A Pollster’s Guide to the Homestretch
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It's entirely online and super flexible. Fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a therapist and get started in minutes. Visit betterhelp.com slash runup today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash runup. Hey, y'all. It's Ested. I'm coming to you before the show to let you know about something new here happening at The Times. NYT has created an audio subscription. And starting soon, they're going to be asking people to subscribe.

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To learn more, you can go to nytimes.com slash podcast. And thanks for listening. I'll see you on the road. Hello? Hi, my name is Ested Herndon. I'm a reporter with the New York Times. I was looking for Kate. And you have found her. How are you? Good. How are you? I'm doing good. Thank you so much. Earlier this week, I hopped on the phone with one of our listeners, Kate.

I worked for the California State Assembly for almost 30 years. And I also was elected to the city council in Ukiah, California in 1980, possibly before you were born. So you've been someone who's been politically active for a long time, both locally and on the state level. You got it. Yeah. And I'm not like, I'm not a player, but I am a...

Kate is a Democrat who lives in California. She's retired. And she wrote into the show because she, like me, is spending a lot of time these days thinking about what this election might come down to. So I...

I have been listening to your podcast since my son told me about it, and it seems so much you were talking about national trends and national demographics and subgroups. And it's not you, but the whole kind of political class appeared to be looking more at the big nationwide picture. And my concern is...

35 to 100,000 votes that Kamala needs to win the swing states. You mentioned kind of when you wrote in to us that you have been working on some models and you have been kind of trying to think through this yourself. Can you take me through some of that? Oh, sure. Absolutely. Well, just so you know, I am not alone in this and I have what I would call some friends we all, you know, we share just to understand the psychology of it because

Because we're all obsessed and very concerned about the election, we have to control our access to these things. Because if you do doom scrolling, then you don't have a life. So there's all kinds of different online simulations where you can kind of turn states blue and red and see who wins. That's kind of what we're doing here, is that we're looking to paths to win.

My current feeling is Arizona is lost, okay? And Georgia, probably lost. North Carolina, probably lost? Not sure. Not sure. As I walk through, it's like it gets down to Pennsylvania. Of course, Kate's right. In the end, this may all hinge on a handful of states and just a few thousand votes.

Is there anything else that really comes up for you? I guess if I was queen, I would ask, what is the latest thinking of very smart people on the swing states? Yeah. I think that we definitely can get some answers for you on what the state of play looks like in some of those swing states and what might be the things that puts one campaign over the top over another. Thank you. Oh, that's so great.

So, with one month to go until Election Day, I wanted to have a conversation with someone who thinks about the landscape of the 2024 election more than anyone else I know. My colleague Nate Cohn, general polling whiz, and chief political analyst for The Times. Today, 2024 by the numbers. Who has the advantage between Harris and Trump? What's the most important battleground state?

And what are the chances that we actually know the result on election night? From the New York Times, I'm Astead Herndon. This is The Run-Up. Can you introduce yourself and tell us who you are? I'm Nate Cohn. I cover politics and elections and polling. And I'm responsible for the methodology of the Times-Siena survey.

In this period of an election, considering we are just about one month out and every new Time Sienna poll seems to have so much weight on it, both from the campaigns and just general public following this. Do you feel like how do you feel in this election period? Does it make you more excited to have all of those eyeballs like on you and your work or does it stress you out any? Yeah.

Wow, I have no idea how to answer that question. You know, at this stage of the campaign, I'm trying not to think. I'm sort of trying to become a machine that produces the things I'm supposed to produce and tune out all of the conversation about it. Polling is rare and is different from much of what The Times does. And so far, it almost by definition is not precise. It's

inherently uncertain and imprecise in all of these various ways. And there's also, as I believe you once put it, a scoreboard at the end. So if I thought too much about all that is said about our polls, I would go completely insane, I think, because, you know, in the end, the final result will tell the tale and we don't know what the final result will be. And although I think the polls can have good years and bad years, they will not be perfect. Mm hmm.

