With a little over three months until the presidential election, Kamala Harris inherited a Democratic coalition that was badly frayed.
In polls this year, young, Black and Hispanic voters abandoned President Joe Biden in droves. Even swing voters began to reconsider the Trump presidency in a new and more positive light. And for the first time in years, more Americans said they leaned Republican than Democratic.
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To win, Vice President Harris will need to stitch a winning Democratic coalition back together. It won’t be easy. She’ll need to rejuvenate support among young, Black and Hispanic voters, even as she reassures the anti-Trump moderates who put Democrats over the top in 2020.
While it’s still early, the first polls since Harris all but locked up the nomination suggest she has already made some progress. But while she’s running ahead of where Biden stood when he left the race, she’s still short of hitting traditional Democratic benchmarks. To win the Electoral College, she’ll need additional gains in the months ahead.
Young, Black and Hispanic Voters
Democrats have long assumed overwhelming support from young, Black and Hispanic voters. For many Democratic strategists, the only question was whether these voters would vote, not whether they would prefer Democrats if they did.
In polls this year, though, Biden was struggling badly with voters whom Democrats usually take for granted. It was enough to give Donald Trump the lead in national and battleground state polls. And it raised questions about why, exactly, Biden was so weak.
Already, recent polls suggest Harris is not so weak. It’s still too soon to tell how strong she really is among young and nonwhite voters, as some polls — like New York Times/Siena College polling last week — find her running far ahead of Biden, while others show little change. But either way, even her best tallies still fall short of typical Democratic margins over the last 15 years. She doesn’t even fare as well as Biden did in 2020, and his performance among these groups was relatively weak for a Democratic presidential candidate.
With the Harris campaign barely one week old, it would be a mistake to assume that her early gains will be her only gains. She’s a new face and her candidacy has already generated a lot of enthusiasm. But whether she will easily match or exceed Biden’s performance from four years ago will depend in part on why, exactly, he was doing so poorly.
Biden had so many problems that it’s hard to say what was really behind the collapse in his support. Were young voters so much more bothered by his appearance than older voters? Was the rising cost of living and housing dashing their hopes for the future? Was it a new social media environment and fading memories of Trump’s conduct? Was it an unmet desire for change? Or was it something bigger — the belated extension of Trump’s breakthrough among white working-class voters to populist antiestablishment voters of all races? The Times/Siena data offered evidence to support all of these possibilities, but almost nothing to untangle their relative import.
All along, the strength of down-ballot Democrats — as well as Harris herself — among young and nonwhite voters was an important clue that Democrats need not assume the worst. But depending on the exact answer, Harris might find additional gains easy, or stubbornly hard. Only time will tell.
Older White Working-Class Moderates
To win, Harris will also need to reassure voters from the rest of the electorate: older and white voters, especially those without a college degree.
This group has been the source of Democratic success in the Trump era. It was the key for Biden in 2020, despite declining support among young and nonwhite voters — and older white voters have helped give the party an unexpected edge in lower-turnout midterm and special elections. While reassuring moderates is usually at the top of any Democratic to-do list, this was not Biden’s biggest challenge. The polls suggested he retained most of his support among older white working-class voters, helping keep him within striking distance in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Harris hasn’t received that elevated level of support among this group in polls since Biden’s exit. Worse, she trails not just Biden’s 2020 levels, but his diminished 2024 tallies as well.
In a way, it’s not necessarily surprising that Harris — a 59-year-old Black woman from California — polls worse among older, white working-class voters than an 81-year-old white man who describes himself as “middle class Joe” from Scranton. But Biden exited the race in such a profoundly weakened state that her inability to match his numbers even in July may betray a deeper challenge.
One challenge for Harris: She has a lengthy progressive record on many issues. In the 2020 Democratic primary, she embraced “Medicare for All” and opposed fracking, and she now has to defend the administration’s record on the border. This is not the kind of candidate Democrats have nominated to great success during the Trump era. Will anti-Trump moderate and conservative voters come around to this kind of candidate? That simply hasn’t been tested.
So far, the Harris campaign seems to understand its task: reassure moderate voters while focusing them on Trump’s liabilities. Her early emphasis on her experience as a prosecutor — and Trump’s legal woes — seems well suited to the problem. She’s backed away from her earlier positions on fracking, the border and Medicare for All. Whether voters will find this credible is another question, but voters may give her the benefit of the doubt. Her vice presidential selection may help.
On the other hand, reassuring classic swing voters risks at least some trade-off with reenergizing young, Black and Hispanic voters. For instance, her most obvious choice for vice president (Josh Shapiro) is opposed by many progressives.
When Democrats could take young, nonwhite and progressive voters for granted, it was much easier to run to the center. Now, Harris will have to pull off a delicate balancing act. That’s the challenge when coalitions fray.
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