Could the ‘shy Kamala voters’ flip the 2024 presidential race?

In the lead-up to the US election, we are sending additional Harris v Trump editions of our What in the World newsletter. Below is an excerpt. Sign up to get the whole newsletter delivered to your inbox.

Greetings from Washington as we hit the final week of the 2024 presidential race.

For the past month, as I’ve been travelling around the battleground states covering this historic campaign, I’ve started wondering: Could there be a group of “shy Kamala voters” that determines who wins the White House?

Just as polling in 2016 missed a “hidden” Trump vote from people who had been uncomfortable publicly supporting the brash candidate – similar to the United Kingdom’s “shy Tories” – there’s always the chance that pollsters are not picking up a cohort of Republican-leaning folk who are fed up with Donald Trump but are simply keeping this to themselves.

In Michigan, I spoke to lifelong Republican Sarah Longwell, a political strategist and publisher of the conservative news and opinion website, The Bulwark.

Longwell has spent years conducting focus groups with centre-right voters and so-called “flippers”: people who supported Trump in 2016 then flipped to Joe Biden in 2020.

She argues that since the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, there has been an “air of menace” hanging over Trump and his supporters. Put simply, some people – including members of Congress – don’t just disagree with the MAGA movement, they’re scared of it.

Political strategist and publisher Sarah Longwell believes many lifelong Republicans like herself are quietly disengaging from the party and may “flip” their vote to Kamala Harris.Credit: Farrah Tomazin

“I think there are a lot of quiet, centre-right voters out there,” Longwell told me during a pit stop at a microbrewery in Detroit.

“I have watched the shift among those voters cycle after cycle, and every cycle there’s a new group that looks up and says: ‘This is not the Republican Party I joined.’

“That could affect polling because the way that the weighting is done based on past voting patterns or whatever could all be off if you’ve got a lot of Republicans who are quietly disengaging from the Republican Party.”

I heard a similar story in Wisconsin last week from military veteran Tiffany Koehler, a Republican who ran for the state assembly in 2018.

She says some of her neighbours – including elected local officials – do not support Trump’s antics but still have lawn signs endorsing him.

“Knowing who they are, and their character, I think they’re afraid to say they’re not going to vote for Donald Trump because they know the repercussions politically and professionally,” Koehler says.

And in Arizona, I spoke to Kevin Wenker, a former pastor who voted for Trump in 2016 and was bullied out of his congregation for turning against the former president. He now appears on billboards proclaiming his regret to the world.

Wenker cited first-hand knowledge of people who aren’t planning to support Trump at the ballot box, but simply don’t want to suffer the same fate he did by openly admitting it.

“They’re being quiet about it because there is a very strong minority, and a very strong MAGA group here in Arizona, which can make it difficult for you if they know that you are actively opposed to Trump,” he told me.

Kevin Wenker, a former pastor who voted for Trump in 2016, believed the businessman-turned-politician would grow into the role of commander-in-chief. He now proclaims his regret to the world.

To what extent there is indeed “a quiet Kamala” voting bloc out there is unlikely to be known until after the November 5 election.

For now, however, the polls show the race remains extremely close, just as it has been for months.

The latest FiveThirtyEight poll of averages shows Kamala Harris 1.4 percentage points ahead of Trump at the national level, but the pair are statistically tied in four of the seven battleground states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada. Trump is ahead in the remaining three swing states: Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona – but only by one to two points.

However, history shows the polls can be notoriously wrong: as recently as the 2022 US midterm elections, polls suggested there would be a “red wave” that would give the Republicans control of both the House and the Senate. In the end, it was more of a trickle.

It’s also worth noting the support that former US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley received against Trump when she sought the Republican presidential nomination earlier this year.

In the critical battleground of Michigan, for example, Trump resoundingly defeated Haley, but she still received 26 per cent of the vote (or 297,124 votes). And even after she dropped out of the race, she won 16.5 per cent of the vote in Pennsylvania (157,581) and almost 13 per cent in Wisconsin (76,841). In a tight election, those numbers could make a difference.

It’s no coincidence the Harris campaign has spent the past few weeks aggressively targeting these kinds of swing voters in the hope they will shift allegiance.

The vice president has joined forces with other Republicans, including former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, to make her case. Both have endorsed her.

She has also given speeches that are remarkably similar to those Haley gave during her presidential primary battle with Trump, particularly when it comes to foreign policy.

“If Donald Trump were president, Vladimir Putin will be sitting in [the Ukraine capital] Kyiv — and understand what that would mean for America and our standing around the world,” Harris said last week.

And in Michigan on Saturday, former first lady Michelle Obama made her first appearance on the campaign trail, where she appealed directly to conservative women by telling them: “If you are a woman who lives in a household of men that don’t listen to you or value your opinion, just remember that your vote is a private matter. Regardless of the political views of your partner, you get to choose.”

The Harris campaign’s aim is to embolden “shy Kamala” voters to support her. In a week, we’ll find out if it has worked.

Until next time.

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