Nate and I talked on Tuesday, the day a new national poll was released from the New York Times and Siena College that puts Vice President Kamala Harris slightly ahead for the first time, with 49% for Harris to 46% of the vote for former President Donald Trump. I wanted to start with that poll and to understand what was driving those results for Harris. The source of strength for Harris in the poll are white voters with a college degree in California.

Most of the polls that we conduct Harris is doing better than Joe Biden did among white college graduates than four years ago And in most the polls we do she's doing worse among basically every other demographic group whites without a degree black and Latino voters and so on in this particular poll She actually doesn't do quite as poorly as she has in some of our other polls among white voters have a degree and black and Latino voters and

But she's not doing as well as Biden still. It's that extra strength among white college graduates that gives her the lead overall. There are more signs of softness for Harris. There are more voters who say she's a flip-flopper. There are more voters who say that she's too far to the left. On some of the character-type questions where she does well,

like honesty. She still does fine, but they're not, they're just not quite as shiny and glowy as they were. So the Harris plus four is being driven by a growth among Democrats in a population they've been doing better and better in in the Trump years, white voters with the college degree. But it's not like the story of this Harris plus four result is at odds with some of the things we've been seeing earlier about Democrats trailing off among other groups, people without college degrees, Black and Latino voters. It's just that she's done better among a different slice of the election.

That's right. And there's another layer to add, which is that compared to some of our previous polls, Harris is benefiting more from narrowing to the group of likely voters compared to the broader group of registered voters. You know, when we conduct a survey, we take a poll of everyone who's registered to vote. But as you know, not everyone who's registered will turn out. And so pollsters narrow the scope of their polling to the likely electorate who we think will show up in November. Right.

there are invariably differences between the likely electorate and the broader group of registered voters. In this poll, Harris does two points better among the people who we believe are likely to vote than the broader group of registered voters. That's her strength in this poll. Well,

Well, taking this all in aggregate, at this point, would you say it's fair to say that the race is largely tied or with a slight Harris advantage? How would you describe just what the likelihood of win comes to at this point? I think it's close enough to a toss-up that I don't really think it's worth squinting to see who you think might have the edge. I do think that if you had to squint and say which candidate leads in the average by even 0.1 percentage points in states worth 270,

That answer is Harris and it's Ben Harris for well over a month because she has that tiny little edge in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin.

I have to tell you that in the last two presidential elections, advantages for Democrats in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin have not always materialized on Election Day. I'm not predicting that will happen again, but that memory is near enough in many of our minds that I think it's a mistake to read into a point one point lead in some of these states. Right. So I think it's we may as well call it a toss up. And that

That applies, by the way, to the states where Trump has a very narrow, if consistently narrow, lead. North Carolina, Georgia, perhaps Arizona or Nevada. You know, these are states where all the polling points toward a competitive race and polling is not good enough to give either candidate an overwhelming advantage if it's one or two points here or there. One thing that does seem that polling can tell us is that Donald Trump is not seen as inherently unelectable.

amongst the broader public in a way that some people thought that he might be. You know, he's been indicted. He's been convicted. He's chosen an unpopular VP candidate per favorability ratings, had a widely panned debate. You know, like all of those like assumed factors of a presidential race. They would be devastating to any other candidate. All those tests consistently. So what does that tell us about how either the country views him or about the importance of those tests in general?

I think that for almost any other candidate and maybe every other candidate that has sought the presidency in recent years, this stuff is disqualifying and game over. I think it is different for Donald Trump. And I think we could devote the rest of the episode. You probably devote a whole podcast to untangling the different sources of Trump strength, some of which are.

maybe even predated his run for the presidency. Even the elements of his ideology, I think, also deserve to be given some credit here. You know, I think for a compared to the Republican Party of 12 years ago, Donald Trump is on vastly better ground on the issues. The series of positions that he took on immigration, trade in China, this this bundle of issues together is incredible.

aimed square at the most persuadable kind of voter in american politics which is a voter without a college degree who doesn't have ideologically consistent left right views on the issues and wants a president who will sort of fight for them and against whatever it is out there that's out to get them and i think that's an extremely powerful appeal that he has and that other candidates simply don't and to your point

In this cycle, rather than four years ago, Democrats are kind of agreeing with him on the issue front. I think they are extremely telling. They are acknowledging the importance of immigration. They are kind of conceding the, you know, inflation argument, just presenting themselves as a better solutions for that argument.

