Yesterday, NBC News noted that ad spending in the swing states— especially Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin— is just getting going for real. “More than half of every dollar spent on ads in the presidential race from Sept. 1 to 20 were spent in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin— with Pennsylvania alone drawing 1 of every 4 dollars spent,” reported Ben Kamisar. “Add Georgia, and it’s more than 60% of the total… Harris’ campaign is running an equal mix of positive and negative ads on broadcast TV, according to the tracking firm AdImpact, while former President Donald Trump’s campaign is running almost exclusively negative and contrast ads— a demonstration of how focused voters and both campaigns are on defining Harris as she runs against a three-time candidate who has inspired entrenched views among American voters. ‘It’s simple: Everyone has made up their mind about Donald Trump. Trump’s numbers are the stickiest things in politics; they don’t move,’ said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and presidential campaign veteran. ‘What’s moveable is Harris— we’ve seen a lot of movement in her numbers since she entered the race,’ Conant continued, noting the dramatic increase in Harris’ favorability numbers since she took over as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate. ‘And there are a lot of voters who haven’t made up their minds about her because she’s new to the campaign, so there’s an ability to introduce new information. That’s why you’re seeing Trump pounding negative information about Harris and Harris feeling the need to give positive information to push back.’”
But who are they trying to reach? The campaigns want to keep up the enthusiasm of their own partisans so that they go out and vote. And they also have to deal with undecideds— those who haven’t decided between the two candidates and those who haven’t decided whether or not to vote at all. Ron Brownstein took a look at who these undecideds are. “When most people think about a voter still trying to make up their mind,” he wrote, ‘they probably imagine a person who is highly likely to vote but uncertain whether to support Harris, Trump, or a third-party candidate. Both political parties, however, are more focused on a different— and much larger— group of undecideds: potential voters who are highly likely to support Harris or Trump, but unsure if they will vote at all. Campaigns typically describe the first group of reliable but conflicted voters as persuadable; they frequently describe the second group as irregular voters. Persuadable voters get the most attention from the media, but campaigns recognize that irregular voters can loom much larger in the outcome— especially in presidential elections when more of them ultimately participate. ‘There are a gajillion more of those [irregular] people than the Harris/Trump “I don’t know; I’m still thinking about it” kind of voter, Anat Shenker-Osorio, a communications consultant for Democrats and progressive groups, told me. ‘There are more humans who are non-habitual voters than there are voters who swing back and forth. That’s just math.’”
Polls show that about a sixth of voters say they are either undecided or not firmly in one camp or the other, but the polls are wrong and the number of actual undecided voters— in these polarized political times— is much smaller. Brownstein concludes that in the battleground states where all the ads are concentrated, between 4 and 7% of the voters are actually undecided (persuadable). “Persuadable voters wavering between the two candidates,” he wrote, “split mostly into two camps. The largest group may be the traditionally Republican-leaning voters (including many who identify as independents) uneasy about Trump. These voters are the remnants of the suburban, largely college-educated constituency that favored Nikki Haley during the GOP primaries. Based on the focus groups she has conducted with a wide array of voters, [Sarah] Longwell said that the persuadable voters ‘who are left are [mostly] two-time Trump voters who don’t want to vote for him again but are really struggling to get to [Harris].’ After listening carefully to their answers and watching their body language, she told me that she expects most of these voters to support Harris eventually, because they are now so resistant to Trump. But she also believed that some of them are ‘leave-it-blank types’ and won’t vote for either candidate.”
“The other big group of potentially persuadable voters,” he wrote, “are younger and minority voters who dislike Trump but are disappointed by their economic experience under Biden— and are uncertain whether Harris offers a sufficient change in approach. In the recent Pew survey, Hispanics who currently support Trump were much more likely than white voters to indicate that they might change their mind; for Harris-leaners, both Hispanic and Black voters were more likely to say they might reconsider. For both candidates, more younger than older voters indicated that they might switch. In the end, however, neither party expects too many of the voters who are telling pollsters today that they might switch to the other candidate to actually do so. The bigger prize for the two campaigns is the irregular voters who are, as Longwell put it, deciding ‘whether they are going to get off the couch’ to vote at all.”
How many of these irregular voters are available for the campaign to pursue? Even in the 2020 election, which produced the highest turnout rate since 1900, about one-third of eligible voters didn’t vote. That’s about 80 million people. About two-fifths of both eligible people of color and white people without a college degree didn’t vote last time; neither did nearly half of young people.
