There’s a reason Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are intensifying efforts to reach beyond their party’s traditional supporters in the final weeks of this razor-thin campaign.
Extending a pattern that stretches back decades, White voters without a college degree, the cornerstone of the modern GOP coalition, have declined by a little more than 2 percentage points as a share of eligible voters since 2020, falling below 40% of the eligible voting pool for the first time ever, according a new analysis of the latest Census Bureau data by demographer William Frey shared exclusively with CNN.
While those working-class Whites are shrinking, Frey found that both Whites with at least a four-year college degree and voters of color have each increased since 2020 by about a single percentage point as a share of eligible voters. Those increases also continue long-term trends that have seen well-educated Whites grow to represent more than 1-in-4 eligible voters and people of color rise past 1-in-3.
These trends help explain why the former president has devoted so much effort to reaching beyond his traditional base of White voters without a college education to attract more Black and Latino voters, especially men. And, in turn, the trends help explain the emphasis the vice president is placing on attracting more college-educated White voters who have previously leaned toward the GOP — a priority she underscored by barnstorming across populous white-collar suburbs outside Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee with GOP former Rep. Liz Cheney on Monday.
The impact of these incremental shifts in the composition of the major voter groups can easily be outweighed by changes in the preferences of those groups. Trump, for instance, is counting on gains among Latino voters, especially men, to neutralize the anticipated benefits for Democrats as Latinos increase their share of the vote, particularly in closely contested Arizona and Nevada.
But the cumulative impact of these shifts in the electorate’s basic composition is undeniable. Trump, for instance, in each of his two presidential campaigns won nearly as big a share of White voters without a college education as Ronald Reagan did in 1984, according to exit polls. Yet because those working-class Whites had fallen from about two-thirds of voters in 1984 to around two-fifths now, Trump only won about 47% of the total vote in each of his two campaigns, while Reagan captured nearly 59%.
Even this year, in a race so close, small shifts in the electorate’s composition across the most competitive states could make a difference. For instance, the fact that non-college Whites, according to Frey’s analysis, have fallen as a share of the eligible electorate since 2020 considerably more in Michigan and Wisconsin than in Pennsylvania may help explain why most analysts consider the Keystone State more difficult than the other two for Harris.
Shifts in racial and educational levels are not the only important changes Frey, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Metro think tank, has tracked in the make-up of eligible voters between 2020 and 2024. He also found that women will comprise nearly 52% of all eligible voters, which should help Harris. But his analysis shows that number actually represents a very small shift in the eligible electorate since 2020 toward men, which at the margin might benefit Trump. Frey also finds that Generation Z will make a big jump in their share of eligible voters, from about 1-in-10 last time to more than 1-in-6 this year. That increase underscores the stakes in Harris’ attempt to max out her support among younger women and Trump’s determined attempts to court young men.
Frey’s analysis finds that the White voters without a college degree are declining as a share of eligible voters not only in the nation overall but specifically across almost all of the seven battleground states. (North Carolina is the sole swing state where he found that they had increased as a portion of eligible voters since 2020.)
That decline is rooted in an ongoing process of generational replacement. Compared to younger generations, America’s older cohorts are much more heavily White and also much less likely to hold at least a four-year college degree. As those older Whites age out of the electorate, and more diverse and better-educated generations grow into it, the composition of the eligible voter pool inexorably transforms.
“Whites are a shrinking part of the population and a part of that population which is shrinking even more are the people who don’t have college education,” said Frey.
While these blue-collar Whites are receding in both the Rustbelt and Sunbelt electorates, different kinds of voters are replacing them across the two regions, Frey found.
These blue-collar Whites represent a much larger share of the total electorate in the Rustbelt than the Sunbelt: Frey found that in 2020 they comprised around half of eligible voters in both Michigan and Pennsylvania and nearly three-fifths in Wisconsin.
