Summer Is Over. Election Season Is Here.
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According to astrology, Mars is squaring Neptune, which means that from energy vampires to draining schedules, you need to root out what's zapping your spirit. The election is basically one big energy vampire, if you think about it.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk, and folks, it's here. Labor Day is behind us, and the conventional final stretch of the presidential campaign is upon us. Don't worry, we'll ask how much that convention still applies. But either way, things are about to feel different.

First and foremost, sorry to our friends in the battleground states, you can still enjoy an episode of Judge Judy, but you might have to sit through five political ads per half hour of it. That's an actual stat from Philadelphia in 2020, by the way. There are going to be debates, in fact, one a week from today between Trump and Harris on ABC. The VP debate is a month away. New jobs reports and Fed meetings will take on a new sense of urgency.

There are probably going to be some October surprises, and your anxiety just might start to spike. Fear not. I'm here for you. We're here for you. We've been embracing uncertainty on this podcast for just shy of nine years, and we're not done yet. And of course, the next two months will all lead up to the big day, November 5th, my birthday. I can't wait to celebrate with all of you. Of course, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

It is my birthday, but of course, more importantly, it's election day. Am I blessed or cursed? I don't know. Great question. But today, we are going to mark this post-Labor Day period in three parts. First, how we got here. Two, where we actually are. And then, what we should expect over the next two months. The first two parts are going to be today. Happy Labor Day.

How we got here and where we are. And then on Thursday, tune in for that third part, what we should expect in the coming months. And here with me to do all of that, parts one through three, is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Welcome to the podcast, Nathaniel. Hey, Galen. I'm feeling extra uncertain today. Can you help me through that? Whatever you need, I am here for you, Nathaniel.

Also here with us is surveys editor at The New York Times, Ruth Egelnik, with the podcast, Ruth. Thanks for having me. And I'd just like to say my birthday is November 11th, which is conveniently just far enough that it can't be Election Day. And it's such a beautiful thing. Oh, but the vote counting in Arizona and Nevada will be testing that, Ruth. So don't count your chickens before they hatch.

Stop it. Stop it right now. I think I'm going to have a birthday party the Friday, two Fridays after my birthday. And if the election isn't over by then, count me out. You won't be able to find me anywhere. I'm not doing it anymore. All right.

Numerically, this is how we got to where we are. The third week of July, the conclusion of the Republican National Convention, Trump was leading Biden by three percentage points nationally and in every battleground state, according to our averages. Today, Harris leads Trump by three points nationally and has a technical lead in our averages in every battleground state apart from North Carolina, but many of those leads are a point or less.

So just to ask this really bluntly, and then we'll dive into the specifics. Nathaniel, how did we get here? Yeah.

It was a crazy freaking month or like three months or two months or whatever it was in politics. It was a wretched summer. Yeah. You know, everybody was talking about like a brat summer. And like now I'm like, wait, was that actually a bad thing? But anyway, our colleague Jeffrey Skelly in his article late last week looking at whether Harris got a convention bounce. Yeah.

had a fun little graph where it was basically like all the crazy stuff that happened in the election. So it was the debate on June 27th. On July 13th, there was the assassination attempt against Donald Trump. Remember that? On July 15th, Trump picked J.D. Vance. Then there was the RNC. Then on July 21st, Biden withdrew from the race. Harris jumped in. He endorsed Harris. The

They just got on the bandwagon and said, this is our nominee. And all of a sudden, Democrats were fired up. A majority of delegates said they were going to select her the day after she jumped in, to give you a sense of how quick it was. She officially clinched the nomination on August 2nd, which was just two weeks later. On August 6th, she chose Tim Walz as her running mate.

August 19th to 22nd, the DNC took place. I was there. Everybody was real happy and cheery. And then on August 23rd, RFK Jr. dropped out of the race and potentially, you know, maybe swung a couple of votes toward Trump, given that his support had become a little Trumpier. And so now here we are on Labor Day. And that's what happened.

