It’s horse-racey, but it is as good an update on Pennsylvania polls in these closing days of the 2024 presidential campaign as you are going to find. Sara Dorn and Antonio Pequeno write in “Pennsylvania 2024 Trump-Harris Polls: Race Virtually Tied In 6 New Surveys Of Vital Battleground (Updated)” at Forbes:

TOPLINE

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are within one percentage point of each other in a half-dozen new polls of Pennsylvania this week, as the race remains essentially even in the swing state that’s likely to decide the winner of the 2024 election.

KEY FACTS

Ronald Brownstein explains why “Why working-class White women could be so decisive this fall” at CNN Politics: “Even as Trump struggled with other groups of women in his 2016 and 2020 presidential races, exit polls and other analyses showed that he amassed a big lead each time among White women without a college education….Those working-class White women loom as a critical, potentially even decisive, factor in Trump’s third White House bid. That’s partly because so many of them, polls show, are torn between personal disdain for Trump and discontent with the results of Joe Biden’s presidency, particularly over inflation and the border….But it’s also because these women are especially plentiful in the three former “blue wall” states that still constitute Harris’ most likely path to an Electoral College victory: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. To win those states, which she is barnstorming every day this week, Harris doesn’t have to win most of those women – Democrats almost never do – but she does need to remain competitive with them….“They are really tired of Trump, and they’d really like to move on, but they are also nervous about moving on, and they do think the economy was better for them under Trump,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. As for Harris, Lake said, “They like she would bring everybody together, they like her empathy. … But they don’t feel that they know her that well.” The sum total of these contradictory impulses is that, “They are really torn,” Lake said. “They feel very insecure about these choices….One measure of how much Democrats prioritize these blue-collar White women is the massive voter contact program that American Bridge 21st Century, a party super PAC, is targeting at them. The group is spending about $140 million to try to reach 3 million women, predominantly White women without a college degree, just in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the three states that Trump in 2016 knocked out of what I termed the “blue wall.””

Brownstein notes further, ““In general, the blue wall states are still the path of least resistance to 270” for Harris, said Bradley Beychok, a co-founder of American Bridge 21st Century. “But I think it’s pretty clear that women are the determinative demographic of this election cycle, and they have been the last few election cycles, so it’s not rocket science.”….American Bridge has pursued these blue-collar women through an extraordinarily long engagement that began in 2023 by regularly mailing them newspapers produced by an affiliated group. The effort has included multiple rounds of contacts and testimonial ads from former Trump voters delivered through every available platform, from television and digital to mail and streaming services. Beychok said one of the group’s strongest messages is reminding voters of the uncertainty and volatility that comes with Trump….Beychok said the group’s guiding principle is that even small gains with these women can prove decisive across narrowly divided states. “We may not get to 50.1 with them, but if we run a program to get what is available to us … it can be just as effective,” he said….The Republican presidential nominees won just under three-fifths of these working-class White women in the 2004, 2008 and 2012 races, while Trump pushed his share with them over three-fifths in both the 2016 and 2020 races, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN. Other well-respected analyses of the 2016 and 2020 vote likewise showed Trump winning about three-fifths of these women, with the Democratic targeting firm Catalist putting Trump just below that threshold each time, and the Pew Research Center’s Validated Voters study putting Trump just underneath it in 2016 and just above it in 2020.”

“The GOP advantage in those national figures is inflated by its imposing advantage among these women in Southern states, where many of them are culturally conservative evangelical Christians who support the GOP in overwhelming numbers,” Brownstein adds. “Critically for Democrats, in the pivotal battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, they have usually run a few points better with these women than they do nationally. In Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection victory, for instance, he only won about one-third of these women nationally, but he carried about 45% of them in both Michigan and Pennsylvania and won a narrow majority of them in Wisconsin, the exit polls found. By contrast, in 2016, Hillary Clinton, the exit polls found, stalled out at around 40% support from them in all three states, which contributed to her losing Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a combined margin of roughly 80,000 votes – and with them the presidency….Compared with Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020 posted a small but critical improvement among these women in Michigan and Wisconsin, contributing to his victories there, exit polls found. Biden ran only about as well as Clinton did with them in Pennsylvania, where he flipped the state primarily by vastly expanding on her margin in the heavily college-educated suburbs of Philadelphia….Because Biden won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a combined margin of nearly 260,000 votes, Harris has a cushion to sustain some erosion among men. But Lake, like many other Democrats, believes that to win the three big Rust Belt battlegrounds – and for that matter, any of the swing states – Harris will likely need to run at least slightly better than Biden did among women. “She is going to have to do better with women,” Lake said flatly. “She has to make up for the fact that she won’t do as well with the men as he did.”