They talk about abortion certainly more than Republicans do, but it's not as if the range of issues Donald Trump is talking about are invalid for Democrats. They're actually agreeing with the premise of the problem. Absolutely. Can I then ask the flip side of the question? We know kind of his unique strengths, but what are his unique weaknesses that have put him in a position to possibly lose to Kamala Harris?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth flipping around for a second this whole idea. What if he is still being really weighed down by all of these issues? What if he would be cruising to a clear victory if he hadn't been offending people? What if he would be favored in all of the key states if it weren't for the fact that he tried to steal their same... Right, I'm like, if he didn't do January 6th, he might be killing this thing. There's the same...

It's their votes, you know, and I don't think if he if in the end, Donald Trump loses these key battleground states by a hair. How many of them were affected by the Donald Trump stop the steal campaign often being aimed at taking their votes? Yeah. And I think that if you could wave a magic wand, you would be perfectly fine to undo the decision in Dobbs. But that's another self-inflicted wound brought about by the conservatives that he appointed to the Supreme Court.

If it weren't for those things, the self-inflicted wounds of abortion, democracy, and arguably the last decade of controversial remarks that alienated millions of voters, maybe he would be winning decisively. And maybe some of what's going on in American politics nowadays is that the two parties are both trying to inch towards a new centrist kind of position that Donald Trump uncovered but cannot capitalize on himself. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's an interesting question. Can I ask, what is the most likely tipping point states? You mentioned battlegrounds, which, of course, you know, this thing will all come down to. We know the states that feel familiar, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan. Are those the most likely tipping point states when it comes to the Electoral College? Come election night, should we all just be waiting for Pennsylvania? Probably. I think that

There's obviously a lot of uncertainty, but the clearest path for Harris runs through Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and Trump has to break one of them. I think you can make a case for all three of those states being the easiest one for Trump. We know that there's a unique challenge for Democrats in Michigan because of Arab and Muslim voters, a group that represents not enough of the electorate to single-handedly decide the outcome, but enough to quickly take a state that

Biden won by nearly three points last time and moved to something much closer to a dead heat if everything else is held equal in Wisconsin. It is true that the polls show her doing well, but this is the state where the polls have the greatest record of overestimating Democrats. So although that may be the one where she has the most room to fall.

I don't know whether that necessarily makes it safe given just how many times this has proven to be sort of the best Republican state of the bunch. And then there's Pennsylvania, which almost doesn't need an introduction, but it's the largest state of the bunch. And it has been extremely close in all of the polling. If Trump wins one of those three states, which is certainly possible,

Then we do care about the others. We care about whether Harris can get a win in North Carolina or Georgia or Arizona and Nevada. And depending on which of the three states Trump won, that would change which of the others would be sufficient to put Harris back over the top. But if we were just making a simple decision tree, you know, part one is can Harris pull off this Rust Belt thing? And then if not, did she win anywhere else? Gotcha.

Got it. I see the flow chart and it starts with Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan. That's right. Now, one thing that makes this all very frustrating is that election night will work in more or less the opposite direction where we learn North Carolina, Georgia pretty quickly and then may have to wait a long time before those Midwestern states come in. Yeah. Which may make the answer I'm providing now ultimately quite unsatisfying in four weeks.

On the other hand, though, by the time we know Pennsylvania, we will have realized whether in fact it is as simple as we're laying it out here, because we'll know probably by midnight whether Harris can win in Georgia or North Carolina, even if the races hasn't been called yet. More with Nate Cohn after the break. Hi, I'm Robert Vinluen from New York Times Games. I'm here talking to people about Wordle and showing them this new feature. You all play Wordle? Yeah. I have something exciting to show you. Oh, okay. It's the Wordle Archive.