But Frey found that since 2020, they have declined more rapidly than almost anywhere else in Michigan (falling by nearly 3 percentage points) and Wisconsin (dropping by more than 3 percentage points). In Michigan, he found a slight increase in minority voters among the eligible voter pool, while in Wisconsin those non-White voters, who were already a smaller share of eligibles than in the other Rustbelt battlegrounds, actually declined even further.
In both states, the big gainers since 2020 are Whites with at least a four-year college degree: Frey found they increased more than 2 percentage points as a share of eligible voters in Michigan and over 4 points in Wisconsin.
In Pennsylvania, the shift isn’t as dramatic: Frey found that the non-college White share of eligible voters dropped since 2020 by about 1.5 percentage points, about half as much as in the other two former “blue wall” states. A small increase in the minority population made up most of that difference, with college-educated Whites increasing only very slightly.
Across the Sunbelt battlegrounds, blue-collar Whites are a smaller share of the eligible voters: about 1-in-3 in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada and just over 2-in-5 in North Carolina. Arizona and Georgia saw big increases since 2020 in the minority share of their eligible voter population, Frey found, while non-Whites actually declined somewhat in North Carolina and remained almost unchanged in Nevada. College-educated Whites increased as a portion of eligible voters in Nevada and Arizona, while falling slightly in Georgia and essentially holding steady in North Carolina.
After these shifts, the minority share of the eligible voting population will remain much higher in the Sunbelt than Rustbelt states, with voters of color representing about one-third of the eligible voter population in North Carolina, a little more than two-fifths in Arizona and more than 45% in both Nevada and Georgia.
In both the Rustbelt and Sunbelt, the winning modern demographic formula for Democrats since the 1990s has been to maximize their support among non-White voters and grow their support among college-educated Whites, while holding down their losses among the blue-collar Whites, with a particular focus on women in each group. In the Trump era, the dominant GOP demographic strategy has been to maximize their support among working-class voters without a college degree, particularly men. That strategy has broadened from a nearly exclusive focus on White working-class voters in Trump’s 2016 race to his more panoramic attempt this year to attract non-college-educated Black and Latino voters as well, especially men.
Manuel Pastor, director of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California, says the contrasting strategies of Harris and Trump in the campaign’s final days illuminate “the task of reinvention that each party faces” as a result of the electorate’s ongoing racial and educational reconfiguration.
Trump, Pastor notes, has responded to the relentless increase in the electorate’s diversity by stressing “really a more male-leaning, masculine approach that is helping to make inroads with Latino males and, to a lesser extent, Black males.” (Trump is devoting a comparable effort to courting younger White men, especially those without college degrees, appearing on podcasts and other media sources where they congregate.)
And while Harris is expending enormous defensive effort on holding as many Latino and especially Black men as possible, she’s also accepting the shifting composition of the party’s coalition more explicitly than President Joe Biden did in 2020 and throughout his presidency, Pastor believes.
Biden, he notes, embodied an almost nostalgic desire to hold onto the Democrats’ mid-20th century base of White working-class voters, but Harris, the daughter of two academics herself, has leaned more comfortably into the party’s modern identity as a coalition primarily of often economically struggling minorities and more comfortable college-educated suburbanites.
“Where Democrats have made inroads is with college-educated Whites who are offended by Trump’s language around immigrants, around his dalliance with right-wing neo-fascist groups and language, with the threats around ‘the enemy within’ — all of the stuff Harris is trying to make sure to get into the conversation” in these final days, Pastor said.
Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster who specializes in demographic trends, said the offsetting gains of Democrats with well-educated Whites and Trump with blue-collar non-Whites should be understand as inextricably linked components of the same dynamic. “Trump doing better among working class minorities is a function of Democrats doing better among college educated voters,” Ruffini, the author of the recent book “Party of the People” about the shifting GOP coalition, wrote in an email. “As the electorate polarizes on education, the nonwhite working class will not be immune from these trends and will gravitate towards Trump more than your standard issue Republican. I think he is broadening the coalition, not necessarily with a lot of intentional effort, but because of natural dynamics in the electorate,” he added.
