Because it’s a must-win for Harris, I used a couple of recent polls to take a closer look.
A version of this article originally appeared on Jonathan Alter’s substack Old Goats, which you can subscribe to here.
Yes, the news from North Carolina is good. The self-described “Black Nazi” (Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson) might just bring down the guy who read Hitler’s speeches, dined with Nazis, and, last week, told Jews he would blame them if he lost. I see a bumper sticker: “Trump and Robinson—Perfect Together.”
But don’t put North Carolina in the Kamala Harris column just yet. The state has only voted for a Democrat once (Barack Obama in 2008) since 1976. It is, as some tar-heel Democrats admit, structurally Republican at the presidential level. That still likely leaves the race as Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania. Without North Carolina or Georgia, Harris cannot win without it.
Let’s stipulate: We shouldn’t rely too much on polls, either individual ones or polling averages. And even improved transparency can’t account for fundamental flaws, including embarrassingly poor response rates that skew samples. Would you answer a call on your mobile phone from an unknown number? I didn’t think so.
The scariest thing I’ve seen lately is a reminder that a Washington Post/ABC News poll two weeks before the 2020 election showed Joe Biden up in Wisconsin by 17 points, and he won there by a whisker. The 2020 Pennsylvania polls weren’t off by as much, but they still predicted a much bigger win than Biden received there. So the new NBC News and CBS News polls showing Harris with a four- or five-point lead nationally might be significant directionally, but that’s about it.
For all of their problems, I have to admit that I still respect these polls, including recent ones in Pennsylvania by The Washington Post and NYTimes/Siena. They’ve made adjustments to account for past errors and remain well-regarded in the (broken) polling industry, for whatever that’s worth.
That makes it even more disappointing that these pollsters contacted voters during a terrible post-debate week for Donald Trump (the period when eating pets and Laura Loomer were in the news) and still found the race to be a statistical dead heat — or close to it. The Times/Siena and a few other polls showed Harris up modestly in Pennsylvania, but not enough to think that state is anything but very close.
Yes, Harris has momentum and some presidential races do break sharply at the last minute. But right now, it’s looking as if we won’t get the big Harris win that could shut up the election deniers on Election Night and put MAGA in the rearview mirror.
The only way we might achieve that decisive result is if after Trump sees all the anti-Trump protesters dressed up like chickens outside his events — and Harris raises his cowardice in dodging the proposed October 23 debate — he relents, as Harris’s strategist, Brian Fallon, predicts. Fallon thinks that Trump is incapable of passing up a huge TV audience, and he’s probably right. If Harris kicks his ass again, which she probably will, the undecideds may swing more sharply toward her.
In the meantime, the nightmare scenario — a Trump win — is still very real, especially if he carries Pennsylvania. So today, I’m paying special attention to polling in the Keystone State, though I’m told no one who lives in Pennsylvania calls it that.
The Pennsylvania electorate is about 25 percent Catholic, with fewer than 50 percent of its voters college-educated. In 2020, that helped Biden, who is Catholic and — before he became unpopular in the state — had some working-class appeal. Now Trump leads among Pennsylvania Catholics by 18 points. Biden carried Lackawanna County — which contains Scranton, his hometown — by eight. (In 2016, Hillary won that area by three.) Unfortunately, Scranton is simply not Kamala Country. Nor is Erie County in northwest Pennsylvania. And “Pennsyltucky” — all of the rural areas of the state — is overwhelmingly pro-Trump, despite hundreds of infrastructure projects underway there thanks to the Biden Administration.
That leaves the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia metro areas, where Harris must run up big majorities. Even if she does that, she has to cut into Trump’s huge margins in the rural counties at least a little in order to win.
The Post poll shows how deeply Trump’s lies have penetrated Pennsylvania. Surprisingly, the top issue there is not the economy, immigration, health care (the largest employer in the state), or abortion but “protecting democracy.” Good news, right? Not exactly. When asked which candidate is best equipped to protect democracy, 48 percent say Harris, and 45 percent choose Trump, an insignificant gap. Nationally, about 40 percent believe the 2020 election was stolen. Those are Trump base voters, and there’s no changing their minds.