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What are some of your, like, habits for playing Wordle? I wake up, I make a cup of coffee, I do the Wordle, and I send it to my friends in a group chat. Amazing. Thanks so much for coming by and talking to us and playing. New York Times game subscribers can now access the entire Wordle archive. Find out more at nytimes.com slash games. You don't understand how much Wordle means to us. We need to take a selfie.

I want to do a little exercise that you might hate, which is that I want to lay out the four scenarios of this election. And I wondered if you could tell me the factors that would have to go into making that happen. So if we were to wake up the day after Election Day and it was a blowout Harris win, what would you say were the factors that were most likely to have led to that result? Well, I would tell you we should have seen it coming all along. The special elections were great for Democrats. The midterms went well for Democrats.

The obvious sign of enthusiasm for Harris that didn't exist for Biden and Clinton was finally back. It sort of was more like Obama 08 in a sense. And in the end, too many swing voters were not going to tolerate bringing Donald Trump back to the White House after what he did on January 6. And they were still furious at Republicans over the loss of abortion rights and many voters in the critical swing states were.

Took all of that very personally. And so it was a landslide. A Trump blowout way. We should have seen it coming all along. Donald Trump has defied every political expectation, every turn of his career. The polls show him doing better today than they ever showed him doing in 2016 or 2020. And he already that's true now. It's already true now.

The polls are going to underestimate him yet again. And how, of course, we should have seen that coming. Pollsters never thought that they had an explanation for why they missed so badly. And they haven't done nearly as much to fix it as they'll tell you. So obviously he was going to win big given that the polls now are so close. The party registration figures, by the way, have been fantastic for Republicans. They're building leads in states where they didn't previously have a lead, like Pennsylvania and Arizona, where new registered voters are just coming in hard to the Republicans right now.

Over the last few months, even with Harris now in the race. Yeah, those special elections all good for Democrats, but like those are just really highly engaged liberals turning out. Of course, they weren't representative of the broader electorate and the broader electorate cared about the fact that their grocery prices went up 50 percent. And Donald Trump was someone who established himself as someone who they could trust on the economy. And the whole basis for the Democratic Party among working class voters for the last hundred years has been that they would be the party that helped them.

And right now they think that Donald Trump is the one that would help them. And so he wanted a blowout. And if we flipped it to a close victory, are there groups or states that you think will lead to either a close Harris victory or a close Trump victory? I think that if we were to break down this scenario, I think that there are like kind of two. One is the one that really feels just like a 2020 repeat where Harris narrowly wins across these states.

Maybe she does better among black and Hispanic voters in the polls currently show or alternately those young Trump black and Latino supporters in the polls. They're just not voting. And as a consequence,

She does a little better in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada than the polls suggest. Maybe she does even better than Biden by squeaking out that North Carolina win, which has been one of the bright spots for her in the polling. And at the same time, you know, she narrowly squeaks out these Midwestern states just like Joe Biden did. So maybe a Trump signs a victory elsewhere, but battleground states like they moved in the midterms and four years ago getting closer towards Democrats. And then I think the other version of this is.

The Midwestern scenario that we were talking about earlier, where, you know what, these losses for Democrats among Black and Latino voters and young men, that's real. And Harris can't win Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina if she's down to 86% of the Black vote instead of 92% and so on. And then it's a very late night where we're waiting to see whether she squeaks out the Michigan, Pennsylvania, and...

Wisconsin group. And those states are much whiter. White voters will represent nearly 90% of the vote in Wisconsin and 80% in Pennsylvania and well over 70 in Michigan. And in the scenario, that's just enough. It never stops being interesting to me to hear you lay out how the Democrats path is chiefly through white and more affluent elector. Yeah, it's it's interesting on both points. I mean, I suppose that of the two,

The affluent one is the one that really sort of strikes me because the biggest change in recent memory, Democrats have, it's interesting, you know, Democrats haven't won the white vote since,

Yeah. 1964. Post-sub-rights. But they've actually often done pretty well among white northerners. And as a consequence, they've often won a lot of relatively white states. They've been winning Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin for decades, right? Even though they're really white. So to me in itself, that the Democratic path depends on predominantly white states is

It's been sort of been true the whole time, even though it's a little counterintuitive because you have to remember that Democrats lose white voters because they get trounced among white Southerners. And that just for the same sort of electoral math reason we were talking about earlier doesn't doesn't hurt them as long as they squeak out these narrow northern states. The shift among college graduates, though, I think that's something that.