Democrats need to remain at least competitive among working-class White voters, particularly in the Rustbelt battlegrounds, where historically they have been able to win a significantly higher percentage of them than in the South (where far more of those voters are staunchly conservative evangelical Christians). But anywhere in the country, the most realistic goal for Democrats among these working-class Whites — especially against Trump’s formidable appeal to them — is to hold down their losses.
The groups that Harris needs to give her winning margins are the non-White and college-educated White voters (especially women in each case). The fact that both of those groups are increasing in the electorate, while Trump’s best cohort is shrinking, may give Harris a small swell in her sails. “The growing parts of the population are leaning Democrat, even in this time” when so many voters are discontented with conditions in the country, Frey said. The fact that women are likely to cast more ballots than men in all the swing states, he believes, will provide a small lift to Harris as well.
But many analysts point out these demographic changes can easily be overcome if Trump can reduce the Democratic margins among the groups she’s likely to win, or expand his own lead among his best groups. For instance, the fact that members of Gen Z are growing in the electorate should benefit Harris, given that Democrats have won big majorities among young people in every election since 2004, the first when millennials entered the electorate in large numbers. But while Harris is posting huge advantages among Gen Z women, Trump may somewhat blunt the impact of this generational transition if he can run as well among Gen Z men as polls show is now possible.
Melissa Deckman, CEO of the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute and author of the recent book “The Politics of Gen Z,” says almost everything about Trump’s messaging on cultural, racial and gender issues profoundly alienates the vast majority of Gen Z women. “I think Gen Z women, including White women, are very committed to an inclusive democracy,” she said.
But while young men may not entirely endorse Trump’s most vituperative and vitriolic messages about racial and cultural change either, she said, they are less likely to find such statements disqualifying amid their concerns about their economic prospects. (Among younger generations, far more women than men are earning four-year and post-graduate college degrees.) Some younger men may also find Trump’s swaggering persona attractive, she noted, viewing him almost as an “anti-hero.”
“For young people in general, there are huge amounts of economic anxiety,” Deckman said. “But I think the difference is that Gen Z women are more likely to prioritize social issues whereas Gen Z men tend to vote more on pocketbook issues.”
These cross-currents among the electorate’s youngest cohort underscores a larger point: At such a fluid moment in US politics, the shift in the electorate’s composition doesn’t so much portend the result of this year’s election as define the assignments that each side faces in attempting to assemble a winning coalition.
One other factor is critical to any discussion of how demographic change may influence the balance of power between the two parties this year. The composition of the actual voters who turn up on Election Day is shaped not only by the share of eligible voters each group represents, but also, of course, by their turnout rates.
College-educated White voters consistently turn out at much higher rates than any other group. In the 2020 election, nearly 9-in-10 eligible White adults with at least a four-year college degree voted, compared to just under 2-in-3 Whites without a college degree and about 3-in-5 non-White voters, according to calculations from Census data provided to me by Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who studies voter participation.
As a result, the college-educated Whites tend to comprise a slightly larger share of the actual than eligible electorate while the relationship is reversed for the other two groups. Analyzing Census data, Frey and McDonald both found that in 2020 college-educated Whites cast just over 3-in-10 votes, while people of color cast just below 3-in-10. The White voters without a college degree remained the electorate’s largest group, but they cast slightly less than 40% of all votes — the first time they had fallen below that threshold among actual voters. (Census data indicates that these blue-collar Whites fell below a majority of the nation’s electorate for the first time in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first Black president.).
A similar pattern is evident along gender lines. Eligible female voters have turned out at a higher rate than eligible male voters in every election since 1980, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. (Before that, men voted at higher rates than women.) That gap can be substantial: using Census data, Frey has calculated that in the presidential elections since 2004, turnout among eligible women has always exceeded the rate among men by at least 3.3 percentage points, reaching as much as 4 points in some cases.
