Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
Members of the crowd cheer during a rally for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, September 29, 2024, in Las Vegas.
We are five weeks away from Election Day in the 2024 presidential election, and the right-wing populist party led by Donald Trump is competitive.
Nonetheless, the Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris will likely win. She has a 3-point lead in national polls. And according to my new poll for Democracy Corps, as well as most surveys in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, she has momentum in the Rust Belt. She is winning by about 2 points in each state, putting her ahead of Joe Biden’s razor-thin margins four years ago. Our poll shows increased support for Democrats in the House and Senate battlegrounds as well.
Part of the explanation for Democrats’ strength in the Rust Belt and other battlegrounds is that Harris is running far better than Biden with white college-educated voters, particularly women. Trump’s ugly current campaign may be backfiring there.
More from Stanley B. Greenberg
But our battleground poll and most statewide polls have Harris losing momentum in the Southeastern and Mountain states. The race is tied in North Carolina, Georgia, and Nevada, and Trump may have pulled ahead in Arizona. That could mean Harris winning the Electoral College by just one vote, with a 50-50 chance of adding North Carolina, Georgia, or Nevada.
If that holds, America will be left with two partisan blocs of nearly equal size and an even more polarized nation. But Harris has many hands to play to shape the final outcome.
Donald Trump in his gut knows that just over a quarter of battleground voters think the country is headed in the right direction. The main reason is a huge jump in voters worried about inflation and the cost of living, and immigration and the border.
Stop thinking that Trump is only hurting himself by continuing to assert that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, “are eating the pets of people who live there.” While this poll was in the field, Trump focused almost exclusively on high prices, Joe Biden, the open border, and immigrants doing unspeakable things. That has shifted white working-class women back to Trump. But most important, this has pushed his base of Trump loyalists to be even more determined to vote. Republicans are now more likely to vote than Democrats.
In short, by focusing on his best issues, Trump changed the likely electorate. Trump’s strategy has darkened its mood and moved the races to being tied in the Southern and Western battleground states.
He understands that a plurality of Black voters, 60 percent of Hispanics, white unmarried women and white millennials, and two-thirds of white working-class women and white union households believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. They are looking for change.
And what do they think is the most pressing issue for the United States? Concern with “inflation and the cost of living” dominates everything. Respondents in my surveys can choose three problems from a list of 12. Consider what it means when 63 percent choose inflation and cost of living, including 69 percent of white millennials and 67 percent of white working-class women. It is over 20 points above the next problem for Blacks, Hispanics, and white unmarried women, as well as in the Rust Belt and Southeast. So why would you be speaking about almost any other subject?
Another concern is that key parts of the Democratic base coalition—white Gen Z, millennials, and unmarried women—have become less engaged in the last month. We measure highest interest as those choosing 10 on a 1-to-10 ladder. Each group dropped 6 to 9 points since the Democratic convention.
This is not an easy time for incumbent leaders. No incumbent throughout the world has come out of these last few years untarnished. Each led their countries through the price hikes from supply chain disruptions, the start of the Ukraine war, the cutoff of Russian energy, and the spike in household food prices. And almost none managed to control the flood of refugees.
Look at the election in Austria this past weekend, where the neo-Nazi Freedom Party ran on refugees and cost of living and finished first.
The vast working-class majority here has faced tough times, and it’s angry with both political and business leaders. Inflation had dropped to 1 percent at the end of Trump’s term, but global events pushed it up to 8 percent in 2022. It now sits at a target the Federal Reserve likes, but that is historically high. Right now, inflation is near 5 percent for shelter and food. The household grocery bill is 20 percent higher than in 2020.
Wage growth exceeded inflation for all of Trump’s time in office but fell dramatically behind for more than two years under President Biden. Extraordinarily, Biden got wages well above inflation this year, but when you lose ground for 30 months, you don’t make up those lost dollars for years. The hardworking middle class is not thanking any political leaders. They want help. They want change.
Increasingly, people blame Big Oil, big monopolies, and big business for the high inflation. The percent that have no or very little confidence in “big business” grew to the highest level since the financial crisis in 2008. Joe Stiglitz was right. The hardworking middle class thinks those big businesses and billionaires have used their money to rig the game at their expense.
These voters at the heart of the Democratic base want to be heard. And this poll shows what they want most of all are middle-class tax cuts, help for their families, actions to lower prices and raise wages, checks on corporate excess, and big tax increases on big business and billionaires. They want a shift in power from big business to working people.
They also want Harris to address the border and immigration issue, which she did effectively in Arizona last week.
They want the kind of changes she is proposing that one would get in a progressive era of reform. And that is in fact what Harris has been proposing in her released economic plans before and after the Democratic convention.
We presented Harris’s plans and asked which were most important. They embraced a middle-class tax cut for more than 100 million Americans, through expansions in the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, paid for by raising taxes on billionaires. They also supported capping out-of-pocket drug costs, reduced insulin prices, and Medicare negotiating lower prescription drug prices.
They reacted very positively to making the monthly Child Tax Credit permanent, and increasing the benefit to $6,000 for families with newborns. Almost half of all voters and two-thirds of Blacks chose the expanded Child Tax Credit as their most important issue.
We tested Harris ads and speech texts, and the strongest one presented the choice between the candidates on economic plans, focused on the cost of living.
Progressives and Democrats have happily described Biden’s major legislation as transformative, even as we should recognize the multiple crises that left people on the edge.
Harris started her speech to the Pittsburgh Economic Club with an upbeat account of how the administration handled the “inherited public health and economic crisis.” She reports America had the “fastest drop in inflation in the developed world” and “unemployment near record low levels.” We created 740,000 manufacturing jobs.
The average voters were surely not watching the speech, but I suspect they would turn it off when hearing the “fastest drop.” In any case, they don’t hear that she will bring change.
Most of the speech talked about how America can build on the success of previous years, by being a beacon of innovation and leading in creating the world’s future industries and economic growth.
In that discussion, she commits to “practical solutions to problems” and “taking good ideas from wherever they come.” She said, “I believe most companies are working hard to do right by their customers and the employees who depend on them,” while adding that “we will take on bad actors.”
The cost-of-living section of the speech is fairly short, but it packs a punch. “But let’s be clear. For all these positive steps, the cost of living in America is still just too high.” She talks with feeling about what’s happening with the cost of homes, cost of prescription drugs, and spells out the plans that were tested in this survey. She asserts, “You see, for Donald Trump, our economy works best if it works for those who own the big skyscrapers, not those who actually build them, not those who wire them, not those who mop the floors.”
And she points out in the business discussion, “Look at my record in California, taking on the big banks for predatory lending, health care companies for conspiring to jack up prices, and big for-profit colleges for scamming veterans and students.”
It sure sounds like she is very clear-eyed about what has happened in this period.
The actual policies for helping families with the cost of living and helping America lead on innovation would be transformative. Harris is proposing reforms that will change America to have “shared economic growth for the American people.”
Trump becomes the leader to bring change by attacking migrants, shouting that the police should be allowed “an hour of rage,” and calling out Biden’s cost of living.
Harris is not just using rhetoric. These reforms would bring the kinds of change so many in the Democratic base and country are looking for. The campaign needs to focus on these changes with the same intensity as Trump’s.
Kamala Harris running as the Democratic reformer could further shape the election outcome.