In addition, Brownstein writes, “In a new analysis shared exclusively with me, William Frey, a demographer at the nonpartisan Brookings Metro think tank, has calculated that these White women without a college degree will comprise a huge share of eligible voters in these pivotal states. According to his analysis of the latest census data, they will represent over one-fourth of adults eligible to vote in both Michigan and Wisconsin and almost exactly one-fourth in Pennsylvania. In all three states, he found they represent roughly as big a share of the eligible voting population as the blue-collar White men who are Trump’s strongest group and a bigger group of eligible voters than either White men or women with a college degree, or non-White men or women. Every vote from every group, of course, counts the same, but the blue-collar White women are a big enough bloc that even minuscule shifts in their preference, or turnout, could easily tip these precariously balanced states….McHenry said in his polling, significantly more of these blue-collar women say they were doing better economically under Trump than Biden. The latest national New York Times/Siena survey reinforces that finding: Among White women without a college degree, 54% said Trump’s policies had helped them personally, while a nearly identical 53% said Biden’s policies had hurt them, according to unpublished results provided by Siena….In the 2022 exit polls, a solid majority of blue-collar White women also backed abortion rights across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to results provided by the CNN polling unit. The Democrats’ problem is not that these women don’t support legal abortion; it’s that fewer of them prioritize it as much as their female counterparts who are college-educated, single or younger.” Brownstein concludes, “How a few thousand conflicted and ambivalent working-class White women in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin sift through these competing views may decide the states that remain the most likely to determine the next president.”

From “To win, Harris should talk more about working-class needs and less about Trump” by Dustin Guastella at The Guardian:

The Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) recently tested a variety of political messages on voters in Pennsylvania, a key battleground for both campaigns, to determine what kind of rhetoric is working to nudge blue-collar voters toward Harris. In collaboration with the polling firm YouGov, we polled a representative sample of 1,000 eligible voters in Pennsylvania between 24 September and 2 October 2024. We asked respondents to evaluate different political messages that they might hear from Harris and Trump, and to score them on a scale of favorability.

In line with our past research, we found that economically focused messages and messages that employed a populist narrative fared best relative to Trump-style messages about Biden’s competence, immigration, corrupt elites, critical race theory, inflation, election integrity and tariffs. No surprise there. Meanwhile, Harris’s messages on abortion and immigration fared worse than any of the economic or populist messages we tested.

Yet no message was as unpopular as the one we call the “democratic threat” message.

Much like Harris’s recent rhetoric, this message called on voters to “defend our freedom and our democracy” against a would-be dictator in the form of Trump. It named Trump as “a criminal” and “a convicted felon” and warned of his plans to punish his political enemies. Of the seven messages we tested, each relating to a major theme of the Harris campaign, the “democratic threat” message polled dead last.

It was the least popular message relative to the average support for Trump’s messages. And it was the least popular message among the working-class constituencies Harris and the Democrats need most.

Among blue-collar voters, a group that leans Republican, the democratic threat message was a whopping 14.4 points underwater relative to the average support for Trump’s messages. And among more liberal-leaning service and clerical workers, it was also the least popular message, finishing only 1.6 percentage points ahead of the Trump average. Even among professionals, the most liberal of the bunch and the group that liked the message the best, the message barely outperformed Trump’s messages.

The exact opposite is true for the “strong populist” message we tested. This message, which combined progressive economic policy suggestions with a strong condemnation of “billionaires”, “big corporations” and the “politicians in Washington who serve them”, tested best with blue-collar workers, service and clerical workers and professionals.

If we break down the results by party we find much the same story. Republicans – who didn’t prefer any of Harris’s messages over Trump’s messages – preferred the strong populist message the most. And they overwhelmingly rejected the democratic threat message, on average preferring Trump’s messages over this by over 75 points. Among independents – an imperfect proxy for nonpartisan voters – the strong populist message was best received, while the democratic threat message was least favored. Only Democrats strongly preferred the democratic threat message, and even then it was among their least favorite.

….Moreover, the distaste for the democratic threat message among working people, and the total obliviousness to that distaste among campaign officials, is evidence itself of the huge disconnect between Harris and the working-class voters she desperately needs to win. Worse, every ad or speech spent hectoring about the Trumpian threat is one less opportunity for Harris to focus on her popular economic policies; one less opportunity to lean into a populist “people v plutocrats” narrative that actually does resonate with the working class.

The electoral college has become a gun held to the head of US democracy

Lawrence Douglas

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If Harris loses, it’ll be because the campaign and the candidate represent a party that is now fundamentally alien to many working people – a party that has given up on mobilizing working people around shared class frustrations and aspirations. A party incapable of communicating a simple, direct, progressive economic policy agenda. A party so beholden to a contradictory mix of interests that, in the effort to appease everyone and offend no one, top strategists have rolled out a vague, unpopular and uninspiring pitch seemingly designed to help them replay the results of the 2016 election.

