What Democratic Operatives Think Could Decide the Election

If 2016 was a referendum on Hillary Clinton and the Clintonite turn in the Democratic Party after two terms of Barack Obama, and 2020 was a referendum on Trump and his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the theme of the 2024 election is still unknown. Is it a referendum on Trump and his approach to both the presidency and his post-presidential period, with not just January 6 but the 88 criminal charges he has been served since leaving office, not to mention his increasingly bellicose and erratic behavior on the campaign trail? Or is a referendum on Joe Biden and the lingering discontent over his — and, by extension, Kamala Harris’s — handling of the economy and foreign policy?

I contacted a long list of the smartest Democratic operatives I know to ask what specific factors they think might decide the election — why and how they see one of these cases triumphing over the other.

In 2016, when Donald Trump won the election, he got 46.1 percent of the vote, and third-party spoilers kept Hillary Clinton at just a tick above 48 percent. Four years later, Trump got nearly the same percentage — 46.8 percent — while Joe Biden inched just slightly above 50 percent.

In this election, Democratic strategists and pollsters agree that Trump is likely to stay below 47 percent for the third campaign in a row. The question, they say, is how much of the other 53 percent of the vote goes for Harris and how much is scattered among third parties. A related question is how many potential voters will simply decide to stay home.

“That’s why Trump’s campaign has been so relentlessly negative toward Harris and so much less about Trump’s own vision for the country,” said Evan Roth Smith, a Democratic pollster with Blueprint. He pointed out that over 80 percent of the Trump campaign’s ads have been negative attacks on Harris and Walz, mostly accusing her of being a radical leftist out of step with the mainstream. “The breadth of the attacks is because the Trump campaign’s entire strategy is to circle the wagons of its own supporters while scaring enough up-for-grabs voters away from Harris that she can’t consolidate the entire anti-Trump universe. Since the number of voters who will actually cast a decisive vote in a swing state is only a few hundred thousand, any attack that moves even a couple thousand voters is worthwhile.”

Trump, said pollster Sean McElwee, is “more bitter, more clearly aging, and now has to defend an extreme policy record and the violence his supporters unleashed on January 6,” all of which makes him getting above that 47 percent threshold for the first time even more difficult.

“If Donald Trump wins, it will be because he motivated his base with immigration and transgender wedge issues; he convinced enough voters that the economy would be better under him (as he argued it was when he was president),” wrote pollster Celinda Lake in an email. For him to win, she added it would mean that Black and Hispanic men “voted the economy and ignored the racism — and, specifically, Latino voters didn’t respond to the Madison Square Garden insults.”

For months, Democrats have fretted that Trump would turn his attention to the economy and inflation, the issues where he has the greatest ability to hurt Harris, but he has largely not done so. “Voters continue to feel stretched thin financially and have favorable economic associations connected to Trump’s term in office,” said Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster with Impact Research.

And while the Harris campaign has focused relentlessly on Trump’s role on January 6 and his appointment of the three Supreme Court justices that overturned Roe v. Wade, the campaign has been quieter on the day-to-day record of Trump’s four years in office: his tax cuts for the wealthy, efforts to overturn the Affordable Care Act, “Infrastructure Week,” and the like. This has allowed Trump’s approval rating to inch upward from where it was for most of his presidency and allow him to get better marks than Harris on the question of who would be a better steward of the economy. And though Trump has been president before and Harris has not, he has been able to run as a challenger while an anti-incumbent mood is sweeping much of the world.

“If Donald Trump wins, it will be because Democrats allowed him to steal their messaging on Made in America jobs, on trade, and on a rigged system that solidified the male vote,” said Chuck Rocha, a strategist with Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. “He will have won because voters cared more about returning to a pre-inflation economy than who is the most sane person to have in the Oval Office, and he will have won because he tapped into the anxious, grievance-filled working class as a change-maker.”

“If she wins, it’s because this election is a referendum on Donald Trump instead of it being a referendum on the party in power,” Amy Walter, the editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, told the Pro Politics podcast this week. “In 2020, it was easy to make the election a referendum on Donald Trump because he was both the center of attention and the sitting president. This time around it would be quite remarkable — we just haven’t seen in a presidential year a candidate who is a sitting incumbent who’s able to effectively make the challenger more of the story, make the race sort of pivot on opinions of that person.”

Strategists on both sides of the aisle see the race coming down to the question of whether or not Trump can squeeze any more votes out of the rural and non-college-graduate white voters who have thrilled to his message over the last two election cycles while making even small inroads into Democrats’ long-standing support among Black and Hispanic voters. Meanwhile, the Harris campaign is attempting to squeeze more votes from the metropolitan suburbs that have swung to the right.

“Harris has a number of tailwinds,” said McElwee, the founder of Positive Sum Strategies, a consulting firm. “The backlash to the Dobbs decision has strengthened Democrats with white voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Gas prices are nearing lows and inflation has cooled significantly while GDP is humming, equities are having their best year in decades, and the unemployment rate is at 4 percent. She’s avoided potential October surprises, from resurgent inflation to a longshoreman strike to a category 5 hurricane to Israel and Iran escalating. Special elections and Washington’s unique primary suggest a decent Democratic environment, and her fundraising advantage has translated into a durable ad spending advantage.”

That spending advantage could be key, especially for Harris’s efforts to stanch leakage among Black and Hispanic voters at a time when, as McElwee points out, immigration has seen a dramatic thermostatic shift, with the percent of Americans in favor of decreasing immigration jumping to 55 percent from 28 percent in 2020.

“Democrats outspent Republicans $50 million to just $6 million on Spanish advertising,” said Rocha. “How do you let that happen? We get competitive sheets each day, and the Republicans just didn’t care because they thought they were overperforming. They could have done so much better if they had tried.”

And though polls show Trump set to make historic inroads with voters of color, several longtime Democratic pollsters are dubious that it will show up on Election Day.

“It could well prove to be a mirage as Black voters rally down the stretch around Harris’s historic candidacy,” said Roth Smith. “Frankly, I have seen this mirage before in my own polling for campaigns that thought they were making gains among Black voters, only to see those voters coalesce decisively behind a Black candidate on Election Day. Harris could also stymie any improvement Trump was hoping to see among Latino voters, helped by the moronic “island of garbage” comments Tony Hinchcliffe made about Puerto Rico, which activated an entire new set of Latino voters and prominent figures against Trump in the closing week of the election. Holding her ground among those two voting blocs is probably enough to deliver Harris a win, full stop.”

And Roth Smith added there was another key demographic, one that has received far less attention that others this election season: college-educated white men. From 2016 to 2020, white college-educated men moved 11 points toward Democrats, with even more dramatic gains in critical swing states. They were the most-improved group for Democrats both nationally, trending 11 points more Democratic between 2016 and 2020, and in key swing states, including jumping eight points into the Democratic column in Nevada, 14 in Michigan, 15 in Pennsylvania and Arizona, and a whopping 43 points in Georgia.

“It is one of the craziest and least-discussed stories of what happened in 2020,” Roth Smith said. “Nearly half of the college-educated white men in Georgia switched their vote from Trump to Biden. If she can keep moving in that direction and not lose ground elsewhere, I think she will win. Actually, I take that back. Not ‘I think.’ She will win.”