Ruth, Nathaniel walked us through literally how we got here, but this was not preordained. I mean, had there not been a debate, we could still be here in September with Biden at the top of the ticket.

the party didn't need to rally around Harris the way it did. And also, it probably wasn't written in the stars that the numbers would flip so aggressively. I mean, from a three-point lead for Trump to a three-point lead for Harris in the span of a month. So from your maybe numerical understanding of how we got here or party machinations of how we got here, how do you make sense of the summer that Nathaniel just laid out?

I mean, I think the best place to look is at voter enthusiasm. Voters were deeply depressed about their choices for candidates earlier in this summer and into the spring. We saw record levels of voters who disliked both candidates. People were miserable. They were unhappy. And in a way, they were kind of looking for an alternative. And that's why, to some extent, you saw a spike with some of these third-party candidates like RFK Jr. People were looking for an outlet.

And maybe in a surprising way, Harris was that outlet for a lot of people. That change in the top of the ticket for Democrats swung a lot of those voters who were frustrated with both options to be considering Harris. I mean, if you look at her favorability alone, before she was the party's nominee, her favorability was very, very low nationally. And it swung, I think in our poll, it swung something like 19 or 20 percentage points in her favor after she was selected as the party's nominee.

And that's a pretty dramatic change in this polarized era where these things are pretty stable. I mean, they called, you know, Trump Teflon Don because his favorability and his approval ratings didn't change for anything. But this really swung Harris. And I think a lot of that that kind of how did we get here was just voters were deeply unhappy with their choices. They were looking for an alternative vote.

they were happy with this alternative. And it doesn't mean that their attitudes on Trump haven't changed, meaning people who like Trump still like Trump, but the electorate as a whole is just more energized.

Yeah, to put some more numbers to your favorability point, shortly before Harris became the nominee, she was underwater by 17 percentage points nationally on favorability. And as of today, she's almost pulling even. She's underwater by half a percentage point or something like that, and there's now some polling that regularly even shows her above water. A really dramatic change. And...

I want to ask the question of why again, because, yes, like Americans didn't like their choices and perhaps now they like their choices better, as evidenced by the almost evaporation of the double haters narrative. But they actually didn't like Harris. But now they do. So what happened there?

Yeah, I think that's a little bit more complicated to piece together. I think part of it is just that voters are really unhappy with their choices and they want an alternative. I mean, I think, you know, later we can talk about this kind of race to define Harris. I think there's a little bit of a honeymoon period still going on right now where voters don't know Harris and they're just happy with an alternative. So I don't know if all of the bounce is...

necessarily Harris or just happiness with an alternative. And we've done some kind of picking at that and started to dig at that to understand it. But I know others are. I think it's kind of an ongoing process that we'd all like to be doing as we get into this last round of polls. Yeah, I think that's a really important point. And particularly among Democrats, you know, I think that there was just

such a thirst for somebody else for another option. And they were just so happy to have someone that they're like, yes, I really like Kamala Harris just because she isn't Joe Biden and because they're seeing her. She's kind of coming in different packaging now instead of being kind of the incumbent vice president who's tied to Joe Biden as this kind of unpopular person running for reelection. She has now become

their new candidate and somebody who represents generational change with, you know, a lot of people in the Democratic Party and the electorate overall have been looking at. But I also think that there is something probably to like her image with independent voters, again, also probably viewing her in a different light and kind of getting to know her as her own politician instead. And I think that they have liked what they've seen. I think

It's been a kind of very carefully coordinated rollout, and she hasn't released a ton of policy plans, but the things she's put out there have been popular. And a lot of the narrative around her has focused on kind of her vigor. And she's not young, but she's younger than Biden. And again, that contrast, I think, really, really helps her. And so the popular image that people have of her on her own, I think,

Is just more positive. And I think, you know, the fact that we're kind of talking about her in this way of like, oh, my gosh, she's so popular. But like, actually, she's basically tied reflects the fact that partisanship is king and they're always going to be about half the country who's going to dislike every politician. But it is pretty impressive in this day and age, as you guys said.

