In A Topsy-Turvy World, The Candidates Stick To These Three Issues
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How important is Mudang in the 2024 presidential election? I don't know what that means. Mary, just Google it. You'll be so happy you did. It's a baby hippopotamus. Look at that. It's a pygmy. It's a pygmy hippopotamus. It's a baby pygmy hippopotamus. Look how cute it is. I guess it's the smallest kind. I don't know. She looks kind of gross. Oh, man. Actually, you're no longer invited on this podcast. It's just going to be a two-way with Elliot today. Canceled.

Hello and welcome to the 530 Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk, and as we head into October, there's a lot going on in the world.

It isn't all what you might think of as presidential election news, but we're going to talk about the role it could play in the final stretch of the campaign. So first, over the weekend, a deadly storm hit the southeast, causing historic destruction and killing 100 people and counting. Also, long-simmering tensions have turned into a wider war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. There have also been a number of high-profile scandals, particularly involving New York. And

Of course, there's a vice presidential debate on Tuesday night. So given the scale of the news that we're looking at, could any of this shake up the race or at least change the subject of the race?

We're also going to take a closer look at what the subject is currently. The candidates have been addressing the issues that Americans say they care most about on the campaign trail. So last week, both Vice President Harris and former President Trump gave big speeches on the economy. Harris visited the border. Trump talked about abortion and also said some demeaning things about Harris. So in the final stretch of this campaign, are Democrats,

Trump or Harris shifting voters' perceptions about how they would perform on key issues like the economy, immigration, and abortion.

Here with me to discuss it all is Director of Data Analytics, Elliott Morris. Welcome to the podcast, Elliott. Thanks for having me. Also here with us is FiveThirty Senior Researcher, Mary Radcliffe. Welcome to the podcast. Good morning, Galen. So let's start by talking about whether any of these big world events will shake up the election. And I want to say first and foremost that I'm thinking of the people who are suffering as a result of Hurricane Helene right now. The destruction and loss of life are terrible.

Maybe it is because hurricane season coincides with election season or simply because managing the aftermath of a hurricane is a very visible example of the government working or failing to work. But over the past couple decades, hurricanes have actually shaped how Americans view presidents. And I'm talking mainly here about Katrina, but to a lesser extent, Sandy, in the final days of the 2012 election. And so I'm curious, Mary,

You know, having said that, the main focus here is loss of life and destruction. Do we see the destruction of Hurricane Helene entering the realm of politics? I mean, I think if you're on social media, you've already seen people talking about how politics relates to this hurricane, which at this point, I think,

is a little misguided, right? The focus at this point should really be making sure folks get the help that they need, that the government is able to provide resources. I know the Biden administration is working with the states to make sure that whatever they can provide is there.

I think that you can, of course, see political impacts down the road, you know, depending on how this recovery and support is managed by the federal government. If folks on the ground are feeling like they're not getting the resources they need, they're not getting the response they were hoping for from the Biden administration, that could probably have an impact on their votes. A natural disaster of this scale has the potential to impact election outcomes?

In fact, it might be one of the most visible opportunities for government officials and incumbents especially to show the people what government is capable of doing when it's acting in an expedient, competent manner. The political science on this says when things go poorly, like a hurricane...

Katrina or Sandy, then you might, you know, suffer a few points on approval or like if your vote gets conditioned on that, then you're going to punish someone. But equally, if like FEMA rolls out recovery efforts in your area or state natural disaster

Yeah.

It's going to be close election. So maybe. As the polls person around here, just put a flag in any polls you see of North Carolina or Georgia in particular. Those are two of our big swing states that have field dates like now.

You might want to just turn down the credulity with which you assess that data. Pollsters are going to have a really difficult time reaching people while they're dealing with all of this destruction. So we will see polls in the field and you should, you know, squint at them really carefully. Yeah, I mean, some of the cell towers got washed away. Exactly. Right. I mean, lack of water and power means that you are probably not talking to a pollster right now.

Well, I hate to front load more serious or tragic news, but moving on to the next in the lineup, there's been some concern for a while about a wider war breaking out in the Middle East.

