While Democrats spent days spreading videos and memes of Kamala Harris mocking and infuriating Donald Trump during Tuesday’s presidential debate, the candidates returned to the tough task of winning the support of the tiny minority of voters in battleground states that will determine the outcome of November’s election.
Harris is on a “New Progress” tour of key areas this weekend as she seeks to build on the momentum she gained from humiliating Trump. On Friday, she visited arguably the most crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania, where she pushed the themes she hammered home in the debate – portraying the former president as a threat to democracy, women’s rights and America’s global standing.
Trump will visit Arizona on Saturday before heading to Michigan, both states he narrowly won in 2016 and lost four years later, where he is trying to bounce back from widely perceived damaging performances.
The race for the White House remains tense.
Before the debate, Harris’s small lead in the polls was being chipped away by the Trump campaign as it tried to recover from the shock of Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race. After Trump’s poor performance in the debate, Harris appears to be narrowing her lead again. But neither side is taking anything for granted and is back to fighting day to day.
A CNN poll found that 63% of viewers of the debate, in which Trump made outlandish claims that immigrants eat pets and Democrats want to kill newborns, said Harris had won. A Washington Post focus group of undecided voters in battleground states overwhelmingly said Harris had won.
Even Fox News conceded defeat, with political analyst Brit Hume saying Trump was spending too much time airing old grievances that were doing absolutely no good to get votes.
“To be clear, Trump had a terrible night,” he said.
Still, more cautious Democrats acknowledge that an overnight slump for the former president was far from a decisive blow and that their candidate remains especially vulnerable on the economy, a top concern for many voters battered by soaring inflation.
According to a CNN poll, Harris’ failure to address the issue of inflation or even acknowledge the hardship it has caused led to confidence in her handling of the economy falling two points to 35% during the debate, while confidence in Trump on the issue rose two points to 55%.
While the latest YouGov poll gives Harris a nine-point lead over Trump in favorability ratings, the presidential race remains close, with both candidates claiming the support of 45% of voters.
Charles Franklin, who led a prestigious Marquette Law School poll of Wisconsin voters, a battleground state where Trump and his opponents have been separated by just 20,000 votes in the past two presidential elections, said while Harris clearly won the debate, he doubted the result would be a game-changer in a state that could decide the election.
“The question is how much will it sway the Wisconsin electorate? Our electorate is pretty polarized even by national standards, so swaying it significantly seems a bit of a stretch,” he said.
“The problem is that voters always come to the debates with a partisan perspective. If a candidate clearly performs poorly, they’ll make up excuses for why, but they still won’t reconsider their support for that candidate.”
Many of Trump’s supporters lamented his performance, but then shifted the blame as the debate moderators attacked the former president and accused him of going easy on Harris.
Polls suggest that about 1 in 20 voters in battleground states are still undecided about who they will vote for, but political analysts question whether so many are really undecided, given that Trump is such a high-profile and divisive candidate.
Nicholas Valentino, a political science professor at the University of Michigan, said while Harris’ positions are not particularly well-known, few would doubt the differences between the candidates on key issues from abortion to immigration to health care.
Undecided voters are ambivalent when they say they need more content, and it’s not because they’re ignorant about the candidates.
Nicholas Valentino, University of Michigan
“At this point in the race, there are very few undecided voters, and when those undecided voters say they want more substantial information from either candidate, it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t know the difference or that they’re waiting for critical information that will really make the difference. It’s an ambivalence. It’s not about not knowing where the candidates stand,” he said.
When asked why Wisconsin independent voters are undecided, Franklin said polling shows the reason has more to do with their feelings about politics in general than with policies or individual candidates.
“But the fact that they are negative about politics seems to be true for many of Trump’s supporters as well, and that’s one argument to think that Trump might have an advantage in winning over people who are undecided but very negative about politics,” he said.
Still, Harris could win over voters who say they support their candidate but are willing to change their mind, according to the YouGov poll: 4% of Trump supporters would consider voting for Harris, compared with just 1% of Democrats who said they would consider switching. But many Trump supporters see the economy as a top issue; a majority of voters continue to view the former president’s time in the White House as a time of prosperity, and they have much more faith in Harris to improve finances.
Still, Ms Harris took a combative approach in the debate because both sides knew the key to victory was voter turnout and generating enthusiasm among undecided supporters.
In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania by fewer than 45,000 votes out of nearly 6 million cast. Four years later, Trump increased his popular vote in the state by more than 400,000, but he lost the state again in 2020 after Biden boosted Democratic turnout by 530,000 votes.
It’s a pattern that has been repeated in battleground states that have delivered Biden victories and that Harris is all but certain to win — perhaps no state more crucial than Pennsylvania.
“It’s primarily a question of voter turnout right now,” Valentino says. “It’s very likely that this election in Pennsylvania, like the last two elections, will be decided by less than 100,000 votes. Pennsylvania has a large pool of voters that each side is trying to boost: whites, non-college educated men, women who live near large cities.”
Polls have shown that enthusiasm for the election soared among Democrats after Biden dropped out of the race in July, and Franklin witnessed that in Wisconsin.
“Democrats currently have about a nine-point lead over Republicans in enthusiasm, which certainly seems to suggest that turnout will be very high this time around,” he said.
Nationally, 72% of Harris supporters say they are very or extremely enthusiastic about voting, according to a YouGov poll. Just 67% of Trump supporters said the same. But enthusiasm is significantly lower among the young people Democrats need: Just 78% of those under 30 say they are likely to vote, compared with 95% of those over 45, who tend to lean toward Trump.
Harris continues to alienate Democrats who steadfastly refused to vote for Biden, calling him “Genocide Joe” over U.S. support for Israel’s Gaza war that has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians. Harris tried to defuse the issue during the debate by saying “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed,” but critics questioned “how many innocent dead is too many?”
Democrats were particularly concerned about the impact of Gaza policies on Arab American votes in the battleground state of Michigan, but Valentino believes that impact has faded somewhat among younger voters who are now focused on fears of a return to the Trump administration.
Harris faced criticism after the debate for spending her time bashing Trump instead of detailing her economic policy and political vision, but Democratic strategists are well aware that the surge in voter turnout for Biden in 2020 was more about ousting Trump from the White House than it was about their candidate.
Valentino said Harris’ approach may have been beneficial to her in that respect.
“Her campaign strategy in this debate was clearly to provoke Trump into making these extremely angry, extremely questionable arguments, so that moderates, and perhaps some moderate Republicans, would become disillusioned with Trump and stop voting for him,” he said.
“The other reason she’s doing this is to mobilize her base. Young people are concerned about the future of our democracy. There’s data that shows that the issue of our voting system and protecting our elections is a very mobilizing issue for Democrats, particularly young Democrats. They’ve lived in this country a lot longer than older people, they know they have to vote, and they’re really concerned about our democratic system. This is a very important issue for the Democratic Party and for Harris, and she’s trying to take full advantage of it.”
