When Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee last month, her twin challenges were to shore up support with the groups where Biden was weak and to maintain his standing with the groups where he was relatively stronger.
As she arrives at the Democratic convention in Chicago this week, a broad array of polls testify to her progress on both tests. In both national and battleground state surveys, she’s regained a solid amount of the ground that Biden had lost with such traditionally Democratic-leaning groups as Black and younger voters, and made a more modest recovery with Latinos.Simultaneously, in both national polls and surveys of the critical Rustbelt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, she is matching or exceeding Biden’s showing among older and working-class Whites — two groups in which Biden had largely maintained his 2020 level of support before quitting the race.Harris’ performance on each of these fronts has allowed her to pass former President Donald Trump in most polling averages measuring each candidates’ overall national support. More importantly, it has reopened the electoral map, providing her more pathways to 270 Electoral College votes than Biden had before he left the race. Her gains among younger and non-White voters have allowed her to put back into play Sunbelt battlegrounds that Biden’s struggles among those voters had moved largely beyond his reach. And in the Rustbelt battlegrounds that represented Biden’s most plausible path to 270 Electoral College votes, Harris looks stronger than the president did because she’s gaining there too among younger and non-White voters while running at least as well as he did among Whites.
But in the Rustbelt and Sunbelt alike, formidable challenges remain to this emerging “Kamala coalition.” Although Harris has demonstrably regained ground with younger, Black and Latino voters, in most polls she still lags below the levels Biden reached with them in 2020. It’s far from certain Harris can win any of the major Sunbelt battlegrounds — North Carolina and Georgia in the Southeast, Arizona and Nevada in the Southwest — unless she can come even closer to those previous Democratic benchmarks. And the remaining voters she needs may be tougher to corral than those that have already returned to her.In the industrial states, she faces the challenge of defending the beachheads she’s established with working-class and older Whites, who comprise a much larger share of the vote in these places than in the Sunbelt battlegrounds. These White voters without a college degree will likely be the most receptive audience to the GOP arguments that Harris is soft on crime and immigration, and an extreme “woke” cultural liberal.
Mark Graul, a veteran GOP operative in Wisconsin, predicted that Harris’ support with these voters will erode as Republicans bombard them with advertising. “I think the surveys we are seeing right now are at or near her peak” with blue-collar White voters, he said. “If the Trump campaign does its job … that kind of messaging is going to drive those working-class White voters who may have been open to the excitement of ‘Hey, we got rid of Biden and I don’t like either of those guys’ to jump back [to Donald Trump].”
Yet it is significant that more working-class voters did not immediately move back to Trump in polls when Democrats replaced their 81-year-old White male nominee with a younger woman who would be the first Black woman and Indian American president. That suggests Harris’ race and gender do not render her intrinsically unacceptable to a larger group of these working-class Whites than the share that find it difficult to support any Democrat. That doesn’t mean Republicans ultimately can’t peel away more of those voters from her; but it does mean they will have to dislodge them, voter by voter, with their arguments and ads, rather than benefiting from an instinctive recoil to a woman of color nominee.
For now, polls generally show Harris generating at least as much support among working-class White voters as Biden did, both in his 2020 race and the polling before he left the 2024 race.Biden didn’t run great with working-class White voters in 2020, but he did improve a few points over Hillary Clinton’s performance in 2016, reaching about one-third of their vote, according to the exit polls and the Pew Research Center’s well-respected validated voters study. Most significantly, the exit polls found that Biden gained over Clinton among them in Michigan and Wisconsin (where he carried about two-fifths of them) and Pennsylvania (where he won about one-third). That improvement, combined with a parallel uptick in support from college-educated White voters, allowed him to recapture all three states, after Trump in 2016 had dislodged them from what I called the “blue wall” — the 18 states that voted Democratic in each presidential election from 1992 through 2012.
Amid all his other problems this year, polls had shown Biden largely holding as much support among these blue-collar White voters as he did in his first contest with Trump. Harris today looks even a bit stronger. National surveys released in August by Marquette Law School, NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist and Fox News Channel each showed her drawing 36-40% of non-college White voters, a share higher than Biden’s in 2020 and back in the range of Barack Obama’s performance in 2008 and 2012. (The Washington Post/ABC/Ipsos poll released Sunday did not find Harris quite as strong, but still reported her slightly surpassing Biden’s performance among Whites without degrees.) New York Times/Siena College surveys found her matching or beating Biden’s 2020 showing in the exit polls with non-college educated Whites in each of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; another round of surveys from those pollsters released last weekend found her beating Biden’s share with those blue-collar Whites in North Carolina and Georgia, and exactly equaling them in Arizona and Nevada.
White men without a college degree could be an especially difficult audience for Harris, but many Democrats are hopeful she can remain competitive in these communities overall by maintaining relatively strong support among blue-collar White women. Both Biden and Hillary Clinton won only about 35% of them in the exit polls. But Democrats see an opportunity to improve on that since many of those women support legal abortion. With the concerns about Biden’s age and capability eliminated as a factor, Democrats also hope that more of those women may feel free to express their unease about Trump’s character and behavior: in a recent national New York Times/Siena poll, almost exactly half of White women without a college degree said they did not believe Trump had the temperament to succeed as president, according to detailed results provided by Siena.
Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster with long experience in Wisconsin, argues that defending Harris against the GOP’s culturally based attacks on issues like crime and immigration aimed at these working-class White women is imperative for her campaign. Harris’ vulnerability to Republican attacks overall is less “than Biden had,” Maslin said. “But we are dreaming if we don’t think there is still some vulnerability. They have much better ground that they are going to get to here.”
Support for legal abortion and distaste for Trump’s behavior and leadership style could also allow Harris to expand on Biden’s already substantial margins among White women with at least a four-year college degree. It’s easy to forget that the six Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices overturned the constitutional right to abortion only after the 2020 election, when Biden already carried between 54-59% of college-educated White women, according to the major data sources. With abortion more politically relevant now than then, Harris has a good chance to exceed those numbers in 2024, many strategists in both parties believe.
— CutC by cnn.com