As a result, according to Frey’s analysis of Census data, in all of the seven swing states, women in 2020 comprised a larger share of actual than eligible voters. They represented about 52% of actual voters last time in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada, 54% in North Carolina and around 55% in both Arizona and Georgia, he found. (Nationwide, Frey’s analysis of Census data showed women casting 53% of all ballots, slightly more than their 52% share of the eligible electorate.) One rule of thumb among Democrats is that they usually triumph when they win women by at least as large a margin as Republicans win men; these data indicate Harris could survive even if Trump wins men by slightly more.
Young people, of course, consistently turn out at much lower rates than older voters, even though their participation has trended upward in the Trump era. Potentially worrisome for Trump is that the gender gap in turnout rates is even greater for young women and men than it is among the older generations, the Rutgers Center has found. Younger non-White men, who have expressed the most receptivity to Trump in minority communities, have an especially meager turnout record.
Other sources of data about the composition of the electorate in 2020 paint slightly different pictures than the Census data Frey uses. The Pew Research Center’s validated voters study put Whites without a college degree at 42% of all voters, while the analysis by Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm, figured them at 44%. Each of those analyses placed both the college-educated Whites and non-Whites just a tick lower than the Census data. Pew, the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN, and the AP/VoteCast project with NORC found that women represented just a slightly smaller share of all voters last time than the Census did; Catalist concluded they represented even more.
Still, all these data sources agree on the same basic pattern over the differing periods that they cover. Consistently they find Whites without a college degree shrinking as a share of actual voters at a rate of about 2 percentage points every four years, with non-Whites posting the greatest gains and college-educated Whites increasing more slowly, though also steadily growing. And they agree that women now consistently cast the majority of votes in presidential elections.
No one, of course, can entirely predict how many voters from each of these groups will turn out this year. But this history clearly shows it is likely that the changes in the composition of the eligible electorate Frey has documented will closely track the shifts in the configuration of the actual electorate. Most of the experts I spoke with believe it’s a good bet that, just as with the eligible population, Whites without a college degree will continue to shrink as a share of actual voters by about 2 percentage points, while people of color and college-educated Whites will each slightly rise.
These glacial shifts in the nature of the American electorate typically leave their mark over decades, rather than from election to election. But this may be a butterfly effect election where even the smallest flutter in the environment could tip the balance between two political coalitions that are utterly antithetical in their vision for America’s future, but also almost exactly equal in size.
Trump offers darkness, Harris offers optimism on election eve in America
The tumultuous 2024 election is ending with a contrast that encapsulates America’s fateful choice on election eve.
Ex-President Donald Trump is darkening what is already the most dystopian closing argument in modern American history and flinging new and baseless claims that Democrats are cheating.
Vice President Kamala Harris, while warning about the perils of a Trump second term, is claiming momentum and invoking optimism and aspiration as she lays claim to a “new generation of leadership in America.”
Voters — more than 75 million of whom have already cast their ballots — are finally face-to-face with an election that could profoundly change the country and the world and that has people on both sides fearing for their way of life should their candidate lose.
Nervous tensions are coming to a boil as Trump and Harris dash through the swing states that are likely to decide a race marked by extraordinary twists that nevertheless ends with them neck-and-neck in the polls.
The former president will start Monday in North Carolina — a state Republicans expected to lock down long ago — before heading to Pennsylvania, which could end up deciding who wins. He’ll close his third presidential bid with a late-night rally in Michigan. Harris, who held her final Michigan rally on Sunday, will spend Monday in another vital blue wall state, Pennsylvania, including a big finish in Philadelphia with Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.
Trump is getting more extreme by the hour in outbursts that seem to augur a fresh attempt to defy the will of voters if he loses. For instance, he claimed falsely in Pennsylvania on Sunday that Democrats are “fighting so hard to steal this damn thing” and that voting machines would be tampered with, while saying he shouldn’t have left the White House in 2021.
Harris is trying to reanimate the feeling of joy and possibility that infused her early campaign rallies. On Sunday at a Black church in Detroit, she condemned those who “sow hate, spread fear and spread chaos” in a reference to her rival. “In these next two days we will be tested,” she said. “We were born for such a time as this.”