Ironically, if Democrats are keen to defend democracy they would do well to stop talking about it. Instead, they should try to persuade voters on an economic vision that seeks to end offshoring and mass layoffs, revitalize manufacturing, cap prescription drug prices and put working families first.

“In other words,” Guastella concludes, “they should sound less like Democrats and more like populists.”

Benjamin Hart interviews Ruy Teixeira on the topic, “Can Kamala Harris Win Just enough of the Working-Class” for New York Magazine’s Intelligencer. An excerpt:

You wrote a piece the other day that pushed back on the idea that Kamala Harris is reassembling the Obama coalition. But she is certainly doing considerably better than Biden was in polling just a couple of weeks ago. Would the loss of working-class voters among Harris voters matter if there are offsetting gains among college-educated voters? In other words, does the composition of her coalition matter so much?
If you gain among group A and those gains balance out your losses among group B, then it’s a net benefit. The question is always “What is the net?” I’m just trying to point out how different the Obama coalition was, and how relatively high the support rates were among working-class voters in general, including both whites and non-whites — that Obama’s coalition was much less dependent on white college-educated voters. It was just a different look.

Things weren’t as class-polarized under Obama as they are now. The Republican and Democratic coalitions haven’t exactly traded places, but they have certainly changed in some important ways. So what Harris is doing right now shouldn’t be confused with reassembling the Obama coalition. Really, what she’s been able to do at this point is push back against some of the losses that Biden was experiencing in his 2024 coalition, relative to the Biden 2020 coalition. In other words, Harris, with her recent success, is getting a little bit closer to where the Biden coalition was in 2020, but that in and of itself is quite different from the Obama coalition.

You’re talking about young and Black and Hispanic voters that she seems to be winning back to some degree, which had been Biden’s big weakness in polling relative to his 2020 results. 
It’s a little hard to tell exactly where the gains are coming from, but certainly I think what we’re seeing is that she’s doing a bit better among younger voters, a bit better among Hispanic voters, a little bit better among Black voters, but not necessarily much better among working-class voters. And it appears like she might actually be doing worse among white working-class voters. So that’s the nature of the beast at this point. How all that nets out in terms of building a coalition that can actually win is yet to be determined. Right now it seems to have brought her close to something like parity, but parity is not what you need. As Nate Silver has observed, you need about a two-and-a-half-point national popular-vote margin to actually be favored within the Electoral College, given the biases attended upon the Electoral College today.

She’s not there yet, but she’s getting there, and the question is, where is she going to make further gains? The thing that would bulletproof her coalition would be to bring those working-class numbers in general back at least closer to where they were under Biden in 2020, even if they won’t get to the Obama coalition level. In other words, to try to reduce some of the class polarization in her coalition. And also, critically, she’s got to stop the bleeding among white working-class voters in particular. Because if she does significantly worse than Biden did among these voters, that’s going to filter down to a lot of the key states she needs to carry. If you lose white working-class voters by ten points more in a state like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, that’s a big hill to climb.

There’s a lot of talk about the white working class, less about the Black and Hispanic working class. We know Harris is winning back some Black and Hispanic voters, but do you have any sense of how that breaks out in terms of education level and how she’s doing among that populace, or is that impossible to tell right now?
We really don’t know. But certainly if you look at where the non-white working-class share is in the Times poll — one of the few people to break it out — she’s clearly doing better than some of the recent Biden results. On the other hand, she’s still 20 points below where Biden was in 2020. So just because she’s making progress doesn’t mean she’s getting to where she needs to be. If she’s increasing the margin she has among Black and Hispanic voters, it would be unusual if she weren’t at least making some progress among the working-class component of those two groups, especially when they’re heavily working class.

It still could be the case that she’s making more progress among college-educated and working-class Blacks and Hispanics. That’s certainly possible. But one thing that people really don’t pay enough attention to, and it’s really important and interesting, is how class polarization has now come to Black and Hispanic voters. That didn’t used to be the case. As I pointed out in my article, if you go back to 2012, Obama does better among non-white working-class voters than the college-educated. Now it’s the reverse. So that’s important. And there was some Pew data that was released before Biden dropped out, which showed pretty big differences between Black and Hispanic working-class and Black and Hispanic college-educated voters. So I think that’s totally something to keep an eye on. Again, we don’t know. The energy and excitement about the Harris campaign is really somewhat skewed toward the more educated, engaged parts of those populations.

To read the entire interview, click here.

