The Harris Campaign Begins 43:05

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I'm hearing like almost like a bell ringing. Do you hear that? Is there a cat? Oh, it could be my kitty cat. Hold on. Let me take her collar off if she's up here. Hold on. I was like, am I going crazy? Like there's definitely... Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk.

What do the early stages of a reshaped 2024 campaign look like? And actually, is it fair to call the race reshaped from a data perspective? We're going to talk about it today. In the time since we last gathered on Sunday, Vice President Harris has secured the endorsement of just about every power player in the Democratic Party and has racked up enough commitments from state delegates that if they vote accordingly in the roll call, she will be the Democratic nominee.

She also raised a record setting amount of money, $100 million in just 36 hours.

So what does a Trump-Harris race look like? It's still early days, but we do have the first polls since Harris' ascendancy was formalized. We're going to look at those. We'll also look at how Americans view the candidates more broadly. The age factor has been flipped on its head, but what about feelings on the issues? And we'll also look at whether all of this has frustrated the coalitions that Biden and Trump were forming.

To do that, we're going to do a good or bad use of polling bonanza. We've got three different polling examples that get at some of these key questions. And here with me to do it all is senior researcher Mary Radcliffe. Welcome to the podcast, Mary. Hey, Galen. And also here with us is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Hey, Jeffrey. Good morning, Galen. Jeff, I want to do a quick check in on the latest polling before we dive right into our good or bad use of polling examples.

What do we know about the race from a numerical head-to-head perspective in the time since Harris has ascended? It doesn't seem to me that the numbers are dramatically different from where Biden was against Trump, but we couldn't really expect that, I think, given the environment we live in politically where things are pretty divided. And so it's really about, are people moving marginally?

We don't have our average – our new average running yet for Harris and Trump. But it seems like just kind of looking at the overall landscape of national polling at least that Harris is slightly behind, maybe by a point or two, sort of depending on how you go about putting a fit line through the polls. And that is similar to where Biden was, although the difference is that Biden was maybe crashing or at the very least Trump was gaining momentum.

You know, when we turned off our average when Biden exited the race, Trump was up by a little bit more than three percentage points in our national polling average. So all of this is to say that you can see why there's the potential for Harris. I read about this recently and why Democrats probably prefer the uncertainty of her over the doom feelings that they were having about Biden.

Mary, does that jive with where you understand the data to be? And perhaps more importantly, when should we expect that polling average to be back up and running? Yeah, I think Jeffrey's interpretation does jive with my understanding of the data up to this point. Although I think there's a lot of reasons to be pretty skeptical of the data. The early data, you know, we're less than a week into a brand new campaign. Kamala Harris has the opportunity to reintroduce herself to the American public. So a lot of things could change.

As to when the polling averages and forecast model and all that comes back up, generally it's our policy not to publish any averages on races where the candidates are not technically certain. Journalistically, we don't think that's appropriate. We don't want to guess what's going to happen in the future, even if we think it's pretty likely. So as soon as we have a presumptive nominee or actual nominee, our data will go back up.

In this case, because the delegates to the DNC are not bound to vote for Kamala Harris, they could theoretically change their minds. We won't have anything up until those delegates vote and we have a nominee in this case. And the DNC looks to be scheduling their virtual roll call to formally nominate Kamala Harris the first week of August. So once that is completed, then you should expect to see polling averages and models back up.

To your point about the early data being complicated, not only are we dealing with one brand new candidate, we are also still in the part of the cycle where you would usually expect to see a convention bounce from the RNC and maybe a reaction to a newly chosen vice presidential candidate in J.D. Vance.

I suspect the answer is no. But is there any way to determine whether Trump has experienced a convention bounce or whether J.D. Vance is having his own honeymoon? I don't think so. I mean, we've had so many events happen thick and fast. It's going to be impossible to disentangle which ones had which kinds of impacts on the polls.

It's funny, I wrote a piece about the convention bounce over time and what we might expect. But I also, this to be clear was before Biden's announcement that he was dropping out. I was saying it was going to be tough to disentangle what was from the convention in terms of how the polls moved, what was from the assassination attempt against Trump. Like there was a lot happening thick and fast. And now...