But the vice president also sought to summon the best angels of America’s nature, striking aspirational notes that her Republican foe abandoned long ago. Harris said in North Carolina on Saturday, “I have lived the promise of America. And today, I see the promise of America in everybody who is here. In all of you, in all of us. We are the promise of America.”
History is beckoning
If Trump wins on Tuesday, he will be only the second defeated president to win a nonconsecutive term. He will complete one of the most staggering political comebacks ever after trying to torch democracy to stay in power after the 2020 election, being convicted of a crime and escaping two attempts on his life this year.
Harris could shatter the line of nearly 250 years of male commanders in chief and become the first female president. It would be a stunning feat after she unified the demoralized Democratic Party in July when President Joe Biden’s reelection bid was destroyed by the ravages of age.
On the last day of the campaign, the massive stakes of the election are heightened by the sense that no one can possibly say who will win.
Polls nationally and in the vital swing states show no clear leader, reflecting a country that is polarized just as sharply as when the race started. But the possibility remains that one candidate has managed to fashion a late advantage in battlegrounds including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona, and could sweep to a wider-than-anticipated win.
Democrats are encouraged by apparently strong early turnout among women voters, with abortion rights a potentially pivotal issue in the first presidential election since the Trump-built Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Harris has also worked to repair fissures in the traditional Democratic coalition, trying to appeal to Black men and Latino voters in particular.
Trump is banking on voters weary of high food and housing prices and still feeling the trauma from now-cooled inflation, and he has demonized undocumented migrants to highlight a southern border crisis. The Biden administration struggled for months to recognize the gravity of each issue and to offer effective remedies, meaning the seeds of a possible Harris defeat may have long been sown. And Trump’s team is convinced he will eat into traditional minority Democratic constituencies and again bring out people who don’t typically vote.
But there are also foreboding signs from Trump. His behavior already looks like a new attempt to try to overturn the result if he loses after his conduct following the last election led to an invasion of the US Capitol by supporters who beat up police and tried to thwart the certification of Biden’s victory. Harris has said that she’s ready to respond if the ex-president makes a premature victory declaration, and his maneuverings suggest that, absent a clear victory by either side, uncertainty over the election could last days.
The end of Trumpism — or the start of an extreme new era?
This is no ordinary election, due largely to the smoldering presence of Trump, already the most disruptive president of the modern age, who is vowing unfettered strongman rule if he wins back the Oval Office. If he follows through on his own promises, the twice-impeached Republican nominee would subject America’s governing, judicial and constitutional institutions to their greatest test in generations in a term he is pledging to root in personal vengeance.
Trump has outlined the darkest, most authoritarian platform of any presidential candidate in modern memory. He is proposing the biggest-ever mass deportation of migrants — an operation that by definition would involve law enforcement and possibly even the military in a domestic crackdown that would challenge civil liberties. He has openly considered using US armed forces against his political opponents whom he labeled “enemies from within” and vermin, emulating the language of some of history’s most notorious tyrants.
The ex-president also proposes a transformation of the economy in the name of working Americans who have flocked to his populist, nationalist message after seeing their livelihoods hollowed out by decades of globalization. But his love of tariffs risks causing a backlash that could throw the economy into reverse. Trump also plans a purge of Washington bureaucrats and gutting of agencies like the Justice Department that constrained him in his first term and that he wants to weaponize to expunge his criminal prosecutions and fulfill his personal and political whims.
More than nine years after first entering the presidential fray, Trump may be as strong politically as he has ever been. He’s crushed dissent inside the GOP and cemented his unshakable bond with tens of millions of Americans who believe he speaks for them and confounds elites who they believe disdain them.
Yet Harris heads into Election Day with a chance to end the Trump era and hand a second straight electoral defeat to a Republican Party that appeased his lies and threats to the Constitution in the hardline pursuit of power.
She is offering voters the chance to dodge the tumult and peril to the rule of law that Trump’s own campaign suggests he represents. The vice president also proposes reforms to improve the lives of working Americans — but hers are less revolutionary than Trump’s. She’s promising steps to make housing more affordable, to crack down on what she calls price gouging by supermarket giants and to guarantee better health care at more reasonable prices.