In “How Harris Can Win Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania… and the Presidency,” John Nichols writes at The Nation that “Harris’s closing argument should be about more than the fact that Trump sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election and has since embraced an increasingly authoritarian, even fascistic, politics. It has to include a strong pro-choice appeal and a loud defense of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. And it must also feature potent messaging about the threat that Trump poses to working-class Americans and the communities where they live….United Auto Workers union president Shawn Fain says he knows what can bring absolute clarity to the debate about that threat—Trump’s disastrous missteps on trade policy, an issue that has been central to the Republican’s many campaigns for the presidency….“We’re calling out Trump’s NAFTA,” Fain explained during an extensive interview with The Nation. “Trump said he renegotiated NAFTA [during his presidency], that he ‘fixed it.’ Well, everything we’ve seen since he supposedly ‘fixed it’ [has headed in the wrong direction]. The trade imbalance in auto went up 20 percent. The imbalance with Mexico went up 30 percent in auto parts.”….Working-class voters in the manufacturing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—all 2024 battlegrounds—are well aware of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement that was approved in the 1990s by Democrats and Republicans. Back then, both parties claimed the deal would benefit American manufacturing. It didn’t. In fact, NAFTA was a train wreck, which produced widespread plant closures, daunting trade deficits, and manufacturing job losses so extensive that it has been difficult to track the precise numbers….Trump was wrong. And Harris was right. She’s said as much this fall on the campaign trail. “As one of only 10 senators to vote against USMCA, I knew it was not sufficient to protect our country and its workers,” she explained in a September statement, where she argued that “it was Trump’s trade deal that made it far too easy for a major auto company like Stellantis to break their word to workers by outsourcing American jobs.”….in the battleground states that could well decide the presidential race, an attack on “Trump’s NAFTA” could be just what’s needed to tip the balance to the Democrat.”

From “To win, Kamala Harris must handle tough questions: Here are the answers” by Bill Curry at Salon: “On Wednesday, Kamala Harris held a televised town hall meeting on CNN. She should do one every day for the rest of her campaign, but differently….Voters in focus groups say over and over they want two things from Harris: direct answers to questions and a better explanation of how she’ll fix problems they face in their daily lives. She should indulge them….The good news is that her campaign doesn’t need a gut rehab — it only needs to focus….Harris must answer every question as clearly and specifically as she can. The doubts voters express pertain to her character as well as her vision. Nothing conveys character quite like answering a question….To beat Trump, Harris must tell the truth as boldly and relentlessly as he lies. Providing clear answers to “tough” questions is one way to start. She may find that the answers actually favor her, and that some are political gold. Here are some examples: “Do I wish we’d moved faster on immigration? Yes, I do. But after 20 years of failure and frustration — and Donald Trump was president for four of those years — our administration was the first to put a tough bipartisan bill in front of Congress. Trump killed it because he’d rather exploit an issue than solve a problem. He betrayed us all. Do not pretend it didn’t happen or doesn’t matter….    I will secure and defend our borders — but I will also stop consigning many who are here to a permanent underclass. Did you know that undocumented immigrants pay $96 billion a year into a Social Security system from which they get no benefit? Without them, Social Security would collapse. Our immigrants are one reason why, during the pandemic, our economy outpaced the entire developed world. Rounding them by the millions and dumping them in internment camps would bring our economy to its knees. They harvest our food, staff our restaurants and care for our elders. They also design new technologies and discover new medicines. I won’t spread lies; instead, I’ll fix a broken system we should have fixed decades ago so it works for all of us.” Read the article for more examples.

If you were looking for a more optimistic view of recent polling, check out Quynn Martin’s take at Daily Kos: “If you look at the seven battleground states, they’re all essentially tied….“But Quynn,” you say, “If the polls are tied, how can you possibly see a landslide? You really shouldn’t be drinking this early on a Sunday morning.”….Well, maybe not, and perhaps it is too early to celebrate. But the thing is, with the swing states all so close to one another and close to even (I think the worst one is Arizona with Trump +2), that means that if Kamala Harris outperforms the polls by just 3 points she could easily win all of the swing states….“What makes you think she’ll outperform the polls by 3 points?” you ask….Look at the early voting….In Georgia, for example, women are outvoting men by 10 points, 55% to 45%. And the trend is similar in other states….I know we’re not supposed to unskew the polls and I haven’t been looking at any cross tabs, but I doubt any of them have their electorate weighted as 55% F and 45% M….And women are way more likely to vote for Harris than for Trump:

In the latest USA TODAY/Suffolk University national poll, women decisively backed Democrat Kamala Harris, 53% to 36%.

That’s a 17 point advantage. And I know those don’t add up to 100%, but if you compare just those two numbers it’s a 19 point difference….If things stay this way through Election Day, it seems like Harris has a really good chance of beating the polls by a big enough margin to take all the battleground states, giving Team Blue a total of 319 electoral votes vs. 219 for the Reds.”