And now the presumptive nominee of one of the parties dropped out, which basically the 2024 cycle is going to just permanently have an asterisk for trying to interpret the convention bouts moving forward. It's just going to be always a messy... Well, basically every data set since the onset of COVID, I feel like has been f***ed in some way or another. So we're just dealing with like four or five years of asterisks next to the data, which

But let's get to our good or bad use of polling examples because we got a lot today. And the first is from Trump's pollster, Tony Fabrizio, who wrote that a Harris honeymoon may give her a bump in the polls in the short term, but that the fundamentals of the race have not changed. And he cites discontent over the economy, inflation, crime, the border, housing costs,

and foreign wars. So there's two sort of uses of polling here. One is the suggestion of a Harris honeymoon. And two is that the fundamentals of the race, because of the issues that he cites, have not changed. Is this a good or bad use of polling?

Mary. I think this is a bad use of polling, unfortunately. I think it's it's crazy to think that the fundamentals of the race haven't changed. I mean, we've been on this very podcast saying that if Biden stayed in the race, we would be talking about Biden's age from now until November. And now that aspect of the race is completely gone. Right. So in a pretty serious way, that fundamental element of how this race was shaping up has completely changed.

At this point, I think we don't have a really good bead yet on how Harris is going to frame the campaign and how that's going to look different from the way Biden was framing the campaign. The early ads, the early inklings suggest a focus on freedom.

Like reproductive freedom, economic freedom, that kind of thing. Completely different from what we were seeing out of Biden, which is an emphasis on his record and the kinds of things he's been able to pass. So I think it's ludicrous to say that the fundamentals haven't changed. All right, Jeffrey?

I mean, I obviously tend to agree with Mary on this. To generalize that the fundamentals haven't changed is a bad use of polling. I will say that if you're sort of thinking about the issues and what is important to voters and what voters say they're worried about, it's true that a lot of those things are going to be very similar, you know, regardless of who the nominee is for the Democrats. And Kamala Harris is the vice president.

So in terms of like a dramatic landscape shift in terms of who the Democrat is and in terms of –

the policies of the president administration. That, I think it's fair to say, hasn't changed dramatically. But to Mary's point, Harris is a different candidate. How she's portraying herself to the public is clearly different. The fundraising numbers and in terms of like the energy that Democrats suddenly have is a different ballgame from where we were before. There was some polling from YouGov about who do you think would handle an issue better, Harris or Trump versus Biden or Trump from earlier this month.

Harris seems to do slightly better on net, not dramatically different because at the end of the day, like,

People were more likely to say a Democrat was going to handle abortion better, but they were somewhat more likely to say that, say, Harris would handle abortion better. They were somewhat less likely to say on net that Trump would handle immigration that much better than Harris compared to where Biden was. So I do think it shows sort of the potential for movement in the margins in this race, which, of course, given how competitive our elections are, it's the movement in those narrow margins that are really going to matter and help determine the outcome. So-

Are we saying like things have shifted entirely? No. But has there been some change in the fundamentals? I think there has been. I want to add something here, which is,

In some ways, it depends which you put more weight on, right? So there was some polling that I found really valuable from YouGov last year, actually, that asked Americans, if you don't think that this candidate is fit for a second term, why? And the most common answer for Biden was that they viewed him as incompetent and too old. And the most common answer for Trump was that they viewed him as corrupt and dangerous. That aspect of the race has been fundamentally changed. I think that the

the reasons for not wanting a Trump second term for voters who don't see him fit probably won't change all that much. But now for people who don't see Harris as fit, it's unlikely that they view her as too old. And so other perceptions of Harris will develop. Some will be positive. Plenty will be negative. I mean, she's underwater with the American public right now, you know, by about 12 percentage points in terms of approval. And

And so we can expect that something will take that place. We just don't know exactly what yet. And when it comes to and this is related, but when it comes to the issues, Blueprint actually published some polling yesterday that suggested that voters see Harris and Biden as about equally liberal on all of the issues that they might care about in the campaign.

Which at first blush, you may say, oh, well, Biden was seen as sort of moderate. So maybe that's not so bad for Harris. That's not actually true. Biden came to be viewed as very liberal on all of these issues, the economy, immigration, crime and safety, things like that. And they view Harris as in about the same place, which is unsurprising because she's part of the same administration.