And I do think what Nathaniel said about change is a really good point, which is to say voters for a while have thought that Trump was a change agent. And in a way, he kind of held the change mantle in this election, which was a really important thing. And Harris is taking a lot of that. We've asked this question over the last several polls about how much change each candidate could make. And voters thought Trump could make change and Biden couldn't. Now they think that Harris can make change. And when we ask which candidate will bring about more change,

It's kind of even. So kind of reclaiming some of that change mantle has also been really valuable for her. Yeah, I mean, some of these numbers in terms of how Democrats' attitude about the election have changed since earlier in the year are so dramatic. I mean, the percentage of Democrats or Democratic leaners in a Gallup poll that asked about enthusiasm for voting increased by 23 percentage points between the spring and now. And

Interestingly, a YouGov poll found that in July, before Biden dropped out, 45% of Democrats said that Biden had the best chance of winning. So a minority of Democrats believed they were on track. Today,

79% of Democrats say the same of Harris. I mean, just a huge change there in terms of how at least Democrats are feeling. I want to ask because we didn't have enough data the last time we addressed this question, but did Harris in the end get a convention bounce?

I haven't really seen evidence of it. And I think it's partially she kind of got a pre bounce on her own announcement and the walls announcement. And I think that kind of took the place of what would have been a post convention bounce, because I'm not really seeing a big change in the data, certainly in our average population.

What we have as our average is the day that the convention started, she was leading by 2.9 percentage points. The final day, she was leading by 3.7. And today she's leading by 3.2. I don't know, though, that you can go off of that 3.7 number just because a lot of that polling would have been done either before or during the convention. Yeah. So Jeffrey in his article looking at the convention bounce back.

He didn't look at margin. He looked at her actual percentage. And basically, she went from just under 47% to just over 47%. So it was like half a percentage point. So it's like, you know, we can debate whether we want to call that a bounce, but I think we can agree it's not a significant bounce. But Jeffrey did also find that she, to Ruth's point, had improved in the national polling average before. So she was at about 45% on July 24th. And then, as I mentioned, went into the convention at around just shy of 47%. So there was a little bit of a bump there.

there. I think it's also worth noting that like in this day and age with polarization and everything, convention bounces have become pretty minimal overall. So the last time that we had a convention bounce of more than two points, according to Jeffrey's calculations, was John McCain in 2008. The last time we had one more than three points was Al Gore in 2000. So there's just not a lot of give anymore in those numbers. All right, let's move on and talk about where we are now. But first, a break.

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We're going to dive into some of the key statistics of the race in this moment, two months out from Election Day that help describe where we are. I mentioned our national polling average shows Harris with a three point lead. Here's what our battleground averages show. So in Arizona, Harris leads by point two percentage points. They don't.

think you would really describe that as a lead, but we're just being very technical here. In Georgia, Harris leads by half a percentage point. In North Carolina, Trump leads by half a percentage point. In Nevada, Harris leads by 0.7. Pennsylvania, Harris leads by 1.2. In Michigan, Harris leads by 2. In Wisconsin, Harris leads by 3. So taking that

data together with what we know about the national picture and everything we've already mentioned, how would you characterize the competitiveness of the race today? I would characterize it as extremely tight and close. And I think I would take what you said about those swing states, and I would just say they are all extremely close. Like, I wouldn't make a lot about some of those small differences, but

to me, these are just close, tight races where neither candidate has a strong advantage across the swing States. And any of the leads there, including that three point lead in Wisconsin is within the margin of error. According to our averages. That's exactly right. You guys host averages. We host averages. We have it a little bit tighter in Wisconsin and Michigan. Um,

But generally speaking, I think what that reflects is that these are incredibly close races in the states. And even though nationally we're seeing Harris sort of have a little bit more of a lead in the swing states, to me, this is an incredibly tight race.

It's very close. This race could absolutely go either way. People don't need us to remind them about the polling errors that happened in 2016 and in 2020. Those both happened to go in the way that favored Republicans, but we could also get a Democratic favoring polling error.