Like voters in other states, Pennsylvanians have a peculiar cognitive dissonance on the economy. While two-thirds think the national economy is “poor” or “not so good,” two-thirds are optimistic about their own financial condition. I figure these folks are in the 33 percent of the electorate who say they receive most of their news from social media and Fox News. (Only 7 percent say they get their news most often from “national print or online news organizations, like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal”).
Harris has an advantage on abortion, with the Post poll showing 64 percent say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. However, among voters who think the economy and immigration are paramount, Trump has the backing of 65 percent and 80 percent, respectively.
While Trump’s 15-point margin among white Pennsylvania voters in 2020 exit polling has declined by a third, a good sign, he is doing surprisingly well in holding down Harris’s margins among Black voters — especially males. In 2020, Biden won 92 percent of the Black vote; Harris is currently winning 78 percent, according to the Post poll. This may be because Black voters in Pennsylvania have been bombarded with ads saying that Harris wrongly prosecuted young Black men as San Francisco D.A. Last week, Roger Stone signaled that another is coming that will feature a Black San Francisco woman who was carted off to jail in handcuffs because her daughter, a sickle cell anemia patient, was truant due to illness.
Harris won’t likely respond specifically to the sickle cell case, but she may engage on this issue more broadly. While her anti-truancy policies led to sharp educational gains among Black third graders, it might look defensive and off-message to point that out.
In better news, Harris leads Trump by 12 percentage points among Pennsylvania voters in union households and a comparable margin among the rank-and-file themselves. In 2020, Trump and Biden were in a statistical tie for that vote. The enthusiastic endorsement of Shawn Fain of the United Auto Workers and several Teamsters locals may prove crucial for Harris.
The NYTimes/Siena/Philadelphia Inquirer poll held some surprises. Respondents found Trump to be the more “extreme” candidate, 74 percent versus 46 percent. That only sounds good to the uninitiated. “Extreme” is apparently no longer a slur in a good chunk of America. In 1964, Barry Goldwater said in his acceptance speech at the Cow Palace in San Francisco that “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” This may have played well with the GOP base but it helped doom Goldwater, who lost to Lyndon Johnson that fall in a landslide. Nowadays, among voters in the Times/Siena poll who say “extreme” described them at least “somewhat well,” Trump won by more than 50 percentage points. And he doesn’t seem to be paying a price for his extreme views among independents.
Harris is making strides in convincing voters that she’s not a San Francisco liberal. It helped when she told Oprah that she wouldn’t hesitate to shoot an intruder. Even so, far more voters see her as too liberal than view Trump as too conservative, though this doesn’t account for independents and Democrats (like me) who would not describe Trump as conservative — because he isn’t. What true conservative is a protectionist, a budget-buster, and an authoritarian?
Both candidates are much more popular in Pennsylvania than they were last year. Trump’s approval rating is up nine points to 46 percent, while Harris’s has reached 51 percent, an astonishing improvement since July. The cross-tabs on “leaners” are ambiguous but appear to favor Harris, which could be critical late in the game. Her most significant advantage may be that she has a five-point edge on “caring about people like you.”The fact that this gap isn’t much wider — that so many voters are still fooled by Trump — is one of the reasons for my crisis of faith in the common sense of the American people. That’s a major theme of my forthcoming book, American Reckoning: Inside Trump’s Trial — And My Own, which will be published October 22. Please consider pre-ordering it now.
Jonathan Alter is an award-winning author, political analyst, documentary filmmaker, columnist, television producer, and radio host. He’s authored three New York Times bestsellers: The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies (2013), The Promise: President Obama, Year One (2010), The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (2006), and His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life (2020). Alter has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, The New Yorker, Bloomberg, The Daily Beast, and other publications.