So I think that that dynamic probably stays the same. Largely, Americans view Harris as more liberal than them on some of the key issues like the economy, immigration, crime and safety and the likes. Harris is going to have the opportunity to define herself. You talked about freedom, Mary. Republicans are going to have the opportunity to define Harris as well. And during the 2020 Democratic press

primary. She took some very liberal positions that were much more liberal than Biden and are broadly unpopular amongst the American public. That included getting rid of private insurance. She didn't literally use the words abolishing ICE, but she said that ICE should start over from scratch. She raised her hand in support of decriminalizing crossing the border. The

Those may have been positions she took because she thought that was how to win a Democratic primary in 2020. That was not the case then, and it probably isn't the way to win a general election in 2024. So I will be curious to see, there's video of all of those and ads have already been cut, I've already seen them online, how Harris is able to manage the perceptions of herself on the issues. Right now, it's matched basically perfectly with Biden. Is she able to

present herself as maybe more moderate through sort of rhetorical skill and breaking with Biden on some in some places? Or does she end up being viewed as more liberal? I think you're right on on especially, you know, issues related to immigration, which are particularly salient. She's going to have some work to do to overcome the pretty liberal positions she took in 2019. You know, one thing that's interesting about Kamala Harris is coming up in California politics is

You know, she's really had to focus most of her career on intra-party politics, you know, working to place herself within the Democratic Party rather than within a general electorate. So it'll be interesting to see how she tries to appeal to a general electorate. That'll be a different kind of Kamala Harris than we've seen in the past.

In that blueprint polling, I think she has an opportunity to define herself particularly on the economy. So they also asked in that poll whether voters trusted Harris or Trump more on various issues. And on some issues, she looks a lot like Biden. She has higher trust on reproductive rights, climate, environment, lower trust on immigration and the border. But when it comes to economic issues, Harris and Trump are just about tied.

So maybe voters don't really have a sense of where she sits on the economy. And that maybe provides an opportunity to her to develop a more moderate approach on that critical issue that could appeal to a broader electorate.

And by moderate, we mean sort of like median voter appeal. I think, right, like not splitting it down the middle, but it sounds like at least from her first rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she's going to take a populist approach on the economy and talk about the middle class versus the billionaires and the banks and whatnot.

That was the framing that she opened with. Yeah, and that's probably smart for her because particularly on the economy, I think she's got an opportunity to really distance herself from the perhaps unpopular moves that were made by the Biden administration.

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So we're talking about changing perceptions on the economy, which is the number one problem facing the country, according to Gallup polling. The number two problem facing the country, of course, is immigration. And that's an area where the parties are extremely differentiated and redounds to Trump's benefit by a significant clip. I mean, he was always leading Biden by like 15 percentage points or more on trust on the issue. Can Harris both keep the energy going amongst the sort of

the base and the activists and whatnot, all of this money pouring in and also try to change perceptions of her on the border. You know, like there's also it's it is interesting where you pull clips from in Harris's career, because there are also clips of her saying breaking with liberals who say we should build schools, not jail. She's saying, I disagree, like with that argument.

approach to progressive politics. There's a world in which you could say, you know, I was a prosecutor, I want law and order on the border. And that means that one illegal border crossing is one too many or something like that. But still take the line of Trump is trying to make immigration about

us versus them. I want to make immigration about law and order kind of thing. Do we expect that? Like, is there room for that in the party? Galen, I don't know if I have a good answer. I mean, I think on the one hand, I would anticipate that this is an issue where they would like to be proactive because in theory, at least, I think she was sort of put in charge of immigration stuff. And so Republicans are going to basically try to, you know, just put that on her and

So I would assume that they would want to be proactive to counteract that as much as possible, put forward some sort of messaging. And to your point, it's sort of do you sound tough on the border or.

But also do you sort of say, but we also need like a path to citizenship kind of like rhetoric, mixing in something that is an issue where Democrats – the Democratic position on that has tended to be the stronger one across the broader public, right? It's sort of like on the one hand this, on the other hand that, and that's how if you were going to try to come across –

As moderating your position in some way, I would assume that you also want to stick to the things where you think you have strengths that are related to that issue. And I would think for Democrats, the path to citizenship one is the – seems to be like the one area of immigration stuff where their position tends to get more support.