“There is still a lot to be done in the days remaining in this contest, and especially in the fraught days that will follow, when Trump and Trumpism will utilize both law and journalism to pollute the vote count and question the election process,” Dahlia Lithwick writes in “The Newspapers Were Never Going to Save Us” at Slate. But that in turn demands that we in the press remain true to the things we already know how to do: investigate, report, bear witness, question, take our time, and admit that we don’t know what we don’t know. There is one side in this election that intends, as it has done for the past two presidential contests, to flood the zone with shit: to lie fluently and constantly in the knowledge that destabilizing confidence in the media and the courts is fascism’s own special Christmas miracle. We owe it not just to journalism and to the rule of law but to democracy itself to persist in believing in and also fighting for our centuries-old systems of truth-seeking, just as we recognize that they are suffering under the greatest stress test of our lifetimes. It is uniquely possible, this time, that journalism isn’t coming to save us any more than the courts are coming to save us, and that we therefore need to rally to save them both. While we are at it, we need to recognize that the moment has come to save ourselves, and the time left to us can be measured on hours and minutes, not years and decades.”

Sometimes we need to shake assumptions based on past elections, and I offered a possible example at New York:

Despite some small recent trends favoring Donald Trump, 2024 presidential polls remain stubbornly very close, both nationally (where Kamala Harris leads by 1.7 percent according to the FiveThirtyEight averages) and in the seven battleground states. Trump currently leads in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, while Harris leads in Michigan and Wisconsin, per FiveThirtyEight, but no one leads in any battleground state by more than 2 percent.

Polls are not, of course, perfect by any means. So the big question right now is whether they are “off” in some systemic way that conceals the fact that one of the two candidates is really on track for a decisive win. As it happens, two iconic political-media gurus have weighed in on this question all but simultaneously, with neither professing to have a definitive answer.

Polling and forecast wizard Nate Silver (founder of FiveThirtyEight but now out on his own) has a New York Times op-ed that expresses a “gut” view that Trump has a small advantage, but nestles it in arguments that polling errors could go in either direction. He reminds us that state polls in 2016 and both national and state polls in 2020 underestimated Trump’s vote, and also notes an explanation that could again show an underestimation of that same vote:

“[T]he likely problem is what pollsters call nonresponse bias. It’s not that Trump voters are lying to pollsters; it’s that in 2016 and 2020, pollsters weren’t reaching enough of them.

“Nonresponse bias can be a hard problem to solve. Response rates to even the best telephone polls are in the single digits — in some sense, the people who choose to respond to polls are unusual. Trump supporters often have lower civic engagement and social trust, so they can be less inclined to complete a survey from a news organization. Pollsters are attempting to correct for this problem with increasingly aggressive data-massaging techniques, like weighing by educational attainment (college-educated voters are more likely to respond to surveys) or even by how people say they voted in the past. There’s no guarantee any of this will work.”

But Silver concedes it could work so well that polls are actually overestimating Trump’s vote:

“[T]he new techniques that pollsters are applying could be overkill. One problem with using one of those — “weighting on recalled vote,” or trying to account for how voters report their pick in the last election — is that people often misremember or misstate whom they voted for and are more likely to say they voted for the winner (in 2020, Mr. Biden).

“That could plausibly bias the polls against Ms. Harris because people who say they voted for Mr. Biden but actually voted for Mr. Trump will get flagged as new Trump voters when they aren’t.”

Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki drills down into some comparisons of 2024 polls and the actual 2020 vote in key demographic categories and suggests there are signs the Trump vote is now being captured fully. In Michigan and Wisconsin, ground zero for 2020 polling errors based on underestimation of white working-class voters, Trump’s lead in that demographic is actually higher than his 2020 performance. So maybe the pollsters have successfully adjusted for past polling errors. Meanwhile, the Harris camp has grounds for suspecting her ultimate vote could be poorly reflected in the polls:

“From Harris’ standpoint, part of the hope now is that polling is undercounting her support with what have long been core Democratic constituencies: Black, Hispanic and young voters …

“The concern for Harris, obviously, is that her Hispanic support is far lower than Biden’s was, both in the 2020 polls and the final election results. But much of Trump’s new Hispanic support comes from younger voters who have not participated at high levels in past elections. If these voters end up sitting on the sidelines in this election, Harris could end up faring much better with Hispanics than the polling now shows. It’s also somewhat encouraging for her that Biden performed better in the election with Black voters than polling had suggested. Harris will need this to happen again.”

There’s a reason Team Trump is devoting much of its get-out-the-vote strategy to low-propensity voters. If he doesn’t reach and motivate them, he could underperform compared to polls showing him making gains among Black, Hispanic, and first-time voters.

If the polls are wrong, it could again be good news for Trump or instead good news for Harris. We just don’t know right now, even though many fearful Democrats and triumphalist Republicans share Nate Silver’s “gut” feeling that the 45th president wins all ties.

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.