Harris has taken a risk by offering continuity at a time of deep dissatisfaction with domestic economic and political realities and growing concern in the country about a world in which tyrants are on the march. She’s also struggled to separate herself from an 81-year-old president who is deeply unpopular despite presiding over the industrialized world’s most robust economic recovery since the Covid-19 pandemic.
A campaign that exploded to life in a surge of joy is ending with the most searing warnings that Trump is a fascist who could destroy America’s democratic way of life, alienate US allies and subjugate the country’s vital national image as he genuflects to autocrats in Russia and China whom he apparently wishes to emulate.
The route to 270
Harris’ best route to the presidency runs through the Democratic blue wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. CNN’s Poll of Polls, averaging the last five nonpartisan surveys, shows no clear leader in any of the trio, though CNN/SSRS surveys last week indicated a narrow edge for Harris in the first two of those states and a tie in the Keystone State. If she loses Pennsylvania, Harris would need a combination of other swing states, including Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, where poll averages also show no clear leader. If Trump wins Pennsylvania — as he did in 2016 — he could take a huge step toward a second term.
The vice president’s campaign has claimed that she’s generating late momentum in the race. “It’s helpful, from experience, to be closing a presidential campaign with late-deciding voters breaking by double digits to you and the remaining undecideds looking more friendly to you than your opponent,” David Plouffe, a Harris adviser, wrote on X on Friday.
Democrats experienced a new surge of optimism on Saturday when the last poll of the campaign from the Des Moines Register and Mediacom showed Harris at 47% and Trump at 44% among likely voters in a state he won easily in 2020 and 2016. That margin falls within the poll’s 3.4-point margin of sampling error and suggests no clear leader in the state. But the findings, which suggested a shift toward Harris from the previous Iowa Poll in September, also showed the vice president with a strong advantage among women. If such a pattern is repeated nationwide, the vice president could be headed to victory if she can limit her deficit to Trump among White males especially.
Trump’s campaign sent out acerbic memos assailing the Iowa Poll and a set of New York Times/Siena College surveys. And the ex-president immediately used the new data to flesh out his claim that he’s a victim of a rigged election. “We’ve been waiting nine years for this, and we’ve got two days, and we got all this crap going on with the press and with fake stuff and fake polls,” he said in Pennsylvania.
But with Election Day hours away, none of the polls matter anymore. Americans are about to make their choice.
Trump embraces the ‘weave,’ while Harris heads to Fox
Donald Trump is trying to bob and weave his way back to power while Kamala Harris is finally daring to ditch the script as Democrats fret about her campaign.
The Republican and Democratic nominees on Tuesday offered voters an unusually self-reflective glimpse into their characters as they pursued dwindling bands of undecided voters in their neck-and-neck race that’s coming down to the wire.
Trump, fresh off a bizarre half-hour at a town hall on Monday when he danced on stage to his campaign soundtrack, made a clumsy attempt to repair his damaged standing among female voters. “I’m the father of IVF,” said the former president whose conservative Supreme Court majority unleashed chaos in reproductive health care.
And in a testy appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago, he made a virtue of his frequent incoherence, styling it as a sophisticated “weave” of multiple ideas that only a political genius would attempt. And he tried a fresh reinvention of history over his attempt to steal the 2020 election, declaring that his crowd in Washington on January 6, 2021, was infused with “love and peace.”
Harris faces some tough questions
Harris also sought a second chance among a key voting bloc that is cool on her campaign. As she seeks to become the first Black woman president, she courted Black male voters who were last week rebuked by former President Barack Obama for flirting with Trump. In an interview with radio host Charlamagne Tha God, the vice president further sharpened her attacks on her rival, branding him as “weak” because he cozies up to dictators and agreeing with the host that his political creed equated to “fascism.”