Looking at, say, Pennsylvania being the tipping point state, which it kind of has been the most likely tipping point state all along, that one point lead for Harris could very easily turn into a two or three point Trump win on election night, could also turn into a four or five point win for Harris. And of course, the polls could still change between now and then, and they probably will. It's very close and nobody should be taking anything to the bank. I will also add that I think as we were talking about the sort of

post-convention but also for Harris pre-convention bounce. She's kind of riding a little bit of a wave of momentum. I mean, nobody knows how that's going to go. Is that a bounce that's going to settle back down? Is that something that she's going to ride further up? That's happening in swing states also. And so if she's ahead by a slim margin in any of these states, that may be a sort of lingering bounce from her initial announcement.

And that comes out to a little bit more even as things settle as we get into the final push. I think that's worth remembering. The ever elusive analysis of momentum in presidential campaigns with this thesis, I will. It's hard to talk about momentum because at once it both feels real and silly. It's silly. Yeah.

I'll just put that right out there. Momentum in general elections is not a real thing. We and others have looked into this phenomenon. If you are rising in the polls one week, you're just as likely to be falling in them the next week as you are to continue your rise. In primaries, it can be a different story because people, you know, there can be kind of like a bandwagon effect and everybody's kind of within the same party.

That's a different story. We are in a general election, in case people hadn't noticed. And yes, momentum is not real in politics, in general elections. But I think that it's tricky to apply that lesson to this situation because the candidates literally changed. And so are we entering a new sort of stasis and that's the trajectory that we've been on? Or...

And like you could call that momentum or whatever, but it's really ultimately a reconfiguring of the race in a sense. Right. That's not the definition of momentum. Right.

Perspectives of Harris have been changing because she was poorly defined before and maybe a bit better defined now. And so whether it's through, you know, glowing media coverage or things that her campaign has done or whatever, perceptions have been changing. And I think it's easy to perceive what has happened as momentum and to ask, will perceptions of Harris continue to grow more positive or will they turn? And I don't know. I think in that sense, the

the momentum question makes sense to me. No, totally. I take your point, but that's not like, that's just, that's not really what momentum means. The idea of momentum means that the direction that somebody has been moving. According to physics, Nathaniel. Listen, I, it's been a while since I took physics. So I feel like I'm going to say something that's going to make me step in it. And we're going to get angry emails from physicists. That's actually inertia that objects in motion. That's fair. Okay. Yes, sure. Inertia.

does not exist, right? But like, no, you're absolutely right. Like nobody should, when I say momentum does not exist in general elections, I am not saying that that means that Harris is going to fall back down to earth. I'm saying that it's indeterminate. Okay. So nonetheless, we've talked about a significant change in the national and battleground scene. I mean, a significant change by what we're used to, which is subtle movements in polls.

How does the Harris coalition look different from the Biden coalition, Ruth? I mean, I think the main thing is that Harris has been more successful with a lot of the traditionally Democratic-leaning groups where Biden was struggling, whether that's young voters, Black voters, Latino voters. These are groups that are traditionally thought of as Democratic-leaning groups.

They're places where Biden was struggling and they're places where Harris has done significantly better. Now, it's interesting because it's kind of bringing her back to the place of a sort of traditional or generic Democrat, but it's a pretty big improvement over where Biden was.

Well, yeah, it's also interesting because while she is improving notably with these groups, she's in many cases still shy of where Biden was in 2020 with these groups, whether it's young voters or Latino voters.

And also, when you look at some of the states where she's turned around Democrats a lot, like it looked like the Sunbelt was out of reach for Biden by the time he dropped out of the race. It looks like the Sunbelt is back in play for Democrats. But four years ago, Biden had a four point lead in Arizona. He had a six point lead in Nevada, in the polls, in the polls, in the polls. Yes. Important caveat there. The polls ended up being fairly wrong. Yeah. Yeah.

