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22 days until the November 5 elections. What do we know and what does that tell us?

Oct 14, 2024

By Dave Andrusko

With just over three weeks to go before America decides on its 47th President, the pollsters and pundits, as you would expect, are looking to spot the trend which will predict whether former President Donald Trump or pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris will carry the day.

And there is no shortage of “trends,” in a race that could be the most closely contested race in history. Here are five points, or trends.

#1. According to NBC’s latest poll, “As summer has turned to fall, any signs of momentum for Kamala Harris have stopped,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt, who conducted this survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. “The race is a dead heat.”

That’s a change from September’s NBC News poll, which found Harris leading Trump by 5 points, 49%-44%,

NBC’s Mark Murray writes

Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are deadlocked in the latest national NBC News poll, with Trump bolstered by Republicans coming back home to support him after last month’s rough debate and a subsequent polling deficit, as well as by a favorable voter assessment of Trump’s term as president.

Later in his analysis, Murray digs into which groups are supporting Trump and Harris:

At 48%-48%, the survey results are as close as possible. But among different groups, there are enormous variations in candidate support.

 

The poll finds Harris with her biggest advantages over Trump among Black voters (84%-11%), younger voters ages 18 to 34 (57%-37%) and white voters with college degrees (55%-41%).

 

Trump, meanwhile, leads among rural voters (75%- 23%), white voters (56%-42%) and whites without college degrees (65%-33%).

 

Yet what also stands out as one of the defining features of the election is a massive gender gap between Harris and Trump, with women supporting Harris by a 14-point margin (55%-41%) and men backing Trump by 16- points (56%-40%).

But the New York Times sees a major drop off in Black support for the Democrat presidential candidate. Under the headline “Black Voters Drift From Democrats, Imperiling Harris’s Bid, Poll Shows.”

Vice President Kamala Harris is on track to win a majority of Black voters, and has brought many back to her party since taking over for President Biden. Still, a significant gap in support persists.

You betcha. In 2016, Democrats received the support of 92% of Black voters, 90% in 2020, but just 78% in the Times/Siena October 2024 poll.

NBC National political correspondent Steve Kornacki says Harris has actually become less popular:

One of the major developments in September’s NBC News poll, conducted after the Harris-Trump debate on Sept. 10, was her double-digit increase in popularity  compared to earlier in the summer, before she became Democrats’ presidential candidate. Her ratings shot upward to 48% positive, 45% negative (a +3 net rating).

 

But in this latest poll, Harris’ rating stands at 43% positive, 49% negative (-6), with the erosion coming mainly from independents and young voters.

 

That’s not too far removed from Trump’s 43% positive, 51% negative score (-8) in this same poll. That positive rating is Trump’s highest in the NBC News poll since he left office.

 

The ABC poll also has her losing three points in favorability.

And USA Today’s David Jackson offers a telling insight:

Trump trails Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in most polls. But the all-important caveat is that he’s down against the incumbent vice president by smaller margins than he faced in his first two general elections – both of which saw him score higher with actual voters than the ones who responded to pollsters.

#2. This insight into the tension between outgoing President Joe Biden’s team and Harris’s team is rarely written about but is by no means something new. Alex Thompson of Axios writes

The relationship between Kamala Harris’ team and Joe Biden’s White House has been increasingly fraught in the final weeks before Election Day, 10 people familiar with the situation tell Axios.

 

Why it matters: Biden’s team wants Harris to win the election, but many senior Biden aides remain wounded by the president being pushed out of his re-election bid and are still adjusting to being in a supporting role on the campaign trail.

 

“They’re too much in their feelings,” one close Harris ally said of the president’s team — a sentiment shared even by some White House aides.

 

Driving the news: Some on the Harris team say that top   White House aides aren’t sufficiently coordinating Biden’s messaging and schedule to align with what’s    best for the vice president’s campaign.

#3. Writing for the New Yorker, Susan B. Glasser tells us

If Democratic worrying were a natural resource, there would never be an energy crisis again. And, to be clear, sometimes the freakout is entirely justified. I, for one, took it very seriously when a major national political journalist, who’s been covering Presidential elections since the nineteen-eighties, told me the other day that, if the election were held today, Trump would win.

This under the headline, “The Harris-Trump Endgame Is On: Is It Time to Panic Yet?”

#4. The headline for David Marcus of Fox News reads “Pennsylvania’s Gen Zers embrace Trump like Millennials never have.” Marcus observes

One increasingly clear phenomenon I have slowly seen, and it’s backed up by some polling, is that Gen Z voters who are between the ages of 18 and 27 are far more open to supporting Trump than their Millennial elders, who are mainly in their 30s. …

 

A recent poll from Harvard has Harris leading Trump 61 percent to 30 percent among Millennials, but an NBC News poll shows that with voters 18-29, that lead shrinks to 16 points at 50 to 34.

 

It tracks with what I have been seeing on the ground.

#5. Gary Langer of Langer Research Associates, offers astute, largely non-partisan information. He writes

Vice President Kamala Harris’ positioning as a change agent is running into headwinds from her role in the unpopular Biden administration: While three-quarters of Americans in a new ABC News/Ipsos poll want her to take a new direction from President Joe Biden’s, most don’t think she would.

 

Harris, moreover, trails former President Donald Trump in having provided enough details about the policies she’d pursue as president. …

 

The poll, produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates with fieldwork by Ipsos, finds that the public by a broad 74%-22% would prefer to see Harris go in a new direction as president rather than continue the policies of the Biden administration. Even most Democrats say so.

 

But that’s not what most people expect: 65% instead think Harris mainly would continue Biden’s policies, vs. 33% who say she’d chart a new course. …

 

Even among Democrats, just 36% want to see Harris continue the policies of the Biden administration. Sixty-three percent of Democrats want to see Harris take a new direction.

More tomorrow.

Categories: Politics