Photograph Source: Nathaniel St. Clair
Is Kamala Harris in danger of losing the women’s vote? It sounds like an absurd proposition, but the latest New York Times/Siena College polls among voters in Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina reveal a dangerous hemorrhaging of support among female voters. She’s not losing women outright but her lead over Donald Trump has shrunk to single digits – just 6 points – while Trump has opened up a 16-point lead among men. Add the two together and it amounts to a gender gap of 10 points – and it strongly favors Trump.
That’s one reason the latest polling in the Sunbelt over all now favors the former president. His lead is 5 points in Georgia, 4 points in Arizona and 2 points in North Carolina. That’s an astounding turnaround from just a month ago, when the same polls had Harris leading in all three states – by comparable margins. Harris is coming off a widely praised debate performance with Trump and should be surging right? In fact, she’s gotten a slight bump in some of the national polls, a positive breakthrough, to be sure.
But winning the national popular vote, even by a sizable margin, won’t decide the race. (Just ask Hillary). Harris needs to win majorities in the key swing states; instead, in the Sunbelt, she’s clearly losing ground.
Those are just the latest polls from the New York Times/Siena College released on Monday. Subsequent polls released on Wednesday confirm the trend. The latest CBS Georgia poll has Trump up by a smaller margin, 51-49, But he’s leading Harris by 13 points among men, while she’s leading among women by just 7 – a gender gap of 6 in Trump’s favor. In North Carolina, the latest AARP poll has Trump up by 3, 50-47. That’s a pronounced gain for Trump over previous polls in the Tarheel State. One reason? Trump leads among men by 11, while Harris leads among women by just 7, a gender gap of 4 in Trump’s favor.
And it’s not just women. Trump’s also widening his margins over Harris among working class Whites, the largest single group in the electorate. In the Sunbelt, he’s winning them by 70% to 25% – that’s a whopping 45 points. He’s even achieved near parity with Harris among college educated Whites, who should be tilting her way (48%-49%). And among youth, another group whose support she has touted for weeks, her lead is down to just 10 points, 53%-43%. It’s an astounding turnaround.
What happened? One can only speculate at this point but it seems clear that much of what Harris has been trying to accomplish since the debate isn’t actually working to her advantage in one of the regions that matter most. Harris was hoping to open up a second parallel path to the White House through the Sunbelt, reducing her reliance on the “Blue Wall” of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. But if she loses the main Sunbelt states, she’ll need to sweep the entire Rust Belt to eke out a 270-268 win in the Electoral College – which would be the narrowest victory in the presidential race this century.
How likely is that? So far, Harris is holding her own in the Rust Belt, but Trump is showing signs of gaining here, too. For example, in the last five polls in Pennsylvania, all post-debate, Trump is winning in 3 of them; in the other 2, they’re tied. In Michigan she’s up by a single point or two in four of the last five polls, for a 2-point lead overall. In Wisconsin, she’s also up in four of the last five polls, for a 2-point lead overall. But these are all very small margins. Overall, based on the polling averages across all seven swing states, Trump now holds a tiny lead over Harris – about 0.2%. This is Trump’s first swing state lead in weeks, and it’s all post-debate. In other words, the overall trend line in the race is starting to favor him, however slightly.
Trump’s new lead in Pennsylvania is also likely due to his favorable gender gap. While comprehensive polling is not yet available, in the latest Muhlenberg College poll, which has the two candidates tied at 48-48. Harris has opened up a massive 21-point advantage among women, which would normally give her a major lead. But thanks in part to a massive statewide messaging campaign targeting Gen Z males, Trump has his own 23-point margin among men, which is unprecedented. That gives him a net 2-point gender advantage in the race, and it’s one of the reasons – but just one – that he’s so competitive overall.
The most obvious explanation for these recent shifts may be hard for the Harris campaign to swallow. One is that voters are underwhelmed by Harris’ public appearances in highly-scripted sit-downs with friendly interviewers, most recently with Oprah and before her, with the National Association of Black Journalists; at both venues, she faced some unexpected push-back. Even worse, she just turned down an almost mandatory appearance at the quadrennial Al Smith Memorial Charity dinner, an event that presidential candidates rarely refuse to attend. It’s an opportunity to appear in a relatively low risk setting to address traditional Catholic attendees. For a candidate who is struggling to reach Catholics, a key voting bloc in the Rust Belt, her refusal to attend – after first suggesting that she would – is a missed opportunity. Indeed, it’s pretty close to a flat out blunder.