And that has been materializing over the past couple of weeks. So earlier this month, Israel carried out an exploding Patriot attack against Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group that has been a longtime enemy of Israel. They followed it up more recently with a series of deadly air raids in Lebanon. The U.S. and its allies proposed a ceasefire, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has distanced himself from it.

So it's unclear at this moment if the war continues to expand further, if this is the limit of it. But for a while, we've been talking about one of the X factors in this election is a wider war in the Middle East blowing up.

It has to some extent. Is it in turn rising in terms of Americans' priorities in the election? Look, if only a small number of people are telling us they're paying attention to foreign policy and that's their top issue, then I guess the natural answer here is probably not or no, not really.

And the way that I'm thinking about this is that right now, yes, you have a broader conflict, but it's expanded to, I'm sorry to say, a country that most Americans don't know exists or where it is. And maybe that'll change over the next few weeks. Maybe we should hope that it does. But in terms of a conflict that's going to resonate with most people and give more...

more ammo to attack the incumbent party, which is probably the person most at risk here is Kamala Harris because of this, then you might see those impacts if other actors in the region that people are familiar with get involved in Iran and Egypt or what have you. So I think at this point,

The Biden White House and Harris campaign are probably thinking that this relative containment of the problem is a tenable situation. But if it gets much worse, if this becomes the type of issue that people can point to and say, look, like the Biden administration's history on Afghanistan is bad. And look where Kamala Harris is taking us in the Middle East, just as an example of an argument, then that's the type of thing that happens.

Hey, it's almost October. Could be an October surprise, right? And so you're saying it's not so much that people are concerned about the specifics of this war, but that the argument would be under the Biden-Harris administration, things have gotten out of control. Yeah, it's a competency argument. Yeah, exactly. I would think voters are less concerned about the specifics of any particular foreign entanglement argument.

especially with the U.S. doesn't have boots on the ground than about just like the general sense of instability that foreign entanglements provide. But I mean, to Elliot's point, I think we have seen generally that voters don't tend to vote based on foreign policy. There's a recent CNN poll that had only 2% of voters listing this as the top issue in the election. And that's a number so small that like the entire 2% could be sampling error. Yeah.

I think this is an important issue for like the world, but I,

I have yet to see evidence that it's a really important issue for the 2024 United States presidential election. And maybe we should just take a break to say maybe it should matter more to people, right? But like in an age of polarization, partisan conflict at home, maybe it doesn't. But that shouldn't, you know, that shouldn't mean that we think that it shouldn't. Right. As with the hurricane, this is little commentary on what is important to people's lives and livelihood, but about our elections.

And it seems as though, which we're going to get to later in the show, almost no matter what happens, the economy, immigration and abortion are the issues that the candidates want to discuss and will discuss in this election. Notwithstanding all the other things that are happening in the world, including in my home state, a bunch of scandals. So late Wednesday, the

Mayor of New York City Eric Adams was indicted on five federal charges, including bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. He's alleged to have taken over $100,000 in graft, including luxury travel and hotels, and aided Turkey allegedly by pushing the New York Fire Department to permit its new consulate, which did not meet safety requirements.

Numerous elected officials in New York have called for Adams to resign. Governor Kathy Hochul has the power to remove him and said on Thursday that she was reviewing the charges. So largest city in the country with a Democratic mayor, first time indictment of a sitting mayor, corruption sort of throughout seemingly the administration. Does this shape how folks view Democrats? I think that it should shape how people view

Think about the power of the New York governor's office. I mean, it is just so cool that a governor can remove a mayor. We have, you know, you're like taught about federalism in your class. No one. It seems like no one knew that this power existed, maybe including Kathy Hochul. Tell this week.

Which I'm sure Kathy Hochul is not even that excited that she has that power. And now she has to think about the consequences of using it. Well, maybe more to the point electorally, right? Biden won New York by 20 percentage points. Currently, Harris is polling around 13 percentage points ahead of Trump. There's been a lot of talk. We talked about it on this podcast about a narrowing electoral college tipping point state gap. And it's...

