At the End, It’s Trump Momentum vs. the Harris Machine

With two weeks left to go, the contours of the 2024 presidential election are clear: Both campaigns need voters who usually don’t vote, and Kamala Harris needs to bring the Democratic coalition, including its Trump-curious members, back home.

While the Republican side plans to spend the remaining days of the contest trying to lure low-propensity voters to the polls, the Harris team will attempt to persuade voters of color to return to its side and will try to increase numbers among white voters in previously red suburbs.

Despite some increasingly erratic public appearances, Donald Trump has the momentum: He has managed to narrow Harris’s already microscopic lead in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada while holding steady in the battleground states where he has a small advantage: North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona.

But the Trump campaign — called an unstoppable force by its own officials — is about to run headlong into what the  arris team describes as an immovable object: the vast get-out-the-vote apparatus that Democrats have built over the past four years. “We have the MAGA coalition,” one Trump official said. “But we also know that it is not enough. And so we need to form a broader coalition, mostly with people who have never voted before. The other side has the easier task. You never want to plan a victory party that is dependent on new voters.”

But that other side is reaching beyond their base, embarking on a media blitz to capture the vanishingly small slice of the electorate that is still considered persuadable, appearing on nonpolitical podcasts including All the Smoke, a show hosted by two former NBA players, and Call Her Daddy, by one metric the second-ranked podcast among women 18 to 29, as well as sitting down with Howard Stern and Fox News. Harris is also exploring the possibility of an interview with Joe Rogan.

Trump, meanwhile, is making the rounds on bro-themed podcasts, chatting with hosts such as Logan Paul and Theo Von. But it’s likely that many listeners of these shows are already in Trump’s camp. The Lex Fridman Podcast, on which Trump appeared in September, is the 58th-most-popular podcast in America and 36th among white men and has been described by Business Insider as “A Safe Space for the Anti-Woke Tech Elite.” By contrast, Call Her Daddy is the seventh-ranked podcast overall and has nearly as many listeners who are Republican or independent as those who are Democratic, according to NPR.

Harris-campaign officials insist that simply reaching new listeners isn’t enough. The key is to get them to the polls. Lauren Hitt, a Harris-campaign spokesperson, said, “These are voters who are just now tuning in, who have not been paying attention to political news, and we are bombarding them at every opportunity with digital ads on mobile platforms, television ads, traditional canvassers going door-to-door, family and friends doing relational organizing. It’s an all-of-the-above vortex.”

The Republican campaign, on the other hand, is relying more on Trump’s media appearances. Harris officials believe this will be insufficient, especially because the Trump ground operation has been outsourced to two super-PACs run by conservative figures without field experience — one largely funded by Elon Musk and the other headed by conservative influencer  Charlie Kirk. “If you are reaching people who are literally hard to reach,” Hitt said, “you have to be talking to them for a long time through programs they trust. You have to work really hard to get to them, and that is what we have been doing.”

In one week in mid-October alone, the  Harris campaign knocked on over 600,000 doors across the battleground states and had 2,500 staffers working in over 350 offices. And while there is a  constellation of churches and  conservative groups that are working on behalf of Trump, both campaigns say the Democrats have a more robust independent ground game, led by labor unions and  outside groups such as American Bridge 21st  Century, a  Democratic super-PAC, which is spending $140 million to  target white women  without college degrees across the three northern battlegrounds.

The one thing the remaining hard-to-reach undecided voters seem to have in common is they dislike politics and distrust politicians. In theory, such a group should be a ripe target for Trump, who ran up huge margins in both 2016 and 2020 with voters Democrats didn’t expect to come to the polls. “There is nobody who does better with low-propensity voters than Donald Trump,” said Jim McLaughlin, a longtime pollster for Trump. “There are very few undecideds out there, and those that are don’t like the job that Kamala Harris is doing, they don’t like the direction of the country, they tell us that inflation is still a real problem, they don’t like the open border and the wars.”

“When you have two-thirds of voters saying the country is on the wrong track,” he added, “that should be good news for Republicans.”

Democrats acknowledge these headwinds and admit to many others. The vice-president only began running for the top job three months before Election Day, a dead sprint for a U.S. presidential race, and Democratic strategists say she remains largely undefined in the minds of the public. Still, they think the concerns of undecided voters dovetail with Harris’s message, and they plan on hammering Trump over the next two weeks on abortion, tax cuts for the wealthy, and the chaos and division of his term in office.

Encouragingly for Democrats, recent polls show that Harris has drawn even with Trump on the economy, after both Harris and Biden trailed him in this terrain for much of the campaign. Alyssa Cass, a Democratic strategist associated with Blueprint, a polling outfit that has provided messaging guidance to Democrats this cycle, said, “The message is that she is someone who has moved up from the middle class, who has worked at McDonald’s, who has prosecuted evil price-gouging corporations. That aligns with what will peel Trump- curious undecided voters away.”

The Trump campaign sees it differently, believing that Harris has boxed herself in while trying to distance herself from her more progressive California past. As Trump continues to push for mass deportations, saying that immigrants bring “bad genes” to the country, Harris continues to tread lightly, denouncing Trump’s comments but touting her own tough-on-the-border bona fides. Trump talks about a national stop-and-frisk policy, but even in her appeals to voters of color, Harris remains hesitant to attack Trump directly on criminal justice.

Meanwhile, there is substantial risk in Trump’s efforts to turn out occasional voters, even if he succeeds. Trump has improved his standing with Black voters by 16 points since his 2020 showing, according to Adam Carlson, a former Democratic pollster, but among Black voters overall, Harris will still win in a blowout. And young men likely to vote favor Harris by 17 points, according to the Harvard Institute of Youth Poll. Turning out more voters of color and more young people could end up disadvantaging Trump in the end.

“I just don’t see a big turnout from low-propensity voters being the thing that helps Trump,” said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster. “A lot of those voters Trump is trying to activate may turn out to be Democrats anyway.”

What we are left with, then, is an election that could be the closest in American polling history, one in which even the slightest shift in voter turnout or conviction will affect the outcome. The variables, like the voters, are too vast to even be knowable. “My advice to everyone is that you just need to stop trying to read the tea leaves,” said Carlson. “Polls aren’t built to do what everyone wants them to do at this point, which is to tell us the winner. We all are just going to have to learn to embrace uncertainty.”