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If you had any doubt about where UAW members stand on the presidential election, read “UAW members support Harris over Trump by 22 points in swing states – poll” by William Sainato at The Guardian. An excerpt: “United Auto Workers (UAW) members in the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada support the presidential candidate Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by 22 points, according to a poll conducted by the union….UAW members in Michigan – the center of the US auto industry – support Harris over Trump by 20 percentage points, with 54% supporting Harris over 34% supporting Trump, the poll found. The union claimed in 2020 that UAW members accounted for 84% of Joe Biden’s margin of victory in Michigan….The poll also found that support among non-college-educated men – a key demographic where Harris has been lagging – gave Harris a 14-point margin over Trump” In addition other the polling, “The union is also running door-knocking operations in battleground states to turn out the vote for Harris. According to the union, the poll has engaged with 293,000 active and retired union members and their families in election battleground states….The union also noted union members who reported being contacted by the UAW about the election had increased their support for Harris over Trump by 29 points.”

Louis Jacobson shares an update on “The State Legislatures: Several Key Battleground Chambers Remain Toss-ups” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Jacobson provides a state by state breakdown for the key swing states and observes: “In our second and most likely final pre-election handicapping of state legislature control of the 2024 cycle, we find 13 chambers that are competitive—either Leans Republican, Toss-up, or Leans Democratic. That’s slightly fewer than the 15 on election eve two years ago, and only a handful of chambers are shifting ratings today compared to June….— Right now, the Republicans are playing defense in more chambers than the Democrats are, but only modestly. The GOP currently holds 7 of the competitive chambers, while the Democrats hold 5 of the competitive chambers. One other chamber, the Alaska Senate, is controlled by a cross-partisan alliance…..— Among the competitive chambers, 7 are rated Toss-up. This category includes 4 Republican-held chambers (the Alaska House, the Arizona Senate, the Arizona House, and the New Hampshire House) and 3 Democratic-held chambers (the Michigan House, the Minnesota House, and the Pennsylvania House)….— Four presidential battleground states this year have at least one competitive chamber—Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—and how the presidential race shakes out in each of those states could have a significant impact on who takes control of those states’ legislative chambers.”

In “Learning to trust Trump’s generals: There’s a reason why his military men now call him a fascist,’ Heather Digby Parton explains at Salon: “The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg chronicled Trump’s odd antipathy toward the military during his first term, the details of which were further confirmed by Susan Glasser of the New Yorker and Peter Baker of the New York Times in their book “The Divider: Trump in the White House,” as well as the New York Times’ Michael Schmidt’s book “Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President.” They all relied on former US Army general and Trump chief of staff John Kelly as a primary source for such anecdotes as Trump’s contemptuous references to service members as “suckers and losers” and his frequent demands to use the military unconstitutionally….Kelly isn’t the only former general saying this. Just a week or so ago, Bob Woodward reported in his new book “War“ that the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, described Donald Trump as “fascist to the core” calling him “the most dangerous person to this country.” Woodward told The Bulwark podcast that former Defense Secretary and Retired Gen. James Mattis agreed with this assessment….It’s good that these former high-ranking military leaders are saying all this. But they really need to go on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” or cut an ad so that people who aren’t reading the Atlantic and the New York Times (or Salon, for that matter) will know about it. There’s no reason for them not to do it at this point. If they fear retribution from Trump, I’m afraid that ship sailed. You can bet they are already on his list. If they simply don’t want to be in the line of fire, it’s a sad comment on the military ethos for which they claim to be speaking.”

It’s time for election junkies to plan their strategy for watching the returns on TV. “When you hear the term bellwether, you might think about states in the presidential election that always vote with the White House winner,” AP’s Maya Sweedler writes in “Where are the voters who could decide the presidential election?,” “The true meaning of a bellwether is an indicator of a trend. And for that, you need to be thinking about counties….In a closely contested presidential election, as many expect 2024 to be, the results in a few bellwether counties in the key battleground states are likely to decide the outcome, just as they did in the past two general elections….Across the seven main battleground states in 2024, there are 10 counties — out of more than 500 — that voted for Trump in 2016 then flipped to Biden in 2020. Most are small and home to relatively few voters, with Arizona’s Maricopa a notable exception. So it’s not likely they’ll swing an entire state all by themselves….What these counties probably will do is provide an early indication of which candidate is performing best among the swing voters likely to decide a closely contested race. It doesn’t take much for a flip. For example, the difference in Wisconsin, in both 2016 and 2020. was only about 20,000 votes….North Carolina’s two Trump-Biden counties – New Hanover on the Atlantic Coast and Nash, northeast of Raleigh – are likely to be the first among the 10 to finish counting their vote on election night. Polls close next in Michigan’s Kent, Saginaw and Leelanau counties and Pennsylvania’s Erie and Northampton counties, followed by Wisconsin’s Sauk and Door. Maricopa is the closer.”

