What Will Decide the Harris-Trump Contest in the End?

After months of turbulence and uncertainty, Election Day is finally here. We still don’t know when the winner will be announced, just as we don’t know if the polls showing a dead heat are accurate. But we do have a good idea of the dynamics that will determine whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump is the 47th president of the United States. Here are the three key factors at play in the 2024 election.

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Harris’s baggage versus Trump fatigue

Kamala Harris is in a situation that would usually spell defeat for the candidate of the party controlling the White House. Solid majorities of the voting public are very sour about conditions in the country. Legitimately or not, they think the economy is terrible; that the southern border is out of control; that violent crime and disorder are threatening our major cities. Joe Biden’s job-approval numbers (38.7 percent approve, 56.2 percent disapprove, per FiveThirtyEight), are significantly lower than the minimum associated with presidential reelections (or even presidential successions by a different candidate of the same party). Yes, Harris is a very different person than Biden in multiple ways, the most important being her age and debating skills. She has worked very hard to cast herself as a “change” candidate. But in the end she’s the sitting vice president of the United States, whose own job-approval rating is underwater even though it’s superior to Biden’s. Internationally as well as historically, all the signs indicate this isn’t a good position for Harris.

While the 46th president and their shared administration represent Harris’s most important “baggage,” there are also doubts and concerns among swing voters about her positions on the issues — which the Trump campaign has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to depicting as “extreme.” In particular, she’s coping with the unpopularity of the progressive positions on immigration, crime, and transgender rights that she adopted as a California politician running for president in 2020. These positions have been isolated and magnified to an insane degree by Team Trump, to the point that you might think Harris’s purpose on Earth is to ruin women’s sports teams and bankrupt the country with subsidies to illegal immigrants and transgender prisoners. This is a lot of flak for a relatively little-known public official to fly through without abandoning her own message. And of course, Harris is dealing with the hard-to-measure but unquestionably resilient sexist and racist impulses inhibiting some voters from embracing a Black and Asian woman as president.

It’s pretty clear that almost any Republican other than Trump would be winning this election comfortably. But Harris’s most important lifeline is that Trump’s dominant position in the politics of this country dating back at least to 2015 make him as much a figure of the hated status quo as anyone, and someone a lot more central than Harris. The pull he has with swing voters is that he represents an administration that is [mis-]remembered as producing peace and prosperity, and a party that lost its exclusive responsibility for national policy way back in 2018. That’s why it has been so important for Harris to remind voters of the down side of the Trump Experience, whether it’s framed as a threat to democracy or simply a return to exhausting daily chaos. Fortunately for her, Trump has worked very hard to reinforce these reminders by doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on the personal traits that even Republicans find problematic. Perhaps Trump can overcome the damage he suffered among Latinos for the racist “jokes” performed in his name at his recent (and totally unnecessary) Madison Square Garden rally. But its echoes have served more broadly as a reminder of the 45th president’s nasty character and the nasty characters who surround him.

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Different approaches to voter mobilization

While a small but crucial segment of swing or undecided voters is being tugged in different directions by Harris’s baggage and Trump fatigue, the “base” vote may be determined by an unusual partisan divergence in voter-mobilization strategies. Best we can tell, the Harris campaign is conducting a very traditional and lavishly financed GOTV (get-out-the-vote) effort, trying to boost turnout via door-knocking and text messages centered in the seven battleground states with special emphasis on areas (both geographical and demographic) she is sure to carry by big margins. Trump, meanwhile, has largely outsourced his own voter mobilization drive to two groups — Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action and Elon Musk’s America PAC — that are focusing on low-propensity voters, by definition the hardest to get to the polls.

It’s here that Trump may be in danger of flubbing the election. Outsourcing GOTV is generally thought to be a bad idea; it sure was for Ron DeSantis in the 2024 Republican primaries, creating vast wastage of resources and mixed messages; it’s significant, perhaps, and not in a good way, that some DeSantis veterans are involved in this latest venture. But even more problematic is Musk’s heavy involvement; he seems to believe you can turn out the vote via social media more than the direct contact (personal and/or digital) that characterizes traditional GOTV. Will it all work? That’s unclear. Answering that question could matter a great deal. It is worth noting that Turning Point Action seems to be using more conventional voter mobilization methods, and Trump seems to be doing better in that organization’s Arizona stomping grounds than in other battleground states.

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Abortion rights versus inflation

While there are a host of issues and candidate comparisons that could matter in a very close election, there are two core issues that affect both swing and base voters intensely.

For Harris, that issue is reproductive rights, which was a signature issue for her long before she became the Democratic presidential nominee. Trump has tried hard to obfuscate his position on the subject, despite his direct responsibility for the Supreme Court majority that handed down the Dobbs decision and abolished federal constitutional abortion rights; but nobody paying the least bit of attention can have any doubts about Harris’s position. And the issue’s salience goes beyond voters for whom abortion rights is the most important issue, since it is certainly one on which it’s Trump who represents the hated status quo while Harris represents change.

Still, voters most focused on abortion rights are essential building blocks for a Harris victory. They’re behind that growing evidence of a gender gap not just in support for the two candidates but in turnout patterns. If women turn out significantly more than men, it’s hard to imagine Kamala losing.

The issue that is inevitably weighing Harris down most is the economy, and particularly inflation. Concern and even anger about the inflation that erupted during the Biden administration is widespread, not only hurting the candidate of Biden’s party but representing a major reason so many voters think of the Trump presidency as a sort of lost economic paradise. Matt Yglesias has a good explanation of the power of this issue in America and elsewhere:

[U]nhappy electorates are unhappy in fundamentally the same way. Inflation spiked, largely because household spending patterns seesawed so abruptly during and after a global pandemic, and though it’s been tamed, prices of many goods have not fallen to what voters remember, and what’s more, the process of taming has involved higher interest rates, which in their own way raise the cost of living. The question of why, exactly, voters so hate inflation — which increases wages and prices symmetrically — has long puzzled economists. But the basic psychology seems to be: My pay increase reflects my hard work and talent, while the higher prices I am paying are the fault of the government.

So a lot of otherwise undecided voters take either abortion or inflation (or both) very personally, and a lot of base voters are motivated by these issues to really move into a higher gear as this close election reaches its omega point.

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