Race is on to reach the rapidly shrinking pool of undecided voters
Trump and Harris have both energised their parties. Now comes the hard part — persuading the holdouts.
After months of apathy, voters are coming off the sidelines in significant numbers and committing to one party or the other, leaving former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris to compete for a shrinking pool of undecided Americans — in many cases, the hardest voters to reach.
Most voters tend to “come home” to the party they usually favour by the end of a campaign. But the turbulent events of the past month have sped up the process. The attempt on Trump’s life, President Biden’s withdrawal from the race and the selection of running mates have energised the core voters within each party and helped Harris erase Trump’s previous lead.
Now the two campaigns face a different challenge. The election will be decided by a small set of voters who will be tougher to persuade, as they haven’t yet tuned into the campaign or still don’t like what they have seen from either candidate.
Six weeks ago, Wall Street Journal polling found that 28% of voters were “up for grabs” and not fully committed to any candidate. By late last month, only 15% were up for grabs, a sign that many voters had settled on their choices.
In another measure that partisans have committed to the nominees, both Trump and Harris now have the support of about 93% of members of their own parties, a particular improvement for Democrats. And both Trump and Harris are viewed more favourably than at any point in almost two years, the most recent Journal survey found. Positive views of Harris among voters overall rose markedly in late July from early in the month, up 11 points, to 46%. Positive views of Trump increased 4 points, to 47%.
This leaves the parties with the task of persuading voters such as Todd Ellingson, a self-described Reagan Republican in the battleground state of Georgia, who feels that both candidates are unacceptable.
“Neither one of them has done anything to reassure people who weren’t 100% in their camp, anyway,” said Ellingson, 61, a computer programmer in Woodstock, Ga., who backed Trump in 2020. What Ellingson has seen lately, including the selection of running mates, has only fortified his decision to leave the presidential line on his ballot blank.
Share of voters considered ‘persuadable’ or ‘up for grabs’
Ellingson said he thinks Trump’s ticket mate, Sen. JD Vance (R., Ohio), has been open to raising taxes, which he finds to be disqualifying, and that Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Harris’s running mate, “is way too liberal” for him. Ellingson sees both choices as efforts to mobilise the parties’ core voters rather than to reach those in the political centre, leaving him frustrated and puzzled.
“Really, does nobody want to win this election?” Ellingson asked. “It’s like neither one of them wants to win.”
Of the 15% of voters whom the Journal polls designate as up for grabs, only a minority live in one of the six or so battleground states that will determine the Electoral College outcome. These voters are either undecided on a candidate, say they are likely but not definitely backing Trump or Harris, or say, at least for now, that they will back an independent or third-party candidate.
Journal polling suggests that Trump has advantages among them.
More than half of these voters approve of the job that Trump did as president, compared with 20% who give Harris a positive job rating as vice president. Only 12% say Harris is better able to handle the economy than Trump, while 61% say Trump is the better economic steward. Similarly, these voters rate Trump as more adept at handling immigration, crime and foreign affairs. They also say the phrases “cares about you” and “shares my values” apply more to Trump than to Harris, though by narrower margins.
The Trump campaign’s assessment is that persuadable voters are overwhelmingly men, particularly young men, said senior campaign advisers this past week. That is one reason Trump appeared recently on an array of social-media platforms that appeal to young men. He recently joined a livestream with the internet personality Adin Ross. Before that, Trump appeared in a video with the golfer Bryson DeChambeau, which racked up more than 10 million views and for a time was the top-trending video on YouTube.
Trump’s allies are also teaming up with the pranksters and podcasters known as the Nelk Boys on a voter registration and turnout drive aimed at young men.
“It’s a very narrow band of people we are trying to move,” a senior campaign official said.
Polling suggests that Harris, who formally became the Democratic nominee only this past week, has work to do in introducing herself to the public and fleshing out a governing agenda. In a recent CNBC poll, some 78% of voters said they knew “a lot” or “some” about how Trump would handle the economy. Only 58% said so of Harris.
“That’s a vacuum in voter knowledge that is ripe for definition,” said Micah Roberts, a Republican pollster who worked on the survey. “And both campaigns have an opportunity to define what a Harris economy looks like.”
A particular challenge for Harris, Roberts said, is to determine how to lay out a policy course without inheriting the low marks voters give Biden on his handling of the economy.
“Task No. 1 for the campaign is to define Kamala Harris’s economic views in the eyes of the electorate,” said Evan Roth Smith, lead pollster at the Democratic-aligned firm Blueprint.
His group’s polling finds that Harris’s best course is to focus on her time as California’s lawyer general — before she was part of the Biden administration — and argue that she took on corporate interests to benefit consumers. That, in fact, has been one of the early steps Harris’s allies are taking.
A pro-Harris super political-action committee is running an ad that focuses on her time as a prosecutor. It says that she had “taken on big banks to pay back people they ripped off” and that as president she would similarly go after corporate price gouging. The Harris campaign thinks presenting her biography to voters will build the credibility she needs to convince them she can accomplish the policy goals she will lay out during the campaign.
Some voters who had been undecided on their choice of candidate just a few weeks ago, or who were thinking about sitting out the election, said in interviews this past week that recent events — particularly the choice of Walz — had prompted them to choose a side.
John Gray, a sales representative in the battleground state of Nevada, had said he couldn’t vote this year for Biden, as he had in 2020, because of the president’s pro-Israel stance and his unwillingness to fight for some of Gray’s favoured liberal policies. When Biden withdrew, Gray became newly open to backing the Democratic ticket.
But he committed to Harris only this past week, when she picked Walz as her partner on the ticket rather than Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, whom Gray saw as the more centrist, establishment option.
Gray doesn’t expect Harris to chart a policy course much different from Biden’s. “But we’re enthused about Walz and the fact that she bucked the establishment and went with a more progressive person,” said Gray, 29, who lives in North Las Vegas.
For Connie Krause, 57, who works in pharmaceutical sales in the competitive state of Wisconsin, the selection of Walz confirmed her recent decision to back Trump, as she had in 2020. “He is way too liberal,” she said, citing Walz’s support for requiring schools to provide access to menstrual products for transgender students, among other positions. “He is not in touch with parents by putting tampons in boys’ bathrooms,” she said.
The assassination attempt on Trump also prompted Krause to set aside her initial hesitancy to vote for him again. She liked how he stood up and pumped his fist in the air after he was grazed by a bullet. “That was an embodiment of America as a whole: We stand up to adversity,” Krause said.
The Wall Street Journal