If that is to happen, it's likely in part because of Democrats declining popularity in places like New York or California, as opposed to Democrats just becoming a lot more popular in the upper Midwest, for example. Although, who knows? We will find out on Election Day if that's the case. I mean, does this all get tied up into, you know, a big blue state

voter backlash against the Uniparty? Well, I mean, I think we already saw, particularly around New York City in the 2022 midterms, we already saw voters shifting a little bit to the right around the city. Now, obviously, a midterm environment and a presidential election environment are very different from each other. But I think, you know,

I have generally been expecting a continuation of that trend, especially given the polling, as you cited, Galen, that shows Harris underperforming where Biden was in 2020 in the state. Generally, I don't tend to think scandals involving one politician have a huge impact on the party in general, unless the party itself was involved in the scandal. I think people generally look at politicians as like dirty anyways.

People think pretty much all politicians are corrupt liars. And so when one of them is revealed to be a corrupt liar, no one is ultimately all that surprised. Yeah, I mean, we talked about this with Mark Robinson really just last week in terms of whether it would have knock-on effects up the ticket, reverse coattails, as we call it. I'd say this is a pretty similar situation. If New York shifts right compared to where it was in 2020, I think that's probably due to factors other than Eric Adams allegedly...

getting fancy hotel rooms from Turkish folks. Okay, well, here's a scandal that is a bit more specific and may have more specific consequences as a result. So Republican U.S. Representative Anthony Desposito has been accused of giving both his mistress and his fiance's daughter jobs in his district office on Long Island. As you said, Mary, people view politicians as corrupt. What does it matter when one is corrupt?

Revealed to be so, or allegedly revealed to be so. Well, importantly, Desposito is currently one of the most endangered House Republicans. Before Desposito won New York's 4th District, it had been held by Democrats since the

Yes. Yes.

I'll be the one to say it. All right. Look, our to the extent that it exists, a 538 house election forecasting model, maybe in like the liminal space that y'all can't see yet, but I can is close enough that a, you know, five to 10 point decrease in.

vote margin for the fourth district of New York could be the difference between Democrats regaining the house and not, and that five to 10 points is like the historical effect that we might see from a house election scandal. So I think it matters. I think it might even matter more than the, uh, like other stuff that happens during campaigns. We do. It may matter more than a deadly hurricane war in the middle East, uh,

America's largest cities mayor getting indicted this scandal in New York's fourth district I think it might because the state of the house race is so you know teeter-tottering right on 217 or 218 So this is one of those cases where localized factors aggregate aggregate up to national outcomes in a really efficient way at least efficient for for the event not to say anything about

D'Esposito's efficiency here. Well, and it's more responsive to the popular vote as well, right? Who controls the House? So Democrats just need to win four seats. And it is likely the case that whoever wins the House popular vote will ultimately win.

control the chamber, although not guaranteed. Obviously, there are some, we don't have proportional representation in America. And so there will be some distortions there as well. And yeah, it's exactly because we have the distortions that events that could have large impacts at the local level that we wouldn't have observed otherwise matter so much. And they matter so much also, because as you know, because it's so close. It really comes down to these particular seats

which are in states, by the way, that happen to be districted by either bipartisan or nonpartisan redistricting commissions. And so while I'm sure Democrats in New York and California would have preferred to redistrict in a partisan manner that would have given them more reliable seats in those states, it also means that their voters are getting lavished with a lot more attention by both local and national politicians. And

And even it seems like there's now a bipartisan consensus about ending the state and local tax deduction cap.

In fact, Trump going against his original position, obviously, he signed into law the tax cuts that put the cap there. So yeah, weird, weird national impacts of very local, particular politics. My sort of internal prior for this race, New York's fourth, was that it was basically a toss-up. If you look at the polls, Laura Gillen is ahead in all the polls that are conducted by Democratic groups, and Desposito is ahead in all the polls that are conducted by Republican groups, which to me looks like

pure 50-50 toss up. I said before, you know, I don't think scandals involving a particular politician impact others, but they do impact the particular politician that's involved in the scandal. So I would expect, you know, my brain has sort of shifted this race over to lean D in the absence of polling evidence. Yeah, this is probably the best seat for this to happen to Democrats too, because it's a Biden plus 14 district and

And he's a first term incumbent. So you're really running in that position as the Republican on your ability to provide your constituents something so that you get an incumbency advantage and can differentiate yourself so you get split ticket voters. And you're just not really doing that when you're spending your time doing these other things that he's been spending his time doing. I'd also just like to take this moment to issue a plea. Public pollsters, please pull house races.