While Trump flaunted his rambling rhetorical style, Harris rejected suggestions she’s too scripted. “That would be called discipline,” Harris said in the radio interview.
But as Democrats panic about Trump’s possible return to the White House, Harris is starting to embrace more spontaneous events.
She took the rare step of answering questions in the town-hall style radio program — and got some tough ones about her commitment to the Black church and Black voters’ economic problems. On Wednesday, Harris will venture into the lion’s den on Fox News hoping to reach another important group of voters. The appearance on the pro-Trump network is part of her attempt to give Republicans disaffected with the ex-president a reason to vote Democrat.
With Trump trying to repair his deficit among women and Harris belatedly trying to shore up support among Black men, the battle for the world’s most powerful political job is looking less like a test of strength than a struggle between two candidates who know mitigating their weaknesses may be the key to victory.
With swing-state polls deadlocked, the election could come down to a few thousand votes in a handful of battlegrounds, leaving both Harris and Trump trawling for people who agree with them but who often don’t vote.
Stunning scenes in Georgia
This election has been a tale of unexpected events, featuring a convicted felon who survived two assassination attempts, an aging president who ditched his bid for a second term a few months before Election Day, and a vice president handed an 11th hour mission to save the White House from a rival who Democrats see as a wannabe tyrant.
But the extraordinary stakes of what lies ahead — and the power of democracy — were laid bare on Tuesday in the most emphatic way as over 300,000 voters in the key battleground of Georgia showed up on the first day of early voting and broke a record. In recent races in the Peach State, heavy turnout would be a good sign for Democrats. But despite Trump’s insistence that all voting should take place on Election Day, the GOP has been pleading with its voters to turn up early, so it’s too soon to draw any conclusions about who is showing up.
Gabriel Sterling — the chief operating officer for Georgia’s secretary of state, who played a key role in debunking Trump’s election falsehoods four years ago — argued that democracy was alive and well in his state. “For those that claimed Georgia election laws were Jim Crow 2.0 and those that say democracy is dying…the voters of Georgia would like to have a word,” he said.
Trump shows his risks and his appeal
In Chicago, Trump demonstrated exactly what he would bring to the Oval Office in a second term, promising an aggressive program to punish countries and companies with a draconian regime of tariffs.
He also offered a reminder of his wild years as president. He was impervious to facts, routinely ignored economic logic, and showed himself to be steeped in personal grievances and conspiracy theories.
But Trump also showed why he is so compelling to so many voters who believe they have been left behind by an economy run by corporate elites for their own benefit. He posed as a proud populist and made his interviewer, John Micklethwait, the top editor of Bloomberg News, into an avatar of the elite economic establishment. When the British-born journalist said it was “simple mathematics” that tariffs would increase costs for companies and consumers, Trump went on the attack, saying, “You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”
Trump also again refused to disown Russian President Vladimir Putin, to whom he often deferred in office. Asked about Bob Woodward’s reporting that he’d spoken to the autocrat multiple times since leaving the White House, Trump said, “I don’t comment on that. But I will tell you that if I did it’s a smart thing.”
The interview was a classic example of how Trump makes a mockery of truth and has shattered traditional election conventions. He piled up a torrent of falsehoods and digressions that made him impossible to pin down, effectively escaping any kind of accountability.
Later, Trump recorded a Fox News town hall with female voters that will air in full on Wednesday. “I’m the father of IVF, so I want to hear this question,” Trump said during the event taped in Georgia. He added: “We really are the party for IVF. We want fertilization, and it’s all the way, and the Democrats tried to attack us on it, and we’re out there on IVF, even more than them. So, we’re totally in favor.”
Trump has previously proposed making the government or insurance companies pay for IVF treatments – without specifying how. But Harris and the Democrats have been warning that a GOP victory next month would threaten IVF treatments and other reproductive rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of the constitutional right to an abortion.
Trump trails Harris among female voters in most polls and badly needs to narrow that gender gap with 20 days to go.
Harris makes belated bid to win Black men
The vice president faces similar challenges among Black men. While this is a cohort that has generally voted for Democrats, there have been signs of erosion in recent cycles — a trend Trump has been working to advance.