I figured this was as good a time as any to come clean about reasons Democrats are fretting the 2024 election results despite some quite positive signs for Kamala Harris, so I wrote them up at New York:

One of the most enduring of recent political trends is a sharp partisan divergence in confidence about each party’s electoral future. Democrats are forever “fretting” or even “bed-wetting;” they are in “disarray” and pointing fingers at each other over disasters yet to come. Republicans, reflecting the incessant bravado of their three-time presidential nominee, tend to project total, overwhelming victory in every election, future and sometimes even past. When you say, as Donald Trump often does, that “the only way we lose is if they cheat,” you are expressing the belief that you never ever actually lose.

The contrast between the fretting donkey and the trumpeting elephant is sometimes interpreted as a matter of character. Dating back to the early days of the progressive blogosphere, many activists have claimed that Democrats (particularly centrists) simply lack “spine,” or the remorseless willingness put aside doubts or any other compunctions in order to fight for victory in contests large and small. In this Nietzschean view of politics, as determined by sheer will-to-power (rather than the quality of ideas or the impact of real-world conditions), Democrats are forever bringing a knife to a gun fight or a gun to a nuclear war.

Those of us who are offended by this anti-intellectual view of political competition, much less its implicit suggestion that Democrats become as vicious and demagogic as the opposition often is, have an obligation to offer an alternative explanation for this asymmetric warfare of partisan self-confidence. I won’t offer a general theory dating back to past elections, but in 2024, the most important reasons for inordinate Democratic fear are past painful experience and a disproportionate understanding of the stakes of this election.

Democrats remember 2016 and 2020

It’s very safe to say very few Democrats expected Hillary Clinton to lose to Donald Trump in 2016, or that Joe Biden would come so close to losing to Donald Trump in 2020. No lead in the polls looks safe because in previous elections involving Trump, they weren’t.

To be clear, the national polls weren’t far off in 2016; the problem was that sparse public polling of key states didn’t alert Democrats to the possibility Trump might pull an Electoral College inside straight by winning three states that hadn’t gone Republican in many years (since 1984 in Wisconsin, and since 1988 in Michigan and Pennsylvania). 2020 was just a bad year for pollsters. In both cases, it was Trump who benefitted from polling errors. So of course Democrats don’t view any polling lead as safe. Yes, the pollsters claim they’ve compensated for the problems that affect their accuracy in 2016 and 2020, and it’s even possible they over-compensated, meaning that Harris could do better than expected. But the painful memories remain fresh.

Democrats fear Trump 2.0 more than Republicans fear Harris

If you believe the maximum Trump ‘24 message about Kamala Harris’s intentions as president, it’s a scary prospect: she’s a Marxist (or Communist) who wants to replace white American citizens with the scum of the earth, which her administration is eagerly inviting across open borders with government benefits to illegally vote Democratic. It’s true that polls show a hard kernel — perhaps close to half — of self-identified Republicans believe some version of the Great Replacement Theory that has migrated from the right-wing fringes to the heart of the Trump campaign’s messaging, and that’s terrifying since there’s no evidence whatsoever for it. But best we can tell, the Trump voting base is a more-or-less equally divided coalition of people who actually believe some if not all of what their candidate says about the consequences of defeat, and people who just think Trump offers better economic and tougher immigration policies. While the election may be an existential crisis for Trump himself, since his own personal liberty could depend on the outcome, there’s not much evidence that all-or-nothing attitude is shared beyond the MAGA core of his coalition.

By contrast, Democrats don’t have to exercise a lurid sense of imagination to feel fear about Trump 2.0. They have Trump 1.0 as a precedent, with the added consideration that the disorganization and poor planning that curbed many of the 45th president’s authoritarian tendencies will almost certainly be reduced in 2025. Then there’s the escalation in his extremist rhetoric. In 2016 he promised a Muslim travel ban and a southern border wall. Now he’s talking about mass deportation program for undocumented immigrants and overt ideological vetting of legal immigrants. In 2016 he inveighed against the “deep state” and accused Democrats of actively working against the interests of the country. Now he’s pledging to carry out a virtual suspension of civil service protections and promising to unleash the machinery of law enforcement on his political enemies, including the press. As the furor over Project 2025 suggests, there’s a general sense that the scarier elements in Trump’s circle of advisors are planning to hit the ground running with radical changes in policies and personnel that can’t be reversed.

Only one party is threatening to challenge the election results

An important psychological factor feeding Democratic fears of a close election is the unavoidable fact that Trump has virtually promised to repeat or even surpass his 2020 effort to overturn the results if he loses. So anything other than a landslide victory for Harris will be fragile and potentially reversible. This is a deeply demoralizing prospect. It’s one thing to keep people focused on maximum engagement with politics through November 5. It’s another thing altogether to plan for a long frantic slog that won’t be completed until January 20.