Please, please, please, please, please. All right. Well, before we forget, there is a VP debate on Tuesday night. So that's my last question here. Does this matter? Vance and Walsh will meet for the first and only time. It may well be the last debate of either a president or vice presidential candidate in the 2024 race debate.

Ultimately, what do we know from history or what should we expect from this specific case about how it could impact the campaign? Yeah, we talked before about the VP selection and VP sort of campaigning and performance in terms of how it impacts the top of the ticket. And I guess I'll just reiterate some of the things we said before, which is basically that like the VP doesn't really have any impact unless they're like devastatingly bad, right?

Yeah, significant. Maybe I have a different definition of that, given the state of play. The way that I was thinking about this...

that the VP debate is one of the last chances for a member of either ticket to reframe the Conversation in their favor and if you think about the debate the presidential debate a Trump spent a lot of time like not taking very obvious opportunities to hammer the incumbent party on stuff like inflation and cost of living and he kept a

you know, going back to like the very red meat partisan talking points that do well on his on his stump speeches. So for example, they're reading cats and dogs as the chief example of this. If Vance is more disciplined, he does have the chance to say, you know, like,

Like, hey, Tim Walls, you are a big spending liberal, you know, whatever from Minnesota and turn that back into an indictment of the incumbent party's record on inflation.

On the other hand, if Tim Walz can say, look how good the economy has grown, at least for some segments of the population over the last three years, look at our recovery in comparison to the rest of the world, XYZ, then they have the chance to, I think, continue some of Kamala Harris's momentum on the economy question. And since that's the biggest issue that undecideds probably will be factoring in over the next month, then I think that that has potential significant effects. Yeah.

I don't know. I'm going to push back on that just a little bit. I just don't know that there's a lot of undecided voters that are going to pay attention to a vice presidential debate.

In early October. I agree. But the thing is, there's like a base rate thing here is they probably won't see anything else. If they see anything, they will see this and they'll see like the news the week before the debate when they're Googling or whatever. Yeah, I don't know. I'm going to remain skeptical. All right. Well, we'll have plenty more on the debate after it happens with a late night podcast. But for now, let's move on and talk about the...

the number one issue, Elliot, that you said voters are going to be thinking about, the economy. We'll also talk about immigration and abortion, but first, a break.

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As the campaign enters its final weeks, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are trying to improve their standing on key issues that could determine the outcome of the presidential race. Last week, both candidates gave major speeches outlining their economic policies. Harris visited the southern border and talked about immigration. Trump tried to defend his record on abortion. Today,

We're going to check in on how voters view Trump and Harris on those three issues, the economy, immigration, and abortion. The economy is, of course, the issue Americans rate as the most important, both generally and to their vote. Immigration is perhaps Harris's biggest vulnerability, and abortion is perhaps

So to what extent do voters trust these two candidates on these issues? And have they been able to move the needle at all? So let's start with the economy. I mentioned that both candidates gave big speeches. I would encourage folks to go if they're curious about what the candidates have to say, check them out in their entirety. But to give some sense, it's

In Pittsburgh, Harris said that she is indeed a capitalist. She talked about building an opportunity economy, which she has talked about before. She did a lot to talk about building wealth and starting a business, you know, tax incentives for starting new small businesses, including a $50,000 tax deduction, as well as incentives to build more homes. On the economy, when it comes to Trump, he said,

He talked about how basically the country is in trouble, talked a lot about inflation and said that if Kamala is reelected, her Green News scam will obliterate the economy of your Commonwealth, saying this in Pennsylvania. He said that she cost the typical family $29,000 because of her inflation policy.

policy. CBS fact-checked this. The number is $28,000. That figure is largely correct in terms of how much more Americans may be spending, but fails to include income growth as a result of all of the inflation-slash-spending over the past, or wage increases, over the past three and a half to four years. So they're both trying to draw distinctions and focus on what they think maybe are their advantages or their opponents' disadvantages.