Coming back to the question of whether the fundamentals have changed, the identity of the candidate has fundamentally changed. And we've already heard, for example, two Republican members of Congress refer to Harris as a DEI hire. We also saw in a recent YouGov poll that Democrats think members of their party would be less likely to support a woman for president. So we see a

both Harris's race and gender already coming into the picture in terms of voter perceptions and how her opposition is talking about her. What can we say empirically about how that changes the race, if at all? I don't know that it makes sense to say specifically that race would be a negative for Harris. It certainly wasn't a negative for Barack Obama.

And as to the point about Democrats not being willing to vote for a woman, I mean, Democrats were completely happy to vote for Hillary Clinton. The question is not about whether Democrats are comfortable. It's the whether swing voters and independents are comfortable with these demographic issues. But I don't I don't think we have evidence on the presidential level that this is a negative thing.

It's interesting because Hillary Clinton has been in this position before for Democrats as the first woman major party nominee. There are probably lessons that can be learned for Democrats and how they go about trying to fight back against sexism on the campaign trail, but also how to –

talk about gender without making it just all about that. I think, you know, for instance, I'm thinking back to Hillary Clinton's who's like, I'm with her kind of messaging. And I don't know that that doesn't necessarily totally, it's not totally about like sex or gender or any of that. But I do wonder if

we would see anything like that from Harris, you know? The Harris campaign selling women cards, literal campaign merch that says women cards, deal me in, when Trump accused her of playing the woman card. Yeah, I don't think we're going to see any of that. Yeah, I think... But see, what I'm saying is it's interesting because it's sort of like, well...

You do have the 2016 example, which is complicated for a lot of reasons. But maybe there are some things that she will take – that her campaign will take from what Clinton did and pick and choose what they – what examples they might follow and what others they might not follow. Okay. So next use of policy.

polling comes from Professor at the University of Florida, Michael McDonald. So Vice President Harris's campaign reported that it raised more than $100 million between Sunday afternoon and Monday evening. The money came from more than 1.1 million unique donors, including 62% first-time donors. And that's a record, as I mentioned at the top.

Michael McDonald writes, given the huge fundraising within the last 24 hours, I expect the first polls will be confounded by response bias, which is to say Democrats enthused by Harris and more likely to answer polls. I'm going to wait and see where we are after a couple weeks.

This had been an argument made about Biden's polling, which was that Democrats are so pessimistic about Biden that they don't want to talk to the pollsters. They're expressively responding, even saying that they're not going to vote for Biden, even when, in fact, they will ultimately vote for him in November. Now the opposite argument is being made. And maybe whether you bought the first affects whether you buy the second. Either way, Jeff, good or bad use of polling?

You're starting with me. So I'm inclined to think kind of good only in the sense that I do think the outpouring of enthusiasm you've seen from Democrats and the shift in terms of you actually now in polls will have – I think the CNN poll, it was like half of Harris voters said they were voting for her more than voting against Trump.

And it used to be more like a third of Democrats, like a third of them were voting for Biden. The other two thirds basically were saying that they were voting against Trump. So it does seem like there's more enthusiasm for Harris's candidacy. Democrats who felt like Biden was headed for defeat.

I don't know if Biden was absolutely headed for defeat, but certainly the vibes around that campaign were really bad in the aftermath of the debate. And it was it was Democrats had plenty of reason to feel depressed and down. And now they have the exact opposite feeling.

So I can imagine, and I think maybe Mary has the data for this off the top of her head, so I'm interested to see what she says, but I believe we actually have heard at least a little anecdotal evidence, well, anecdata evidence that there was some very strong Democratic response in recent polling. Yeah, we heard at least one pollster on Twitter saying that they had –

the largest response bias they have ever seen. Unweighted, before they weighted the survey, the recalled 2020 vote was D plus 20. This was a national survey. This is a good use of caveats. In general, to Jeff's point, I mean, the rule of thumb I always give to folks in my life who ask me how things are affecting the polls is after any event, you have to wait two weeks.