Few people could have anticipated. I mean, I remember in 2004, there was that book, What's the Matter with Kansas, talking about how strange it was that working class people would vote for a Republican, given the Democrats, the party of the working class. And now here we are with the Democrats very clearly being the party of college graduates and the affluent Democrats.

You know, that was a factor I wanted to isolate. And you've already really done that because it seems to me like a huge thing for people to know is the educational polarization that we see in the data, but also the gender gap that feels really important. I hear Republicans talking so much about how they need to get young men out and that men need to vote at the same rates of women and that, frankly, they seem pretty open about.

and resign to the fact that they're really not trying to claw back some of those votes from the proverbial suburban women we're talking about. More so that they're trying to round it out with an electorate that has more men in it. In the numbers, does that track as what seems like the Trump strategy? And how hard will it be for Republicans to close that gender gap? So,

Talking about I mean, we've already said polls are imperfect. Polling a subgroup like young voters or black voters or Hispanic voters is tough. We're going down even further to like young men or young women. That's getting really hard. Right. Most polls don't even release that. That said, all of the data at our disposal suggests that Trump is doing very well on young men. And you could easily talk me into the idea that he leads among young men, maybe even comfortably, even as Harris has a 30, 40 point lead among young women.

So you have to take the opportunities where you have them if you're the Trump campaign. And this is a group of voters that traditionally has not been inclined to support Republican candidates. But there's a lot of evidence, including in like hard party registration data, that they've swung to the right. And I think this relates to what I was mentioning earlier about effective turnout in this election. If you were to like

say, hey, what's the group that would be hardest to try and mobilize it for the first time this election? Be like, maybe young Hispanic men. It's like, well, that's one of the best groups for Trump compared to 2020. So you definitely can see why that's a great opportunity for them. If you can get those people to the polls, then you're in a great spot. But if not, then maybe a

a lot of the lead that you've seen in some of the polls in a state like Arizona or something, maybe that becomes harder to maintain when people actually show up on election day. Yeah. I mean, it seems as if what we're consistently hearing is that we have to unlearn the political story that was so core in, I think, Obama era that Democrats really held on to. The Obama coalition. More votes equals winning. That coalition being one that's driven by young people, driven by people of color, and...

You know, I remember that coalition talking about college graduates, but it wasn't chiefly only or only. There was almost no gap between people with and without a college degree in 2008 and 2012. Almost none. I think that education has become one of the major dividing lines. And maybe just as importantly, by becoming a major dividing line, that's been like the major shift, the major change over the last decade.

decade is this loss for Democrats among college people without a degree and gains for Democrats among people with a college degree. So is it true to say the more people who come out in this election, the evidence points out to being better for Donald Trump? I think that there are some like wrinkles that we can add to that. But like, yeah, basically. And we can see that in these special election results that, you know, they tracked like 7% of the electorate and the Democrats dominate them. Yeah. Yeah.

It's just it's an uncomfortable pill for them to swallow. But the true it's and it's it is extraordinary. You know, the Obama coalition is it's gone.

I want to ask some specific questions based on things we have learned in previous episodes of ours. We were just in El Paso at the border specifically thinking about how Latinos think about immigration. And I know one of the things you've been writing about is the data that, you know, talks about what we would consider attitudes among immigration, the relationship between Trump and Latino voters. Now, we know that that is a block that doesn't necessarily see itself in tandem. That came up a bunch yesterday.

folks saying they don't really see themselves connected to other groups of Latino voters. But I know that like when we think about them in polling or if we think about them in some of the data sets, they're sometimes combined. What do we know about the specific views about immigration among this group and their relationship with Donald Trump?