We know that this was a really big issue for Biden back at the beginning of the year. I mean, we were seeing double digit margins in terms of how Trump was outperforming Biden. What are we seeing now? Has Harris been able to shift?

the needle at all in her favor on this? She's definitely moved the needle in her favor. So if you if you look at polling between Trump and Biden for Biden dropped out of the race, Trump had more like a 10 or 11 point advantage on the economy. And and that's narrowed now to maybe a three or four point advantage, one compared to Harris. So that's a pretty significant improvement.

But one of the things I think particularly on the economy that Harris has done that's been very smart, is she spent a lot of time focusing on housing. Because when voters talk about the economy, they mean a lot of things. There's a lot of pieces, a lot of issues here. We've talked about how economy is maybe not a great measure of a salient voting issue because it's not always clear what voters mean by that or what politicians mean by that, frankly.

But she's actually managed to build up an advantage on handling housing. And that's a much more tangible piece of this that's really important to voters, particularly in some of the swing states where we've seen housing costs increase enormously. I'm thinking of North Carolina and Nevada, which have had prices increase faster than the nation as a whole. She has almost a 10-point advantage on handling housing in the swing states, according to the most recent Morning Consult Bloomberg poll. So I think in

In that aspect, she's been very smart to focus on a set of really tangible policies that address a piece of the economy that matters a lot to voters.

Yeah, I think that the Harris campaign has done a really good job at like a campaign 101 tactic here, which is if you want to talk about an issue, but there's been one label attached to you and like find a new label to talk about that issue. So for the Biden White House, it was inflation. And evidently, that was the type of drag that they couldn't escape.

Now, the Harris White House talks about the, quote, cost of living crisis, which is smart in a couple of ways. It allows them to talk about the same problems in a way that's not so negatively valenced already for the campaign and like attached to an image of incompetence for the incumbent. And it also gives them a advantage on talking about the next phase of the problem as people get

used to higher prices, which the economics research tells us they tend to do over like a six year period. And you know, as they forget that the prices went up, they will still have high prices to deal with. And the candidate who's been talking about this crisis for a longer period of time might have some advantage in talking about that thing. So I think that the utility of that is evidenced in the polls, the Harris campaigns gained on

you know the question do you what candidate do you trust more to handle this issue like six points in an echelon insights poll and a poll that came out on friday two points in morning consult from august to september so we'll see where those numbers land in in mid-october but uh yeah i don't really think we believe in momentum here but that is definitely a good trend

All right, let's talk about one of Harris's most vulnerable issues, which, of course, is immigration. She went to the border in Arizona on Friday to give a pretty hawkish speech on the border as far as things go for Democrats, particularly over the past few years.

She said that the United States is a sovereign nation and, quote, I believe we have a duty to set rules at our border and enforce them. And I take that responsibility very seriously. She said that she would go further, actually, than the bipartisan border bill that was hashed out amongst a group of people.

a group of bipartisan senators earlier this year that Donald Trump didn't ultimately want passed. You know, she talked about her own personal biography. She said the issue of border security is not a new issue to me. I was attorney general of a border state for two terms. I saw the violence and chaos that transnational criminal organizations cause and the heartbreak and loss from the spread of their illicit drugs.

She went on to talk about things like DACA and, you know, an earned pathway to citizenship. But that was certainly towards the end of, you know, maybe about a half an hour speech at the border. So Trump responded. I think he was upset a little bit about this speech. He criticized Fox News for airing the speech. And he said in Wisconsin following her speech, I will liberate Wisconsin from the mass migrant invasion. We're going to liberate the country. Then he went on to say,

say something that's been getting quoted quite a lot in the time since, quote, Kamala is mentally impaired. If a Republican did what she did, that Republican would be impeached and removed from office. And rightly so. Joe Biden became mentally impaired and Kamala was born that way. I mean, do you just need any more evidence for what I said earlier about this guy not being able to stay on message? No, probably not. Right. This is his strongest issue. You know, you said it takes six years for voters to forget about price increases.