Given that we know that the polls now were off by about five percentage points nationally in the 2020 election, should we say it really just looks like she's getting back to where Biden was in 2020? Or should we say that, no, she's still falling actually short of where Biden was in 2020? I would say she's still falling short of where Biden was in 2020.

just looking at swing states and looking at some of these demographic groups. Like, I think we all talked a lot about slippage for Biden with Latino voters. And on the one hand, you can look at the numbers that we've seen for Harris with Latino voters and think that's a lot better. On the other hand, it's actually not that different than...

when we started that conversation with Biden and he was starting to slip with Latino voters, that was in, you know, the winter of last year. And her numbers are fairly similar to where it was when we started that conversation and say, wow, Biden might be slipping with Latino voters. So she's, she's stopped the bleeding, but I think she still has a lot of room to climb to really be able to be successful. Yeah.

And is that difference in part because there are still more undecided voters out there and they just have to make up their minds? Or is it because Trump is genuinely more popular today than he was in the past? I think it is because Trump has...

improved a bit. The analysis that we did that Mary Radcliffe did for us looking at the kind of Biden coalitions and the Harris coalition side by side did normalize the Biden results for like a two way race. So basically to make sure we weren't comparing polls from twenty twenty four with that still had undecided voters to results from twenty twenty, which obviously didn't have undecided voters. So even by that standards, Harris is still a little bit shy of where Biden was in most cases.

But what's interesting, I think, and maybe is like a little bit of a silver lining for her, is that I think she is weaker in kind of strategic ways. Right. So like if you look at the national polling average, so Biden won in 2020, the national popular vote by, I believe, four and a half points. And Harris is at about three points. Right. So that shows that she is doing a little bit worse than Biden did in 2020. But in a lot of those state polls,

If the polling averages right now translated exactly to the results, she would actually basically be right at what Biden did in most of these states, like Nevada being a key exception. I think Biden won Nevada by like three points in 2020. But obviously that is just one state and it's relatively small. But I think a lot of the losses that Harris is still experiencing are maybe in states like California or New York where she can afford to lose some of that support a little bit more.

And just to round out the conversation about favorability here, Trump's current favorability rating is net negative 10. And you can't do a one-to-one comparison between his job approval when he was president and favorability now. But when he stood for reelection in November of 2020, it was somewhere similar. Net negative 10. He was 10 points underwater on job approval. But I actually want to ask whether this matters altogether, because Nathaniel, you wrote back in April about why favorability might not matter.

We now have a situation where there's a pretty big difference in favorability. Harris about even Trump about net negative 10%.

Obviously, that's a lot bigger than the divide nationally or in the battleground states. Someone might, if you're just trying to look at favorability, you'd be like, oh, you know, if the better liked candidate usually wins, then I have a feeling I know how this election will go. But Nathaniel, you say that might not be the right way to look at things. Well, yes and no, I would say. So when I wrote that back in, I think it was April, we did, as you mentioned, have two candidates who were historically unpopular and

So what I found was that in the last 11 presidential elections, the more popular candidate won eight times out of 11. But that in some of those exceptions were the cases like when both candidates were either liked or disliked. And so when you have like two candidates like in 2016 and like we were shaping up in 2024 who are both disliked, there isn't like a positive force pulling people to vote for somebody. And it just becomes like, you know, a battle between the lesser of two evils.

Harris isn't there yet. And certainly by the end of the election, she may not be there. But if we have one candidate who is popular or at least not unpopular with the electorate versus one candidate who is unpopular, I'd rather be the candidate who is popular personally, although we aren't really seeing that in the battleground state polls. If you squint and you had to pick a winner at this point, like it looks like Harris is doing a little bit better. But as we mentioned, it's certainly not a safe lead. And I think it should be considered a toss up.

Obviously, partisanship has kind of confounded a lot of this favorable stuff, but also partisanship enters into favorability. So I would say look at the horse race polls before the favorabilities. The favorabilities provide interesting color for sure.

When it comes to the issues, we also see much larger gaps than we do in national or battleground polling and also advantages for different candidates. Trump still has a roughly 10 point advantage on the economy and immigration, although in some polling we've seen that shrink a little bit.

