opponent, Michael Dukakis, more than they disliked him.
Like Harris on the former question, if Trump doesn’t close this gap, it’s hard to envision him winning. (Yes, this is a major tension in the polling, but I suspect that one of the two numbers will move, and the candidate who had it move in his/her favor wins).
Does Trump’s undisciplined nature catch up to him? From wasting his time in non-competitive states, to straying far from his campaign’s message, to making promises that turn off some crucial segment of the electorate (either left or right — usually the former on cultural issues, or the latter on economic issues), Trump is something of a disaster of candidate. He’s always been this way, but it’s gotten worse in 2024, as his debate performance showed. Most of the electorate probably won’t be swayed, but in a tight contest, it doesn’t take much to make a difference.
Does JD Vance cost Trump votes? Vance has been an unmitigated disaster of a vice presidential nominee. He’s just not good at politics. At a moment when his running mate is swerving left on economics (Trump promised to cap credit card interest rates at 10% this week), Vance outlined a healthcare plan that would make it impossible for people with preconditions to get health insurance. That threat proved to be politically devastating for Republicans in 2012 and 2018. Given Vance’s lack of skills and his extremism, the vice presidential debate could be a disaster. It likely won’t move a lot of voters, but again, if the race is close, alienating any gettable voters is a problem.
Can Harris flesh out her policy agenda enough to win over voters who are open to voting for her, but want to hear more about how she’s going to improve the economy and their lives? Also, can she do so without alienating any key constituencies?
As early voting opens, what signs do we get about the impact of the Democrats’s superior turnout/GOTV operation? The candidate that does a better job of getting their voters to the polls (or mailboxes) is going to win. Right now, it looks like Democrats have a vastly bigger and more sophisticated operation. If that translates into doing a far more effective job of reaching voters and turning them out, Harris will win. As people start to vote, we’ll get clues as to whether this is happening.
Does positive economic news move voters’ perceptions of the economy at all? There has been a persistent gap between economic indicators and how Americans feel about the economy. Does anything change that in the last month? Even a small uptick in voters’ confidence in the state of the economy will probably be enough for Harris to win.
Can Harris reach the young men of color who have soured on Democrats over the last four years? Young women are going to vote overwhelmingly for Harris, and may turn out in droves. But Harris is having a tough time closing the sale with young men of color. If she can persuade them either to turn out for her, or in some cases just to stay home, she’ll win. If Trump significantly cuts into Harris’s margin with voters of color (as a lot of polls are showing he is), he stands a far better chance of winning. This is a crucial battleground over the last 6.5 weeks of the campaign.
What’s the next surprise — and does it matter?
What signals do we get down ballot? As we get closer to October, we’ll start to see the two parties shift money down ballot based upon their internal polling. It will be a signal as to what they’re seeing — where do they feel optimistic, and where do they feel pessimistic? If we see, say, a flood of money going into Republican held seats in Wisconsin, for example, that’s a bad sign for Trump and the GOP. Conversely, if Democrats in Arizona’s two coin toss House races look to be in trouble, that’s a bad sign for Harris. These are just examples, but these smoke signals will be a good sign of what is happening on the ground.
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