And check the polls then, because the first week is going to be autopsy-turvy. And then in the second week, you're going to see things start to settle in to something that feels a little more normal. So and we are still in the first week. And that's also two weeks from the event, not just when pollsters release the data, because the challenge is, you know, pollsters are

are into next week going to be releasing data from this week, which is only one week after. So you might even have to wait like three weeks in order to get polls that are fully priced in, have fully priced in what's happened. But guys, I mean, I'm already jinxing myself here, right?

pretending that the next two weeks are going to be smooth sailing and no breaking news is going to happen and we're just going to have some clean polls. Yeah, exactly. We already know that we're not going to have a non-newsy two weeks. Enthusiasm always is a difficult topic to talk about when it comes to elections because on one hand, we all know that an enthusiastic vote is worth just as much as a cynical vote. On the other hand,

There are real effects of enthusiasm when it comes to both ability to fundraise and ultimately turnout. You're going back to like, has the race fundamentally changed? Does having Democrats enthusiastic or at least a chunk of Democrats enthusiastic about their nominee change how we should be thinking about this race?

I mean, I'm inclined to think yes, at least again, marginally, like at least a bit. Because, you know, if you're like a campaign and you need people to volunteer for you, to go knock on doors, to go like do the things that campaigns do to take a message to people, to remind people about the election, to try to get them energized. It's, you know, just fundamentally easier to

to get volunteers and to get people who are willing to phone bank and go knock on doors and donate if they are at least somewhat excited about the candidate or the cause. See, I think in 2020, the cause for Democrats and kind of a larger part of the electorate that was like an anti-Trump coalition was defeating Trump.

Now here, four years later, with an unpopular incumbent president, there's still the cause of defeating Trump. But that may be proving with Biden, the lead of the ticket was maybe not proving to be enough, especially because of the concerns about Biden's age and capacity to do the job, especially for four more years. All that stuff was circulating, maybe making it more difficult to gin up the kind of

effort that you need as a campaign and maybe having somebody that people are at least somewhat more excited about. It's not like Kamala Harris is like Barack Obama necessarily as much as people are going to talk about those comparisons. But nonetheless, there is clearly some energy here in the immediate aftermath. And if that continues to some extent, I would imagine that that is good for Democrats and good at bringing Democrats home. I think some of the early polling was suggesting that even Democratic-leaning independents were saying that they were more likely to back

Harris than they had been saying about Biden. And maybe they were going to come home to Biden in the end. But if they are popping up in polls and saying, yeah, I plan to support Harris, that's like good news for Democrats. But that, of course, doesn't necessarily win them the election since Trump is still leading.

Yeah, just to put some numbers to this. So YouGov The Economist is a weekly survey. So and every week they ask this question about whether voters are enthusiastic to vote in the election. The categories are extremely, very, somewhat, not much or not at all enthusiastic to vote.

And if you look at last week's YouGov Economist poll and compare it to this week's, last week there was an 18-point gap between Democrats and Republicans on extremely very or somewhat enthusiastic with Republicans ahead. This week's poll, that gap is down to nine points. And that was only just taken like...

The immediately after Biden dropped out, the three days immediately after. So given what we've been seeing in terms of online enthusiasm and memes and all kinds of stuff, I wouldn't be surprised to see that number shift a little bit. And to Jeffrey's point, I mean, I think that's really important because it's pretty hard to knock on a door and say like, hey, I know, but we all got to vote for this guy versus...

Being able to come to the door excited about a candidate. And again, I think this gets back to just like we can't know like Harris could very well lose this election. But I think this gets back to why the situation with Biden was untenable for Democrats was because they just felt like they're in this like doom loop, doom spiral kind of thing.

And now, while Harris may not be able to win, there's more energy on the Democratic side. And there is at least there's just greater uncertainty about what she is capable of doing against Trump. And that uncertainty range may include more winning outcomes. Yeah, I mean, I would say this race is still very close and it's anyone's game. But, you know, last week when it was Biden and Trump, it did not feel that close. It did not feel like anyone's game.