And how has that shifted from 2020? I think one of the big surprises of that night was a lot of the border communities who end up moving in Trump direction. Yeah, it's funny because as it's often been noted and correctly noted that Hispanic voters are not a monolith, that there are dozens of different communities with different levels of assimilation and different experiences in the United States. And yet, despite that, in 2020, they did all basically move towards the right more or less the same amount, regardless of whether they were QBs

cuban refugees people from spanish settlers hundreds of years ago here in new york and the bronx i mean we can keep going we can list every community and give an example of trump making big gains um there are signs those gains are poised to continue to some extent or another um this fall though i do think that because his strength is so concentrated among lower turnout groups i think that's going to mitigate um just how much of that materializes in on election day

But our polling absolutely speaks to the phenomenon you just talked about, which is that many Hispanic voters don't see themselves as the sort of person who's targeted by Trump's policies. And even beyond that, many of the claims that Democrats would usually say are racist dog whistles aren't just simply not being heard as racist dog whistles by Latino voters, but they agree with many. Yeah. They...

are much more sympathetic to a border wall than you might think. They're much more sympathetic to deporting undocumented immigrants. Yeah, I mean, we were with a group of Democrats who even said, you know, this group of people coming feels really distinct for me. We waited our turn. They didn't wait their... There's like language that, you know, you hear from an in-group that I think sometimes would surprise folks, but I don't know why. Because, you know, like, of course those attitudes exist among that group. And, you know, they...

Also sympathize with Trump's claims about crime and would agree if he said that this crime in our cities is out of control. You know, they'd be like, yeah, it is. That doesn't mean that they like Donald Trump or if you ask them, they'd say he's a racist, too. That's not a question that we ask in polls. But I think that's what our result would be based on the other pollsters who have done it over the years. In the end.

Our polling suggests that it's Trump's strength on the economy that's ultimately driving the decisive here that we're talking about a group of working class voters who, you know, if you're a college educated Democrat and this goes back to a recurring theme about the education divide. But if you're a college educated Democrat, you might assume that Hispanic voters mostly support Democrats out of like racial solidarity. Yeah. And that's not what it's about. Yeah. It's because the Democrats were the party of the working class that would help people like them.

In general, the assumption of someone supporting people out of racial solidarity feels wrong. Like, even with Black voters. I mean, there's a slice of that, folks, too. But you hear even the economic concern come up all the time. Of course. And, you know, if you view the world through the lens of, like, a liberal arts class on...

you know, race, gender, and systems of power and domination in American life, then that's how you would think these groups are voting. But every piece of evidence that we have suggests that the economy is

at least co-equal and in all likelihood, a more important factor. And this is Donald Trump's major advantage, not only in this election, but in previous ones as well. What about Gaza? We hear so much about foreign conflicts abroad, of course, that has been increasingly inflamed with the escalations in the last couple of weeks. What do we know about the places where that might most matter? Because I remember you telling me before, foreign policy doesn't often rise to the top of people's list, including young people.

people. I think we have every indication that Donald Trump is going to do much better among Muslim and Arab voters in this election than he did four years ago. I think he'll do better among young people as well, but I would not rate foreign policy as being a driver on that. While I think it is the factor that will explain the gains that he makes in Dearborn, Michigan or Hamtrak, Michigan or wherever it may be. And, you know, this is an extremely small group. Even in Michigan, we're talking 2% of the electorate. If you do a poll of Michigan with

thousand people that means you had 20 respondents who were Muslim or Arab like we cannot measure this group reliably as a result of its small size and

But we do a lot of polling. And if you aggregate all of our polls together and look at the still pretty darn small group of Muslim and Arab voters who we've spoken to, they have swung really hard to Trump by their own account. And it's worth thinking about on election night when we think about Michigan. It's a real possibility that that type of factor could could help bring the state closer to at least 50 50. Absolutely. I mean, Biden won it by two point seven points. And we're talking about a group that's two percent.

So if that group, hypothetically, I don't think this is going to happen. Suppose it swung 50%. That's half of Biden's lead gone right there.