Harris’ official explanation is that she prefers to be out on the hustings campaigning, but no one outside Harris World considers that excuse convincing. A more likely explanation is that she’s simply uncomfortable having to appear next to Trump at a high-stakes public event without friendly moderators present. In fact, it’s not the first time she’s been tempted to duck out of a high-stakes dinner. Earlier this year, Harris was so anxious about a friendly small group appearance before donors that her campaign actually held a mock donor dinner so that she could practice how to conduct herself. The Al Smith dinner is actually low-risk – traditionally the two candidates tell jokes about themselves and their opponent, and the event – including the jokes – are scripted for them.
Why not, then, attend? For one thing, Harris is busy demonizing Trump, so the atmosphere of levity at the dinner may be perceived as counterproductive – because it seems to humanize him. But another reason is that she feels vulnerable for the actions she’s taken against Catholic charity organizations in the past, which could feed Trump’s own narrative about religious bigotry and alleged violations of religious freedom – all played out before a sympathetic Catholic audience. And no doubt her zealous defense of abortion and reproductive rights – part of the raison d’etre of her entire campaign – is hardly going to win her new Catholic friends.
But she would not be the first Democrat to enter the Catholic lion’s den. Hillary Clinton did in 2016 and Trump promptly savaged her, but he was booed for doing so, and lost the moral high ground. The event is meant to be relatively friendly, not mean-spirited. For Harris, it’s an opportunity to demonstrate her ability to stand her ground and operate with grace under pressure. The impression she’s leaving by withdrawing is that she’s not up to the challenge – and even worse, that she’s willing to simply thumb her nose at Catholics. Her critics on the right now wonder how she ever plans to host a state dinner while president. They have a point: Will she insist on conducting mock sessions for those events, too?
These aren’t the only recent developments that have dented Harris’s standing with key voter groups. Another was last week’s decision by the Teamsters Union not to endorse her candidacy. Teamster president Sean O’Brien said afterward that neither of the two campaigns had made the hard–clad commitments to the union he was looking for. But it was also revealed that a clear majority of Teamster members – mostly men, of course – now favor Trump, by an almost 2-1 margin. When Biden was the candidate, most Teamsters said they favored him over Trump. It’s just another indication that Harris, despite the vocal support of the UAW and other union leadership, still lacks broad-based support among their membership, to say nothing of working class voters overall.
And just when things couldn’t get worse, the mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, the nation’s only majority Muslim municipality has just announced that he’s supporting Trump, too. Yemen-born Amer Ghalib is the nation’s first Muslim mayor and a symbol of the mounting Democratic rebellion against the Biden admoinistration’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. His endorsement comes on the heels of a decision by the largely Arab-American “Non-Committed” voter group to stay neutral in the presidential campaign. The Non-Committed group, which constitutes some 200,000 voters, abstained from supporting Biden during the primaries. Their defection, like that of the Teamsters, could help tilt the race in one or more battleground states, especially Michigan, the last thing Harris needs.
All in all, the last two weeks have featured a steady stream of developments that have slowed Harris’ post-debate momentum to a near standstill, and may well be setting the stage for a Trump rebound. The next inflection point in the race is the October 1 vice-presidential debate. There’s a danger here too, of overconfidence on the part of the Harris campaign. Vance’s favorability rating, never high to begin with, has taken major hits ever since he became Trump’s running mate. But, in fact, he’s a skilled debater, and has held forth on policy issues in the Senate. Walz has not. (In fact, he’s ducked some debates in the past). It’s doubtful that Walz will be able to bait Vance the way Harris baited Trump, which helped deflect persistent concerns about her ability to discuss and defend her policy stances. Vance already enjoys a strong lead over Walz among White voters and men (according to the latest USA Today poll). He’ll be looking to use the debate to consolidate those gains, Walz needs to offset Harris’ persistent and potentially deepening shortfalls with these same groups. So far, his presence on the ticket – with one or two video ads prompting him as a role model for men – has done virtually nothing to achieve that goal.
The upshot? Despite the impressive gains Harris has made since she began her campaign in June, her campaign is still underperforming with nearly every demographic relative to Biden in 2020. Losing men and working class voters is to be expected up to a point – every Democrat does – but in the key swing states she is losing them by truly historic margins. And her gains with Hispanics, youth and even African-Americans, so far at least, aren’t enough to offset these losses.
But the biggest warning sign is the widening gender gap she’s suffering in the Sunbelt. It suggests that Harris’ current strategy – or at least, her messaging – may be backfiring. Are just working class women peeling away from her – or is it college educated women. too? Maybe Harris can still recoup these losses – but if either group continues to defect, even in modest numbers, while men keep flocking to Trump, she can’t possibly win in November. It’s a disturbing prospect – a potential 5-alarm fire, one the Harris campaign and its supporters must be prepared to address as an urgent priority. Right now, they seem blithely unaware that a problem even exists.