And we see that Harris has an advantage, even a greater advantage than Biden did on things like abortion, protecting democracy, health care. And one one area where we've seen sort of real tightening is on crime and safety. It seems like she's improved notably over where Biden was compared to Trump. Is that just information that gives us a

a little bit of a sort of a why behind the broader national picture? Or does it tell us something about where this election is headed or where we are? In a best case scenario, it can tell you a why. Like, I certainly wouldn't use it to tell you where the election is headed. You can't just total people up and be like, these are the people who are most interested in the economy and they prefer Trump. Therefore, this many points to Trump. And these are the people who prefer abortion and this many points to Harris. Like, it doesn't work that way. There are

We have seen examples of this in the past in 2022, I think being the most notable example, polls agreed that the economy was the most important issue, but in kind of targeted ways, abortion obviously ended up carrying Democrats to big wins in certain areas.

political science studies have shown that voters don't think about it in terms of the issue scorecard way and often people are saying oh that's my important issue because of the candidate they support and so like the the causality goes the other way yeah after the election maybe if you're lucky they can be used to tell a coherent narrative about the election but as 2022 showed sometimes that doesn't even work all that well so i

I, you know, I think that, again, they're interesting color, but I'm not looking at those polls to tell me who's going to win. Yeah. And I don't think that should be their goal. Right. Right. Like, I think they're not trying to do that. And I think the economy is a great example where exactly what you said is likely happening, which is that it's some views of the candidate that are kind of seeping into that. Since we saw Harris starting to shrink Trump's edge on the economy. I think an interesting thing to follow when you're looking at these is less of what it means about who's going to win.

and more of what it means about the issues that might be discussed and debated in this election. So the fact that things are narrowing on crime and things like that just tells me that's an issue that might become more important as a part of the discourse in this election. That's partially because Harris is making it more of a centerpiece of her campaign, and also that Trump wants to make it a centerpiece of some of his attacks on Harris.

So I think that's the kind of clue it's showing me, is that as Harris is widening her gap on abortion, for example, over where—

Biden was and we're sort of simultaneously seeing abortion rise in some of the polls as the most important issue to voters. That just tells me it's going to be more of a dynamic in this election, not so much that it tells me that Harris is necessarily going to do better because of it. It's just going to be more of a conversation. And we're obviously seeing that with Trump, who over the last several days spent a lot of time talking about his views of abortion and kind of like bringing that back into the public discourse.

A question here that I have is with, you know, Harris pivoting pretty hard on immigration, at least the messaging around immigration, saying that she wants to continue building the border wall. This isn't a pivot at all, but saying that she would sign the border bill is still a pretty sort of decisive position that she's taking. It's certainly a pivot from where she stood in 2019. And then Trump, you know, sort of waffling on even the question of whether he would vote for the

the ballot proposal in Florida on abortion. Is median voter politics having a renaissance? It never left, Caitlin. But it seemed for a while that politicians could maybe take more extreme positions or felt like they needed to take more extreme positions because of their base or whatnot. And it really seems like Trump and Harris are trying to really shore up

support where they are most vulnerable, and in doing so, pivoting to the center. Yeah, I guess I'd be interested in a rigorous look at to what extent that's different, because I do think part of this is that we spend most of our time in primary mode, because primaries last a freaking year and a half in this country, and then the general election is comparatively short. And so

The candidates tacked to the center in 2020 and 2016 too, but like a lot of the times that we think about when we think about those more extreme positions were when people were campaigning in primaries, right? Put another way, it's kind of like boiling the frog. For a long time, we were all just sort of used to the heat slowly turning up. And so we didn't notice that those positions were moving more towards the center. And now we've had this kind of extreme switch and we're more aware of those positions tacking to the center that we kind of didn't notice before.

All right, let's leave things there for today. That's a wrap on where we are and how we got here. As I mentioned at the top, tune back in on Thursday because we're going to talk about where things go from here the next two months of the campaign. Thank you, Ruth and Nathaniel. Thanks for having me. Thank you.

My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Trotavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcast at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.