Eugene Robinson is a regular columnist for The Washington Post. He is baffled that the election is so close. He finds one demographic where Trump holds a decisive lead. This group is loyal to Trump. They think he cares about them and empathizes with them. He does care about separating them from their hard-earned cash. He does care about getting their votes. He does care about exploiting their grievances, their resentment about being left behind. It’s hard to remember what precisely he did for them during his four year term in office.
Robinson writes:
It is absolutely, completely, totally ridiculous that this election is even close. But here we are.
The choice between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump should not be a tough call. Harris is a former prosecutor; Trump, a felon. Harris gives campaign speeches about her civic values; Trump rants endlessly about his personal grievances, interrupting himself with asides about sharks and Hannibal Lecter. Harris has outlined a detailed set of policy proposals for the economy; Trump nonsensically offers tariffs as a panacea, describing this fantasy in terms that make it clear he doesn’t understand how tariffs work.
Also, Harris never whipped thousands of supporters into a frenzy and sent them off to the Capitol, where they smashed their way into the citadel of our democracy, injuring scores of police officers and threatening to hang the vice president, in an attempt to overturn the result of a free and fair election. Trump did.
Yet polls tell us that either candidate could win. The Post’s polling average has Harris ahead by 2 percentage points nationally. The Post also finds that Harris holds leads in four of the seven crucial swing states — 3 percentage points in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, 2 points in Michigan, less than a point in Nevada — but adds a note of caution: “Every state is within a normal-sized polling error of 3.5 points and could go either way.”
So how is it possible that this is not a done deal? I’m not sure there’s a definitive answer, but I can throw out a few theories.
One obvious potential factor is that Harris would be the first woman to serve as president and commander in chief. It amazes me that the preceding sentence can be written in 2024 — decades after the careers of Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir and so many other women who have led their nations in peace and war. But, again, here we are.
Harris and her advisers have made the decision not to lean into the history-making aspects of her candidacy, which I think is wise — if only because Trump so desperately wants to have a fight over gender and race. Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), are trying hard to win the votes of men who equate manhood with cartoonish machismo — men who somehow feel that their status and prospects are threatened because they are men.
An Associated Press poll released on Thursday found that about 4 in 10 Americans believe Harris’s gender “will hurt her chances of getting elected this fall,” which suggests the manly-men act by Trump and Vance might be having some impact. Then again, the issue of reproductive rights, along with gratuitous insults such as Vance’s “childless cat ladies” slur, might be driving enough women into Harris’s corner to offset Trump’s harvest of dudes. I find it hard to conclude that gender alone answers the question of why Harris doesn’t have a bigger lead.
Deep in the numbers, you can find other hypotheses. Trump got 74 million votes in the 2020 election. Joe Biden got 81 million — thankfully — and won the electoral vote 306-232. But Trump’s showing means he started his 2024 campaign with a big base of support, and it has remained loyal.
White voters without a college degree are a key component of Trump’s base, and two recent polls — one by the New York Timesand one by CNN — showed Harris with a huge deficit of roughly 35 points to Trump among this segment. That is worse than Biden did against Trump in 2020, when he lost this big demographic by 32 points, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Whites without a college degree make up 42 percent of the electorate — meaning that if Harris were matching Biden’s performance with this group, she would add a full point to her overall national lead.
This might suggest that Trump’s red-meat-to-the-base campaign strategy is not as crazy as it looks. His vicious demagoguery on immigration — the lies he keeps telling about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, for example — invites working-class Whites to see their jobs and communities as under threat. That kind of tribal appeal likely does not win Trump many new voters, but it might keep some of the old ones on his side.
Still, though, how does any of this overcome Trump’s manifest unfitness? How does any of it erase his pathetic performance in the debate? How does it nullify the fact that he awaits sentencing by a New York judge after 34 guilty verdicts in a criminal trial? If the answer is buried somewhere in some poll, I can’t find it.
The truth about the election might be simple: It is what it is. Look at the trend lines in the polling averages. Trump had a narrow but consistent lead over Biden. Soon after Harris became the candidate, the lines crossed, and she took a lead over Trump. Since taking that lead, she has not surrendered it. In fact, she has slowly expanded it.
It is possible that Harris could pull ahead decisively. But it is also quite possible that this race will still be too close to call on Election Day. And at that point, the question we face will not be theoretical, but urgently practical: With Democrats’ huge advantage in money and volunteers, will they be able to turn out their supporters in numbers big enough to overwhelm any hidden population of Republican voters that the pollsters might be missing?
The people, not the pollsters, will give that answer.
