Tuesday offered two potential catalysts for movement in what has been a fairly static presidential race since the Democratic National Convention last month: the first and potentially only debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, and the endorsement of megastar Taylor Swift.
As a political data enthusiast, I’m a bit disappointed we probably won’t be able to separate those two events in any future shifts in polling. As a partisan Democrat, I don’t care as long as Harris gains! Let’s see where things currently stand.
Things remain extremely tight in 538’s polling averages as of Sept. 13 at 2:30 PM ET. Here are the states where the margin in the presidential race is less than 5 percentage points:
The polls will change, and as we all know, polls don’t perfectly predict electoral outcomes. But if Harris were to win every state where she’s currently ahead, she’d wind up with 270 electoral votes to Trump’s 262. (They’re polling even in Nevada, which holds the remaining 6 votes.) And while this means she’d only just reach the 270 votes needed to win, that scenario is built on the slightest of edges. In Pennsylvania, she leads by half of a point. And she needs at least either Pennsylvania or both North Carolina and Nevada—her next-closest states in polling—to hit 270.
Wisconsin and Michigan
Harris’ leads in Wisconsin and Michigan are also within the error bars as they appear on 538’s averages, meaning these states are far from a sure thing even if she’s in better shape in these states. Some good news, though: In Wisconsin, the latest survey from Marquette University Law School shows Harris leading Trump, 52% to 48%, among likely voters. That’s a decent lead from one of the best pollsters in the country, but it’s also within the poll’s 4.7-point margin of error, meaning, again, that it’s not a clear lead.
That being said, Democrats have fared exceptionally well in recent elections in the Badger State. In April, a liberal state Supreme Court candidate beat her conservative rival by an astonishing 11 points in a race that focused on abortion rights. And in August, Democrats won big again, strongly defeating two Republican-backed initiatives to restrict the Democratic governor’s ability to spend funds granted by the federal government. One ballot measure lost by 14 points, the other by 16 points. And Democratic turnout marked a 60-year record for the state’s presidential-year primaries, auguring well for the fall election.
North Carolina
In North Carolina, where Trump leads by just 0.1 points, voter registration trends have been supercharged by Harris’ entry into the race. Indeed, data from TargetSmart shows that the number of young Black women who registered to vote in the state more than tripled in the week following President Joe Biden ending his reelection bid. (Same with Pennsylvania, in fact.)
“As we have seen across the country in states we have analyzed thus far, in NC the surges in registration are being driven by women,” tweeted Tom Bonier, a senior adviser to TargetSmart. “In the first week of VP Harris’ campaign, the gender gap among new registrants was +12 women, as compared to +6 four years earlier.”
This is notable because women are far more likely than men to vote Democratic. In 2020, Biden won North Carolina’s women 53% to 46%, while losing its men 45% to 54%, according to exit polls. He lost the state by 1.3 points.
Still, there’s a difference between voter registrations and, well, voting. Democrats will need to make sure all these new voters get to the polls during the state’s voting period, which begins on Oct. 17.
Florida and … Texas
If the polling looks like this in November, Florida will likely go to Trump. His 4.4-point lead is outside the error bars on 538, meaning that it’ll take a big polling miss for Harris to win the state.
At the same time, there are a couple signals Harris might overperform in the Sunshine State. In November, Floridians will also vote on a ballot measure to restore abortion rights (which has Trump in fits), and turnout for that could boost Harris’ chances in the state.
Additionally, the Trump ticket has recently been maligning Haitians, a key Florida voting bloc. Given the amount of money Harris has, she could certainly dabble a bit in this perennial Democratic heartbreaker, if only to help the bottom of the ticket. Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell is trying to kick Rick Scott out of the Senate, and polling is tighter than Scott is likely comfortable with.
Texas doesn’t appear on the chart above, since 538’s polling average shows Trump with about a 6-point lead. But if Harris picks up steam nationally, it might make Texas interesting. We also have a potential pickup in the state’s Senate race, so the tighter Harris can make the race at the top of the ticket, the more it helps Democrat Colin Allred to defeat Sen. Ted Cruz.
If Harris cuts her margin in the presidential average below 5 points, I’ll add it to the chart. (Same goes in the unlikely event that Trump cuts his margin below 5 points in any other state.)
Takeaways
Overall, I think Democrats will outperform this polling. Their get-out-the-vote operation is multitudes better than whatever it is the Republicans have going, and by itself, that could be worth a few points. Democratic intensity is also through the roof, including in key battleground states. And Tuesday’s debate could well drive Democratic enthusiasm even further upward while also depressing Republican enthusiasm. (The first post-debate polls look good, and here’s hoping she can sustain the bounce.) As I wrote when Biden was still in the race and Republicans were more enthusiastic, an enthusiastic vote counts the same as an unenthusiastic one. But enthusiasm drives GOTV, fundraising, and engagement. The effect might be slight, but a couple more points in a slate of tight battleground states will make a difference.
And lately, Trump has just … lost it. He is quite obviously not the same candidate as he was in 2016, and he doesn’t have the incumbency advantage he had in 2020. He’s now old, sad, beset by petty grievances and an inability to articulate and stay on a positive campaign message. Screaming that the country is going to hell doesn’t just halt hopes of growing support—he never hit 47% of the popular vote in his two previous campaigns—but it’s ugly, tedious, and a turnoff. That’s why he’s losing high-profile Republicans. And I hope rank-and-file Republicans soon follow suit.
And then there’s the Taylor Swift effect. Polling is complicated. It’s not enough to determine that, say, Black women will vote for the Democratic ticket by roughly a 90%-to-9% margin. That’s the easy part. The hard part is in determining what percentage of the electorate will be Black women. It matters what percentage of the electorate are Democrats, or white old men, or young voters. And there’s no perfect way to know beforehand.
Young people generally don’t vote at the same rates as older people. In 2020, over 50% of voters under 30 turned out—the highest share since at least 1986—but that’s well below the 66% turnout of the general population. So what happens if Swift manages to bump up that youth turnout even a few points? Given the Democratic lean of young voters, and Swift’s own liberal politics, that could be worth several points nationally. Her Instagram endorsement post has roughly 10.3 million likes right now, and interest in voter registration spiked following her post and the presidential debate. Her post alone reportedly led to 337,826 people visiting Vote.gov as of 2 PM ET on Wednesday, and it spiked related web searches.
But what could help Trump gain in the polls? Does Elon Musk have some juice? Seems to me that he’s talking to the deplorables who are already loyal to Trump. Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, certainly doesn’t bring anything new to the table. Can Trump gain in the rural vote more than he did in 2016 or 2020? Maybe, but the GOP’s problem is demographic, after all—their best supporters are the oldest and the most likely to be exiting the electorate, so to say.
Trump cried at Tuesday’s debate that he got more votes than any other Republican in history, but Biden turned out even more. We do that again—and better—and good things will happen in November.
