Contradictory influence

For roughly a year now, the Trump campaign has planned for a path to victory that ran through some core Democratic voters. Kamala Harris has upended that plan.

In July, The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta wrote that a Trump ally had privately described the 2024 Republican operation’s calculus in blunt terms: “For every Karen we lose, we’re going to win a Jamal and an Enrique.” The quip, a play on Chuck Schumer’s infamous 2016 prediction that Hillary Clinton would compensate for losses among rural, working-class voters by picking up affluent suburbanites, spoke to a core assumption within the Trump campaign — whatever the former president’s weaknesses with highly motivated voters like white suburban women, Trump could win by making inroads among voters more disillusioned with politics, like working class Latino and Black men.

This crop of voters — disproportionately younger, working class, and people of color — are known as “lower propensity.” They’re less likely to follow politics and less likely to vote, particularly in off-year elections. They were also the biggest red flag for Democrats during Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign. In March, the New York Times’s Nate Cohn wrote that “almost all” of Trump’s polling gains over Biden had come from these less-engaged voters. An analysis of the paper’s internal polling data, dividing 2024 respondents into those who voted in 2020 and those who did not, drove the point home: while Trump's standing amongst those who voted in 2020 remained largely steady over the last few years, he had improved among non-2020 voters by over 20%.

The hefty batch of data showing Biden’s weakness with this group led to a spate of media chatter earlier this year of a potential “realignment” election, one which reshaped the general voting patterns of core Democratic constituencies. Now, with the campaign moving past Labor Day, the antiquated but traditional marker of the general election kickoff, both sides seem to agree the environment has changed significantly.

A USA Today/Suffolk University poll released this week encapsulates the reset: In June, Trump led Biden among the lowest income bracket (those making $20,000 or less) by three points. Harris now leads Trump by 23 points. The nearly 30-point swing is part of a clear picture in the polls right now: Among the voters often least likely to turn out in midterms or special elections — but who are a likely part of a presidential electorate — Harris has reversed Biden’s weaknesses.

In an election that seems to give new meaning to the word “unprecedented” every month, it’s worth viewing polls with requisite skepticism. But there’s reason to believe Harris’s advantage over Biden predates her recent momentum. As early as last Fall, some polls found the vice president running notably ahead of the president among these exact voters.

“Biden was uniquely weak among these people,” said Lakshya Jain, a partner at the elections analysis site Split Ticket. “The more disengaged a group was, the more they slid away.” By contrast, Jain noted, “Harris has done a remarkable job in coalescing a lot of the Biden 2020 voters.”

To be sure, the Harris campaign still faces many of the same challenges the Biden campaign did. A Democratic strategist working in a Sun Belt state, for example, privately predicted that some Latino voters would continue to move rightward in November.

But as the race moves into the Fall sprint, there are new signs the Harris campaign recognizes the sway of infrequent voters — and more evidence the Trump campaign is struggling to adjust to the new race. On Tuesday, the Harris camp announced it had reserved $370M in advertising over the next two months (for context, that is more than Barack Obama and John McCain spent combined on ads during the entire 2008 general election).

Even more notable than that mammoth topline was the breakdown beneath the surface: While $170M of the spending is set to go to traditional TV ads, a majority, $200M, will be focused on digital advertising — from streaming platforms like Hulu to social media sites like TikTok. Studies have found that traditional broadcast advertising is most likely to reach active, engaged voters, while digital advertising is more likely to reach the precise voters among whom Harris has seen gains.

The ad buy, described by the campaign as “the largest digital reservation in the history of American politics,” dwarfs the Trump campaign’s planned digital presence. Kyle Tharp, author of the newsletter FWIW, which tracks campaigns’ digital presence, argued it speaks to a change within the Trump operation.“I've been very fair to the Trump campaign and given them credit when I believe they deserve credit,” Tharp said, pointing to the potency of the 2020 Trump campaign’s digital efforts. “That is just no longer the case.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment about its digital strategy (on Wednesday night, Puck’s Tara Palmieri obtained a leaked memo showing that campaign leadership is privately advising staff to clamp down on speaking to the press).

With the election exactly two months away —  and several tentpole moments still to come, including next week’s debate — there remains a good deal of uncertainty and no guarantee Harris’s gains can fully reverse Trump’s inroads.