So I think that shift in the vibes is going to lead to better fundraising, better organizing for the Democrats. Jeffrey, you mentioned comparisons between Harris and Obama. And to that end, this gets us to our third good or bad use of polling example. There's been a lot of talk about the Obama coalition this week. And Ronald Brownstein wrote an article in The Atlantic titled, Can Harris Reassemble the Obama Coalition?

positing that her path to victory depends on recreating the sort of electoral coalition that carried the 44th president into the White House, and that, quote, as the nominee, Harris could alleviate Biden's most intractable electoral problem, his erosion of the support of younger and non-white voters, but she could also potentially squander his greatest remaining political asset, his continuing support amongst older and blue-collar whites."

Mary, is this a good or bad use of polling? I think it's kind of mixed. I think we do see evidence from the early data that Harris is improving on Biden's margins with young and nonwhite voters. You know, CNN did a recontact survey where they reached back out to people they had already polled and asked them about Harris versus Trump. And you can see shifts in those exact demographics toward Democrats.

compared to how they answered that same survey question about Biden, you know, whatever, a few months ago. We also got a poll out today from Generation Lab and Axios that Generation Lab is a pollster that focuses on Gen Z voters in particular. This poll was among voters ages 18 to 34. So that's Gen Z and younger millennials. Including me as a young voter. God love them. Yeah.

And they showed Biden had six with that age group. Harris is ahead by 20. This was also just immediately post dropout announcement. So we're certainly seeing improvements compared to Biden among younger and nonwhite voters. With respect to white working class voters or white non-college educated voters, I am less sanguine. I think that's a much tougher road to hoe. I don't expect that Harris will

have that kind of success bringing back even Obama's losing numbers with that demographic. Wait, do you mean Obama's or Biden's losing numbers? I mean, if you're talking about reassembling the Obama coalition, you would want to say that she would improve with white non-college educated voters. But Obama lost white non-college voters in 2008 by 19, in 2012 by 25. And then Clinton and Biden both lost that demographic by 35-ish points.

So, like, I don't think I don't I don't think there's a way for her to get that part of the Obama coalition back. Yeah. In fact, that's kind of where my question comes from, is that this positing that Biden has a unique appeal with white working class voters goes against what I've understood based on the data.

Clinton lost that group of voters by 37 percentage points. Biden lost that group of voters by 35 percentage points. Basically, he was not able to improve at all. And the reason that Biden ended up winning the 2020 election was because largely because of improvements amongst college educated white voters.

And so Harris could certainly do worse amongst white voters without a college degree. And that's a pretty big risk for Democrats because white voters without a college degree make up the biggest segment of the electorate when you're just looking at race and educational status. But also, Democrats had already been failing on that question with both Clinton and Biden. Like the Scranton Joe thing didn't work, actually.

The thing that worked was I'm normal and I'm opposed to Trump. And that worked in like Fulton County and the suburbs around Atlanta and the suburbs around Phoenix and maybe Detroit and places like that. Yeah, suburban voters hate weird s***. That'll be the title of the podcast, Mary. But it's weird to suggest that

To me, that the pathway to victory is reassembling the Obama coalition because one, it seems basically not possible. And two, it's not how they won in 2020. Perhaps you could say that in some ideal world for Democrats, it would be getting halfway between the Biden coalition and the Obama coalition, but trying to take the best parts of each, right? Exactly.

maintaining or even increasing support among college-educated white voters, but also improving turnout among voters of color and getting back to the margins that Obama had among Black voters, Latino voters, the whole nine yards. You know, to the point about Biden and white voters without a college degree,

If you look at some of the state-level data, because I remember doing this after 2020, he did improve on Clinton's performance pretty regularly in a lot of counties that had a large share of the population that was white without a college degree. But again, it was like three points, four points, which to be clear was not too different from the overall national swing of

of Clinton by two to Biden by four and a half. But that mattered in a state like Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania because the margins were so tight in those places, and those states are wider than the country as a whole. So I think that's where you get into the questions about if Harris has a path to victory, what does it look like? Is it still through the Rust Belt states?