Maybe it takes something similar for people to forget what the migrant crisis looked like just a year ago, for example. I mean, in December, there were there's a record breaking 300,000 encounters at the southern border under Obama and Trump that look more like 50,000 monthly encounters at the southern border. And so while, of course, Biden did take this executive action earlier this year,

People can ask for themselves and see with their own eyes, you know, why didn't you do anything earlier? Why did you wait three and a half years to do this? And Democrats will counter that Trump tanked their bipartisan bill, but you can still ask the former question nonetheless. So we'll talk about Trump's sideshow in a second. But has Harris been actually able to improve her standing by becoming a little more hawkish on the border?

No, no. And Biden wasn't able to really pull it off either. I think that will come as a surprise to some people who, as you, you know, as you reference Galen, there's this counter argument like, oh, we tried to do something. But at the end of the day, voters do notice conditions and especially in a media ecosystem that's very fractured, um,

And you know on the right really harps on immigration a lot There's you know There's lots of social media videos that go right that get taken out of context and go viral or go viral also sometimes for the right reasons and That sort of like constant humdrum and reminder of this to people is not something that goes away very easily and that's you know, that's evidence than the data I think

Yeah.

Yeah, and even what immigration rights advocates would say are the most draconian policies that Trump has been proposing are supported by slim majorities of Americans. So, for example, the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants is supported by 54% of Americans in a recent Scripps News Ipsos survey, which is, as a policy, probably very difficult to pull off and would require a significant amount of resources and cause a lot of chaos. But even so, as...

Majority support. So right. Well, lots of the framings of these questions like don't mention what it would take to actually accomplish the thing, which I think can get you can get the pollsters in trouble. Yes, of course. I could give you examples of questions that have a little more detail here where you see less support. This one is just very neutral. The mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.

But it also serves as a comparison point. I mean, right. This is basically how the question has been asked for the past decade. And we have seen significant growth in support for this kind of policy. Yeah, exactly. With all the work that the Harris campaign has has been trying to do on this issue, I just don't see it moving the needle. Yeah, it looks like Trump today has a...

roughly nine percentage point advantage on the issue of immigration, whereas earlier in the year against Biden, he had an 11 point advantage on immigration. So maybe subtle improvements, but really, this is an issue that Trump has defined himself on for a decade. And so it's hard for in the final six months of a campaign, Democrats to decide, oh, this is a big vulnerability, we're going to turn things around that have been a decade in the making. But

To the broader point about whether Trump is campaigning on a strength, he took his opportunity to talk about Kamala Harris's mental capacity when responding to her speech. You know, obviously that's just like offensive and unnecessary. It's rude. But does this shape how folks in turn see Trump? I mean...

I doubt it. He does this hurling insults at his political opponents frequently. He's said before that he doesn't think that Kamala Harris is very smart. And I think in general, folks have a pretty good sense of how they view Trump personality-wise that I don't think this would change. Yeah, but I guess it's not necessarily a question of whether it changes anything or whether it reinforces the stereotypes that could cause the election to go against him. One thing we haven't really mentioned is that

His unfavorable rating is minus 10 now. He's 12 points behind Harris's net favorability rating of plus one. Historically, that measure is predictive, loosely predictive, but predictive of outcomes nonetheless. So if this is the type of thing where he's not taking very obvious opportunities to hammer home the weaknesses of the incumbent party and doing his normal thing that reinforces the electorate's predisposition

Right. I actually think these two stories go together in a way, which is that.

Trump's favorability rating is 43%. So 43% of Americans have a positive view of Trump. In order to win this election, he is going to have to win the support of somewhere in the range of 47, 48% of Americans vote.

votes. So he will need to rely on people who have a negative view of him to still cast a ballot, hold their nose and vote for him nonetheless. Now, what Harris can do about that is to try to make herself look like a viable alternative, like a reasonable alternative for people who think Trump is just rude or mean or they don't like this sideshow.