You know, the flip side, of course, is that Biden didn't need a single vote from Dearborn to win Michigan. So if Harris loses, you can't. I mean, it may be a scribe. It will not only be because of this, but if there was a race that otherwise Harris was going to win by a point or would otherwise win by a half point, which would not at all be a strong result for Democrats in Michigan. But if that's what it was, then then, yeah, this could be it could it could be decisive. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And the last thing I want to do is focus on a couple questions about what's coming in the next several weeks, both things that we're looking at and things that you can help us point to to look for in the homestretch. If you were Trump and Harris campaigns, respectively, both where and what would you talk to? Who would you talk to? Like, what does the numbers say are the most important groups for them? And where do those voters live? Well, the persuadable voters are different than...

We imagined them to be in the past. You know, the stereotypical swing voter was the soccer mom, the security mom, a white suburban mom. Yeah. We used a lot of different words, but that's basically what we always meant. That's all we mean. White suburban mom. And I don't think that's who the persuadable voters necessarily are. They're not necessarily white. I think that if you told me after the election that the people who swung, like switched their votes, were majority non-white,

That wouldn't shock me. They'll be disproportionately young. They'll be disproportionately without degrees, though. I mean, our polling does show Harris doing very well among college graduates, so clearly she's making gains there as well. The reason the soccer mom analogy was relevant was she was too busy dealing with her kids to have...

well-formed opinions on politics and already know who's going to vote for and stuff. And that's who you needed to be reaching down the stretch. I think we're still talking about people who are less engaged, less political, who are going to learn things about the candidates that we take for granted for the first time over the next three weeks. Reaching those people is way harder than it used to be. And they're not all watching the

network television. Like, you know, and so reaching those voters is going to be hard. And do you think that's a joint interest of both of those campaigns? For, you know, to speak to the question about, like, where would you target? You think both of them are going to be focused on those more lower-propensity voters? Yeah, and that's not

what I would have guessed four years ago. But I think that is what I think that's that's the game. That's who the swing voter is turning out to be. We've talked so many times throughout the scope of this race, and we've been following this, you know, before any normal person was interested. What if you could sum it up, like, what do you think has been your biggest surprise over the last year and a half? Like, what has jumped out to you as something you did not expect? And what is something you got completely right?

If you had asked me at the beginning of this campaign, what I sort of expected, I would have told you Trump and Biden were going to run again. Biden and Trump would basically redraw the electorate as it was two years earlier that Biden probably do, given how the midterms went, that Biden was probably gonna do a little bit better than he did in 2020 because of abortion and the fallout from January 6th. And I don't,

think that's what's happening right now. I think that instead, even though all the events that I think really mattered probably had already happened by January 2023 or whenever we would have had this hypothetical conversation. I think that the huge, like I've used the word upheaval already. I'll use it again though. The upheaval that happened after the pandemic in terms of the economy, culture, the direction of social media, um,

had already sent the electorate on a different course by January 2023 than I had recognized, one that would mean that this was not a simple repeat. The election result will look more like 2020 than not, just because our country is very polarized, and it takes a lot to move it off of that. I think a lot of things that were already playing out in early 2023, I did not recognize had the potential to break up what seemed like such a

stable political arrangement. Like, I think that's a part of a national story that's affecting everyone in our own ways. Would have never guessed that the midterm result we saw in Florida was like possibly real, like that the shift, the state really did. I mean, we'll find out in a month whether this is true or not. And you know, in retrospect, it makes sense. These were really personal things that like fights and everyone had a different version of it depending on your experience. But whether it was a fight over

Like vaccines or masks or crime or prices or abortion rights or January 6th. And if you're in a swing state, your own vote trying to be taken by a sitting president, like those are all really personal things that left a mark on all of us in one way or another.

And it was maybe naive to assume that the way that people responded that would map neatly onto their prior political allegiances. I think that there are people as, you know, as polarized as we are, there are people out there whose political views were upended in some way by all of those events I just mentioned. It's different for everybody, but...