Those patterns frame the 2024 mobilization challenge for each party. Catalist, a Democratic voter-targeting firm, shared with me data rarely disclosed in public, based on its modeling, that attempt to quantify the number of infrequent voters in each of the swing states who lean strongly toward Harris or Trump. That research shows, first, that across the battleground states white people without a college degree routinely account for 70 percent or more of the Trump-leaning nonvoters; and, second, that people of color make up a big majority of Harris’s potential targets across the Sun Belt battlegrounds, as well as in Michigan. In the three big Rust Belt battleground— Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin— working-class white women without a college degree, Catalist’s projections show, also make up a significant share of the voters who lean Democratic but don’t vote regularly.
The infrequent voters on both parties’ target list have some common characteristics, other strategists say. “Part of what you are seeing in this electorate is: a) a lot of anger; but b) discouragement,” Page Gardner, a Democratic expert on voter turnout, told me. “People are discouraged about their lives and feel … I’m trying really hard and I’m not getting anywhere.” Against that backdrop, she said, the challenge for Democrats is “giving them some sort of agency to feel like My vote matters, because a lot of people feel that no one is paying attention to them.”
As a lead organizer for the Sunrise Movement, a liberal group focused on mobilizing young people to support action on climate change, Paul Campion knows the challenge of engaging irregular voters for Harris. Sunrise is trying to reach young voters of color in battleground states through a combination of phone-banking, door-knocking, and text-messaging.
Like other campaigners seeking to organize young and non-white voters, Campion told me that “the biggest issue is not people choosing between Trump and Harris, but choosing between not voting… or voting for Harris-Walz.” Campion sees a fundamental conflict between Harris’s attempts to reassure centrist swing voters, by emphasizing moderate positions on energy from fossil fuels and on the war in Gaza, and her need to activate more progressive young voters uncertain whether to vote at all. “Young people want to hear Harris articulate over and over again more forcefully how she will fight for them and listen to their demands,” Campion told me.
Imagine if the Democratic Party decided to run candidates who stood for Democratic Party ideals and values instead of running corporate mush candidates like Kamala, Biden, Hillary, Obama, Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Dukakis… When the Democrats ran FDR he won an unprecedented 4 elections, with 57.4% in 1932, 60.8% in 1936, 54.7% in 1940 and 53.4% in 1944.. Roosevelt’s worst electoral college showing was in 1944 when he beat Dewey 432 to 99 (36 states to 12). People knew what he stood for. People think they know what Trump stands for too— although most still don’t like it.
On Thursday, Dan Pfeiffer asserted that “This election will be won or lost with persuasion. In the media, the commonly understood image of a prototypical undecided voter is a fickle white person who is economically liberal but socially conservative and just can’t decide which of their political itches to scratch. Those people exist, but the largest swath of the undecided universe is not deciding between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. They are deciding between one candidate and the couch. We all know those people. They are in our lives; and their numbers are in our phones. Maybe they voted for Biden in 2020 but tuned out politics over the last four years. Maybe they have always hated politics. Maybe the whole thing seems overwhelming, and information is unreliable. If we can convince them to get off the couch and into the voting booth, Kamala Harris will be the next President of the United States... The primary Democratic strategy of the last nine years has been to convince undecided voters of the danger of a Trump presidency. This was Hillary Clinton’s strategy in 2016 and Joe Biden’s strategy in 2020 and 2024. The polling clearly shows persuadable voters are looking for something else this time… [P]eople are sick of talking, hearing, and thinking about [Trump]. There is nothing else to learn. Trump is oversaturated. While Kamala Harris has high name identification, she arrived in this campaign a largely unknown figure. The campaign has been a race to define Kamala Harris. Thus far, her campaign is winning. Voters like her— her favorability rating is up 16 points since becoming the nominee, but there is more work to do.”
Pfieffer doesn’t see it this way at all but— and I really hate being a buzz-kill— personally, I think it’s too bad her economic message seems unconvincing and, well... full of shit. I wanted so badly to believe… and then I saw fold after fold after fold as the Wall Street and Silicon Valley money started rolling in. 6 words sum this election up for me now: “She’s not as bad as Trump.” I mean, she’s like a C or, I pray, a B- and he’s an F... unless there’s something less than F. So, go ahead and get off the couch, especially if you live in Michigan or Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada or Arizona. Also if you live in Omaha, Lewiston, Auburn, Bangor, Orono, Augusta or Waterville. Your country needs you.
From Umair Haque:
To this day, Democrats won’t dare mention this damning statistic, that median incomes are where they were, or lower, than half a century ago.
Those really are Roman sorts of social indicators, no exaggeration necessary. A half decade of stagnation is OK, maybe. But a half century?
But the Democrats never, ever even look in this direction. They look away awkwardly.
Their silence is deafening.
Why is Trump still so widely supported?
Because more people trust him on the economy. (And on immigration, which is the same thing, because here there’s a naive theory of economics, that immigrants take our jobs and so forth, which can be true, but in America, has more to do with the…