And what she has been doing is trying to moderate and even give voice to some conservative positions on issues like the economy. I mean, I watched her whole speech in Pittsburgh. Half of it could have been given by Romney in 2012. The other half of it would have been given by Obama in 2012. It really was combining sort of all of the above. But, you know, and also talking about

The why behind the border piece, not just, oh, I'm going to protect the border, but it matters that America is a sovereign nation. In order for us to be a sovereign nation, we have to have a secure border. And rolling out Republican endorsements, you know, somewhat left and right. Jeff Flake from Arizona, the most recent endorsement, but also having the Cheney's endorsements and so on.

trying to position yourself as a reasonable alternative if you do not like Trump's sideshow. That's been kind of the whole goal of all of this. And so the combination, you know, who knows if it's enough? I mean, people may just see Trump as he's rude, he's mean, but he'll handle the issues to the, you know, the ability that I want or whatever. But these two things together are a clear dynamic in the race. Harris really trying to make herself seem like a reasonable alternative and Trump continuing a sideshow.

And to the extent that Harris is trying to present herself as a reasonable alternative that can be competent and is generally likable, she's actually had a lot of success with that. I mean, if you look at her favorability rating since she took over at the top of the ticket, I've never seen anything like this in modern American polling. Bush post 9-11.

Literally, that's the like that's the most obvious comparison in terms of how her favorability has skyrocketed. Yeah, it's like a hockey stick. It just goes straight up. So what Elliot is sort of saying and what may be possible is to raise in voters minds the salience of their distaste for Donald Trump. I just don't know if you can raise that salience above the issues that affect their day to day lives. So, I mean, sort of yet to be seen.

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So when it comes to Trump's most vulnerable issue, abortion, he said last week at a speech in Pennsylvania, quote, you will be protected and I will be your protector. Women, he goes on to say, women will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion. It's all they talk about abortion because we've done something that nobody else could have done. It is now where it always had to be with the states and a vote of the people.

So Trump, I think, recognizes that abortion is a vulnerability for him, particularly in the aftermath of the 2022 midterms and the referenda across different even red states that voted to ensure that abortion rights were legal. Has he had any success in mitigating that vulnerability? No. No.

Harris's lead on this is around 18 points now. Biden's lead before he dropped out of the race was around 15 points. So has she improved on that? Yes. But actually, of the three issues we looked at today, this is the one where one candidate has the largest advantage, both with Biden in the race and with Harris in the race. The Democrats have a much wider advantage on abortion than the Republicans have on the economy or immigration.

Although the salience is sort of different there, too. Yes, exactly. That's the question. Will this be a salient enough issue that voters are thinking about it when they cast their vote? Will it be driving their vote? Does it motivate some voters to turn out that didn't turn out before? Not sure. Yeah.

If you look at the polls that ask people, what's the most important issue facing the U.S., which is different than like, what are you going to vote on? But still, abortion is 10 percent. Ten percent of people say that's the most important issue facing the U.S. It's the same, let's say, immigration, at least according to YouGov's tracking. And it's increasing since Biden dropped out of the race. It was at six percent when when that happened. And it's a 10 now. So this is one of those issues.

One of those examples where if you hit the nail hard enough and like you keep reminding people of this issue that you have a big lead on then you know could have theoretically

a double whammy effect. And it's, you know, I don't think it's necessarily something we should shrug off. No, I wouldn't shrug it off at all. I mean, we've seen research suggesting that what's your most important issue doesn't translate exactly into what's the issue you're going to vote on. So I actually would not be surprised if the number of people who said abortion was a major deciding factor in their vote is actually higher than that 10% when all is said and done. Right. It's also usually not an issue or any one issue that decides people's votes. It's a

It's a constellation of things. And I think this is a good reminder, looking at all of this polling, that millions of Americans who think that Harris would be better on abortion will vote for Trump. And millions of Americans who think Trump would be better on immigration will vote for Harris because, you know, neither party really owns the popular positions across the board. The majority opinion zigzags across different issues that you are discussing.

looking at. Just to put some numbers on that, in the most recent New York Times-Siena poll, 9% of Harris voters said they thought Trump would be better on the economy. 12% of Trump voters said they thought Harris would be better on abortion. 10% of Harris voters said they thought that Trump would be better on immigration. So somewhere between, you know, 9, 10, 11, 12%.

on each of these individual issues are planning on voting for the candidate that they say would do a worse job. Yes, American voters are indeed complex and have nuanced opinions about all of these things. I think we're going to leave it there.

for today. Thank you, Mary and Elliot, for joining me. Glad to be here, Galen. It was awesome. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or a review in the Apple Podcast Store, or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you soon. ... ...