I think it's added up to something a little different. The Biden-Trump rematch created an expectation of a political alignment that's closer to 2020 than we might have. And some of the forces that you think are...

driven that shift were already being put in motion in January 2023. When we would have had that conversation. And they were happening underneath the kind of Biden-Trump of it all. And in fact, many of them have subsided in some ways since then. And I think that's one of the reasons why maybe in the end, some of them will build that. And well, switching to Harris is also a relevant factor here, I think. But I think that if they had stuck with Biden and if the election had been held earlier,

I think it could have been completely different than 2020 and nothing like what I would have guessed in January 2023. What's something you got right? You're very good. So let's hear the brat. You know, I don't know. Not much. See, the thing is, I can't take credit for anything until the results actually come in. You know, I can say things I'm wrong about, but I don't know that I'm right about anything at this point. Yeah.

Thank you, Nate. We really appreciate your time. And thank you so much for being our guide through polling and through the data all for the last year and a half. Happy to chat. Thanks for having me. Good luck down the final stretch. Thanks. We'll need it. Yeah, me too. Yeah, like, you're like, oh, I just feel too, I feel to embrace machine. I was like, oh, you should do that. Just embrace machine. Hearing from Nate helps inform the things I want to focus on in the homestretch of this presidential race.

how the campaigns are targeting low-propensity voters, the gender gap, and just what is happening in Pennsylvania. Nate also reminds me that for all the time some people put into trying to predict who's going to win, that's mostly a coping mechanism in this moment of great uncertainty. Because this race is basically tied. And even if you ask the experts...

and comb through all the data, there's basically nothing that looks like it can change that. If you're interested in hearing more from Nate and me on the state of the race and what the campaigns are doing in the homestretch, we joined our colleagues Maggie Haberman and Michael Barbaro on The Daily today, so check that out too.

Are you dreading another political cycle heavy on punditry and light on substance? Liberties is a journal of consequence, essays of ideas to inspire and lead our culture, our politics. Mario Vargas Llosa called Liberties a triumph for freedom of thought. Ralph Fiennes said, Liberties opened my mind to subjects unfamiliar and points of view unexpected.

That's the run-up for Thursday, October 10th, 2024. And now, the rundown. Please welcome back to The Late Show, Vice President Kamala Harris. Thank you.

This week, Vice President Kamala Harris was on a media blitz. I'm here on a special day. I was supposed to have a day off. I'd only come in for the vice president of the United States. The next president of the United States. We met the 59-year-old vice president this past week on the campaign trail. Daddy gang, I went to Washington, D.C. to interview Vice President Kamala Harris. It took her from podcasts like Call Her Daddy to CBS's 60 Minutes.

And while she was largely on friendly ground... Would you like to have a beer with me so I can tell people what that's like? She also faced questions on 60 Minutes about the administration's record on the border. Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did? It's a long-standing problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally...

We have been offering solutions. What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place? I think the policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem.

Also this week, Senator Mitt Romney spoke at the University of Utah and took a question about Harris. What's stopping you from getting to the point where you'll say you'll vote for Kamala Harris and, you know, endorse her the way that Liz Cheney has? Yeah.

Yeah, I made it very clear that I don't want Donald Trump to be the next president of the United States. And you're going to have to do the very difficult calculation of what that would mean. All right. And my own view is that I want to continue to have a voice in the Republican Party following this election, because I think there's a good shot that the Republican Party is going to need to be rebuilt and reoriented either after this election or Donald Trump is reelected.

after he's the president and believe I will have more influence in the party by virtue of saying it as I've said it. He did not say he would be voting for Harris, taking a different path than other prominent anti-Trump Republicans like Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney. We are 26 days away from the 2024 presidential election. See you next week. The Run-Up is reported by me, Ested Herndon.

and produced by Elisa Gutierrez, Caitlin O'Keefe, and Anna Foley. It's edited by Rachel Dry and Lisa Tobin, with original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker, Diane Wong, Sophia Landman, and Alisha Ba'i Tut. It was mixed by Sophia Landman and fact-checked by Ina Alvarado.

Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Sam Dolnick, Larissa Anderson, David Halfinger, Maddie Maciello, Mahima Chablani, Jeffrey Miranda, and Elizabeth Briscoe. Do you have questions about the 2024 election? Email us at therunupatnytimes.com. Or better yet, record your question using the voice memo app in your phone. That email again is therunupatnytimes.com. Thanks for listening, y'all.