Is it more like she could actually make Georgia and Arizona more competitive and Nevada than they were looking because Biden seemed to be struggling more in those places, which are more diverse than the country as a whole, generally speaking? That's like the thing that's going to be really interesting to follow is sort of

What does that look like? Does Harris end up actually being a little strong in the Sun Belt but not strong enough but a little weaker in the Rust Belt but such that actually that makes it more difficult for her to win those states? And so Democrats end up in a less optimal situation, right? And that's, of course, really hard to know at this point.

Yeah, and I mean, her possible strength among non-white voters also could put some states back into play that have been kind of a long shot, like maybe North Carolina, for example, which has a significant non-white population.

The best you can possibly say about Biden's performance with white non-college voters is that he stemmed the tide, right? Like it had been decreasing every single year and then you get to Biden's election and it stopped decreasing. Now, is that Biden in particular showing strength among those voters or did they just reach a floor? I don't know. I mean, to that point, I...

that it was probably impossible for Harris to get to Obama's numbers with non-college educated white voters because he did well enough that he was able to win a state like Wisconsin by 14 percentage points. I don't think anyone expects that to happen today, but is there anything Democrats could do to win that group

Is it basically just stealing Republicans' popular positions on some of the issues that seem to be most important to them? Or is it a cultural gulf that doesn't really rely on the issues? I mean, this is one of those things where abortion could come into play. Like, in the case at least of voters in that group, in any group, that are maybe fiscally conservative but socially moderate, they weren't fans of Roe v. Wade being overturned. I'm thinking about, for instance—

Kind of like Northeast Ohio. So that's an area that has turned much more Republican in the Trump era. But it is an area where Senator Sherrod Brown still –

did decently in the 2018 midterms, for instance, while he won reelection, even as Republicans generally have been gaining in that area of Ohio. And that's also a place where we saw in Ohio's vote regarding abortion in 2023, that along with the Democratic strongholds of the state or the areas that voted to protect abortion rights, it looked a bit more like an older Democratic path to victory in Ohio than

So to me, it's a question of if there are voters who fall into that category, can Harris appeal to them and make that issue front and center? There's no wonder that Trump has been sort of trying to moderate a bit on that issue because it is clearly one of the Republicans' biggest weaknesses in this campaign. We saw it in the 2022 midterms, and while that was a midterm election, different ball of wax when it comes to turnout and who's showing up, but still the messaging and the power it had in winning over Trump.

Some swing voters, even some Republican-leaning independent voters in key states like Arizona and whatnot, that's really important. And so I could see that issue being something. And it's no wonder Harris' first ad there talking about reproductive freedom. I would assume we will hear that until the cows come home.

I don't know. I might have to disagree with you a little bit here, Jeffrey. I think if this was Harris versus a Republican not named Trump, I might say that there's an opportunity for Democrats to make inroads with white non-college voters. But here's the thing. White non-college educated voters really like Donald Trump. They just do.

I don't really think with Trump on the ballot, it is the year that Democrats can start trying to win those voters back. I don't think it's going to happen this year. Could it happen in 2028? Sure. I think there are. I mean, especially if Harris is going to lean into those economic populist positions, I think there will be an opportunity for the Democrats to sort of reframe and take these more populist positions in the future. But with Trump on the ballot, I just don't see it.

I think for me, I wasn't trying to say that like Democrats are going to magically make a bunch of inroads. I just think that if, again, if you're thinking about sort of stemming any further drop of

or even picking up even marginal ground. To me, it's like abortion is the clear opening. And that's also the opening for Democrats in terms of just winning over college-educated swing voters and suburban voters and people who are put off, who would be very receptive to like, let's restore Roe v. Wade's protections, et cetera. That kind of messaging is

We saw it work in 2022, and I would imagine that it could work again. But of course, that's with the economy and immigration in the mix, and maybe it doesn't work for them. But it just seems to me like that continues to be their biggest opening.

All right. Well, we got 100 days left to figure out all of this. And I should say I have a whole bunch of things. Wait, is that an exact number? Is it really 100 days? I think it's now 99, right? Oh, my God. Let me look. How many days until 11?

It is 102 days, 102 days until election day. And hey, we still get to wait on like an October surprise or something, right? Right. I can't wait. All right. Thank you, Mary and Jeff. We're going to leave it there for today. Thanks, Galen. Thanks so much, Galen.

My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Trotavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or a review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.