Trump has been working hard to perfect the flaws in his 2020 post-election campaign that led to the failed January 6 insurrection, devoting a lot of resources to pre-election litigation and the compilation of post-election fraud allegations.

Though if you look hard you can find scattered examples of Democrats talking about denying a victorious Trump re-inauguration on January 20, none of that chatter is coming from the Democratic Party, the Harris-Walz campaign, or a critical mass of the many, many players who would be necessary to challenge an election defeat. Election denial in 2024 is strictly a Republican show.

If Harris wins, she’ll oversee a divided government; if Trump wins, he’ll have a shot at total power

As my colleague Jonathan Chait recently explained, the odds of Republicans winning control of the Senate in November are extremely high. That means that barring a political miracle, a President Harris would be constrained both legislatively and administratively, in terms of the vast number of executive-branch and judicial appointments the Senate has the power to confirm, reject, or simply ignore.

If Trump wins, however, he will have a better-than-even chance at a governing trifecta. This would not only open up the floodgates for extremist appointments aimed at remaking the federal government and adding to the Trumpification of the judiciary, but would unlock the budget reconciliation process whereby the trifecta party can make massive policy changes on up-or-down party-line votes without having to worry about a Senate filibuster.

Overall, Democrats have more reason to fear this election, and putting on some fake bravado and braying like MAGA folk won’t change the underlying reasons for that fear. The only thing that can is a second Trump defeat which sticks.

“When your enemy is sinking,” the saying goes, “throw him an anchor.” That’s what Kamala Harris is doing to Trump. But in this case the anchor is Trump’s own words, and the required Democratic response is thunderingly obvious.

E. J. Dionne, Jr. riffs on the short-term strategy, in his latest Washington Post column:

Vice President Kamala Harris has an indispensable ally as she closes her presidential campaign. She carries messages from him nearly everywhere she goes. His name is Donald Trump.

At a United Auto Workers union hall in Lansing, Mich., on Friday, she showed video of Trump demeaning the labor of autoworkers by describing them as simply taking parts “out of a box” and putting them together — “we could have our child do it,” he claimed — and declaring his hatred of overtime pay.

….For Republican-leaning voters who can’t stomach Trump but are reluctant to vote Democratic, she has highlighted the threat he poses to freedom and constitutional democracy. Clips of Trump describing his political opponents as “the enemy within” and threatening to use the military against them make the point more dramatically than anything a critic could say.

Those are only two of dozens of examples one could cite, and that’s just recently.  Summing it up nicely, Dionne quotes “Geoff Garin, a Harris campaign pollster,” who “draws the obvious conclusion. “They don’t want him to be seen and we do,” he told me. “Our job is to put him in front of the public in a way they don’t want him there.””

For Democrats, it’s less a planned strategy than an almost pavlovian response. When you are running against Trump, media makes it impossible to not use his own monumentally asinine comments against him. Unfortunately, Democrats can’t ignore his rants to craft and implement a pro-active strategy, because there isn’t enough time in the campaign work day.

The media demands a timely response to Trump’s daily outpouring of bilge and venom. To ignore it would be political malpractice at best and campaign suicide at worst. In a way, it limits Democratic strategy, which is too often determined by the need to react to Trump’s mouth. It almost traps Democrats in “I’m not Trump” as a central message. There is both an opportunity and a price, as Dionne, notes:

For Harris, Trump’s indiscipline offers her the chance to seize back the momentum she enjoyed from three surges: her buoyant emergence after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, the success of the Democratic convention and her pummeling of Trump in their single debate. Since then, Trump has managed to shift attention to his own attacks on Harris, his dire and deceptive tirades about immigration, and voter concerns about the cost of living. The result is polling suggesting virtual ties in all seven swing states.

Trump isn’t doing this with thoughtful deliberation. His undisciplined temperament requires that he wings it and ends up submitting to the meanness that rules his spirit. It is disturbing that so many voters like it.

Yet, the “I’d rather be us than them” meme is rooted in polling, early voting trends and endorsements at this political moment. One problem, however, is that Republicans often rally in the final days of presidential elections. And Musk is reportedly dumping big money into GOP GOTV, so they can put more warm bodies on porches. But their GOTV door-knockers are going to spend a lot of time playing defense, thanks to Trump’s recent outbursts.

So take heart, Democrats. Harris is playing a good hand, with no major blunders or gaffes dominating the daily news. Her prosecutorial experience really does serve her well in interviews, debates and speaking engagements, and she is very good at honing in on the main issue and striking ‘the cool head in the room’ tone. She could probably use a little rest to complete the marathon in top form. But Two weeks out, her campaign has to pour it on and work like hell.