What the proximity of this election reveals about the future of American politics

With less than three weeks to go before Election Day, Kamala Harris is leading Donald Trump by less than three points in national polls. Since Republicans have a structural advantage in the Electoral College, this means the presidential race is purely a back-and-forth affair. To talk all things election-related, I recently got on the phone with Nate Cohn, senior political analyst at New York Justand the person overseeing it Just’ Election campaign carried out with Siena College. (Full disclosure: Cohn and I worked together on The New Republic and are friends.) During our conversation, which has been condensed for length and clarity, we discussed why Republicans have made gains in voter registration and what we can learn from it Just’ major new survey of black and Hispanic voters and how pollsters are trying to predict what turnout will be this year.

Specifically in the seven swing states, what can we say about what voter registration numbers looked like this year and what do you think they can tell us?

Voter registration numbers aren’t entirely final yet, so it’s worth pointing out this caveat right from the start. That is, in states where people register by party, almost all of the battleground states have seen a shift toward Republicans in voter registration. The last four years have seen a real collapse in Democratic registration numbers among young voters. And there’s a chance that the electorate in many of these states has become more conservative.

However, it is important to distinguish the different ways voter registration can change. One is someone registering to vote again and changing their party affiliation, which is often a lagging indicator. Maybe they’re someone who’s been voting for Trump for years even though he’s officially registered as a Democrat, and now that he’s moving, he’s registering again. And then there are newly registered voters, and that would mean a change in the composition of the electorate. The overall shifts in voter registration include both. Newly registered voters are overall less unfavorable to Democrats, but that varies greatly by state. There are states like Arizona and Florida where newly registered voters are heavily Republican. There are states like Pennsylvania where newly registered voters appear more balanced.

Is there any reason to believe that these new voters are not being captured by polls?

It depends on the way the survey is conducted. Most campaign polls are conducted using lists of registered voters. So when those people register to vote, they end up on our list of people to call. And when we weight our poll, we make sure it reflects the makeup of registered voters. This may not be the case for other pollsters. Perhaps you are taking surveys of online panelists who say they live in Florida and are now weighting your survey to reflect the partisan identity of Floridians as indicated in the 2020 election survey. And if the electorate has changed since 2020, you may not have a way to capture that unless you do a lot of modeling, which frankly most pollsters don’t do.

Do you have a theory about why voter registration has been so good for Republicans? I suspect it’s because there’s an unpopular Democratic incumbent.

In the long run, there was a significant decline and perhaps a reversal in the Democratic advantage in party identification when pollsters only asked, “Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” A decade ago Democrats had a big lead, but today Republicans are often ahead, if only close, front. And we see that in the voter registration numbers. I think this stems from a deeper shift in the way voters have identified themselves during the Trump era, and that it works both ways. There are a lot of people who were independent-leaning Republicans who voted for Trump, who didn’t consider themselves Republicans in 2016. But now that the party has clearly defined itself around Donald Trump, they see themselves more clearly as Republicans than they ever have before. And conversely, I think there are a lot of Democratic-leaning voters who never really voted for the Democrats because they are deeply committed to the Democratic Party, but because they oppose Donald Trump.

You can tell a story where the realignment of politics around Trump led to an increase in the share of Republican voters who identify as Republican, while perhaps a smaller share of Democrats went through the same process because they didn’t get a positive result have achieved identification with the Democratic Party as much as they have been repulsed by Donald Trump. By the way, I think this is an optimistic story for Democrats, because it wouldn’t necessarily mean that the change in identification is accompanied by a decline in the share of voters who actually lean Democratic.

They just conducted a large survey of black and Hispanic voters. Since becoming the nominee, Kamala Harris has increased her numbers among black and Hispanic voters compared to Biden before he left office. But it still falls short of Biden’s 2020 results. What did you learn from your survey?

To agree with your statement, this poll and the track record of other polls show Harris doing much better than Joe Biden in the summer, but much worse than Biden in 2020. And it’s also worth noting that Biden’s performance in 2020 was worse than that of Hillary Clinton in 2016, which was worse than Barack Obama’s in 2012. So this is a low point for the Democrats among black and Hispanic voters. With black voters, if the polls are accurate, Harris could do worse than any other Democrat since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. And for Hispanic voters, there’s a chance it would be a low point, too — Trump’s strength in today’s polls rivals George W. Bush’s performance among Hispanics in 2004.

There are many theories as to why Democrats are doing relatively poorly with black and Hispanic voters, and I think we’ve found support for almost all of the theories. We found support for the idea that there are some young black and Hispanic men who are entertained by Trump. We found support for the idea that many low-income black and Hispanic voters are upset about the economy and believe Donald Trump would do better for them personally. We found support for the view that many black and Hispanic voters are disillusioned with the Democrats and believe they have not kept their promises over the last fifteen years.

This is a huge shift, and it shouldn’t be particularly surprising that such a big shift requires many different factors pointing the way for Republicans. By the way, this is the same thing that happened with white working-class voters in 2016, where we can debate whether it was the economy or sexism or racism or some other hypothesis, but what gave the Republicans this big breakthrough was that all of these Hypothesis have merit and that all of these things probably did something to help Donald Trump.

It looks like the Democrats are losing votes from both the right and the left among black and Hispanic voters – you’ve talked about voters who actually like Trump and others who are disappointed that the Democratic agenda isn’t robust enough – which all suggests that the Democratic Party’s problem cannot be solved simply by moving to the right or to the left, and perhaps that gets to the point you made about white working-class voters have. It’s not clear which direction you can go to win back these voters.

Absolutely. Looking at this through an ideological lens is a mistake. I do think it’s true that some of these voters have conservative views on many important issues of the day, such as immigration, or that they may be sympathetic to Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, and so on. But for me, the defining feature of Trump’s appeal is that in many ways he has broken the traditional left-right divide in American politics. He is populist in his rhetorical orientation. He is a kind of anti-system candidate who can appeal to voters dissatisfied with the status quo. These are all things that could have been said to varying degrees about Obama in 2008 or 2012.

And many black and Hispanic voters in 2012 may not have been far left or right ideologically, but they were very sympathetic to this basic populist direction of the Democratic Party. And Donald Trump’s message and his rhetoric appeal to many people who would previously have voted Democratic. The rhetorical argument that the system is corrupt can be taken up by both the left and the right. But right now, I think it’s fair to say that Donald Trump is doing a lot more of that than Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.