But Harris hit back on Charlamagne Tha God’s “The Breakfast Club,” saying that Black voters need to think carefully about the future.
“By voting in this election, you have two choices, or you don’t vote, but you have two choices if you do and it’s two very different visions for our nation,” Harris said, warning as she often does that another Trump presidency would “take us backward.”
And she went further than she has before in categorizing the threat she sees personified by the ex-president, who over the weekend suggested turning the military against “enemies from within.” The show’s host said that one choice represented by Trump is “fascism,” adding, “Why can’t we just say it?”
Harris replied: “Yes, we can say that.”
Kamala Harris leapfrogs Donald Trump to take lead near Election Day. Here’s how
The nationally recognized Iowa Poll shows Kamala Harris picking up support from women to surpass Donald Trump in a ruby-red state he has won twice
Kamala Harris now leads Donald Trump in Iowa — a startling reversal for Democrats and Republicans who have all but written off the state’s presidential contest as a certain Trump victory.
A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Vice President Harris leading former President Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters just days before a high-stakes election that appears deadlocked in key battleground states.
The results follow a September Iowa Poll that showed Trump with a 4-point lead over Harris and a June Iowa Poll showing him with an 18-point lead over Democratic President Joe Biden, who was the presumed Democratic nominee at the time.
“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has abandoned his independent presidential campaign to support Trump but remains on the Iowa ballot, gets 3% of the vote. That’s down from 6% in September and 9% in June.
Fewer than 1% say they would vote for Libertarian presidential candidate Chase Oliver, 1% would vote for someone else, 3% aren’t sure and 2% don’t want to say for whom they already cast a ballot.
The poll of 808 likely Iowa voters, which include those who have already voted as well as those who say they definitely plan to vote, was conducted by Selzer & Co. from Oct. 28-31. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
The results come as Trump and Harris have focused their attention almost exclusively on seven battleground states that are expected to shape the outcome of the election. Neither has campaigned in Iowa since the presidential primaries ended, and neither campaign has established a ground presence in the state.
A victory for Harris would be a surprising development after Iowa has swung aggressively to the right in recent elections, delivering Trump solid victories in 2016 and 2020.
The poll shows that women — particularly those who are older or who are politically independent — are driving the late shift toward Harris.
“Age and gender are the two most dynamic factors that are explaining these numbers,” Selzer said.
Likely Iowa voters in the 2024 general election have been polled four times since March 2024 about the presidential candidate they would vote for at the time. In October 2024, 47% say they would vote for or already have voted for Kamala Harris and 44% for Donald Trump.
Notes:
*On July 21, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection. Kamala Harris would later become the new Democratic nominee.
** In the February 2024 poll, Kennedy and Oliver were not listed among the candidates.
Independent voters, who had consistently supported Trump in the leadup to this election, now break for Harris. That’s driven by the strength of independent women, who back Harris by a 28-point margin, while independent men support Trump, but by a smaller margin.
Similarly, senior voters who are 65 and older favor Harris. But senior women support her by a more than 2-to-1 margin, 63% to 28%, while senior men favor her by just 2 percentage points, 47% to 45%.
“I like her policies on reproductive health and having women choosing their own health care, and the fact that I think that she will save our democracy and follow the rule of law,” said Linda Marshall, a 79-year-old poll respondent from Cascade who has already cast her absentee ballot for Harris.
The registered Democrat said she identifies as pro-life but doesn’t think anyone should make that choice for somebody else.
“I just believe that if the Republicans can decide what you do with your body, what else are they going to do to limit your choice, for women?” she said.
One aspect where Trump does better than Harris: A greater share of his supporters than hers say they are extremely or very enthusiastic about their pick.
Seventy-six percent of Trump supporters say they are extremely or very enthusiastic about their choice, while another 23% say they are mildly or not that enthusiastic.
76% of likely Iowa voters for Trump are ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ enthusiastic, compared with 71% for Harris
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