In my previous two posts, I concluded on positive notes for Kamala Harris. In the first, I pointed out that Democrats’ most recent electoral gains have come in whiter, more northern districts—exactly the types of communities that could help deliver her the Midwest swing states in November. In the second, I examined the Democrats’ increasing edge among White, college-educated voters, especially in the recently purple states of Georgia and Arizona, and also pertaining to a potential 2024 flip state: North Carolina.
Despite these encouraging trends, though, polls show a very close race in 2024. What’s holding Harris back?
Analyst Adam Carlson maintains a publicly available spreadsheet that compiles polling “crosstabs”: the responses of specific demographic subgroups in general polls. Crosstabs typically include too few respondents to function as statistically significant mini-polls by themselves. But by compiling the crosstabs across several major polls, as Carlson has done, a holistic view of the polling data across various demographics can be seen. Here’s what the data says as of late September:
The column to the far right is the important one: it shows Harris’s current polling status compared to Joe Biden’s performance with the designated group in 2020.
Taking into account the numbers in that column, the problem for Harris is clear: she’s polling well behind Biden’s 2020 voting shares of Black and Hispanic voters. With White voters, she’s actually outperforming Biden, which fits with the analysis in my first update. In particular, she appears to be outdoing him with college-educated White voters—fitting with the further analysis in my second update. Among Black and Hispanic voters, though, she appears to have lost an alarming amount of ground.
We’ll dedicate this piece to analyzing data pertaining to Black voters. Although Harris leads them by a substantial 66 points, this represents a marked decline over 2020 Biden, who won the demographic by 83 points. This apparent 17-point shift, if it were to actualize in November, would be devastating to Harris’s chances in several swing states: in Georgia, for example, where Black voters comprise 29% of the electorate, it would cost Harris about 5 whole percentage points. (In 2020, Biden won the state by only 0.2 points.) Even in a predominantly White state like Pennsylvania, where Black voters comprise only 11% of the electorate, such a shift would cost Harris 1.9 points, enough to erase Biden’s victorious margin of 1.2 points in 2020 (although this loss would be more than offset by Harris’s apparent gains with White voters).
Harris’s poor polling with Black voters has already been subject to much media speculation and hand-wringing. Right-wing pundits have largely hailed the phenomenon as a rejection of “woke” identity politics, especially among Black men. Progressive analysts, meanwhile, have characterized it as an inevitable consequence of Democrats’ broken economic promises to the Black community. Even Trump himself has weighed in, musing with typical denseness that his criminal trials have endeared him to Black people (who, according to this theory, are culturally familiar with being federally prosecuted for fraud, stealing classified military information, and attempting to overthrow American democracy).
I don’t believe either of the first two theories are correct, and I won’t even humor the third. Actually, I already hinted at my theory about Democrats’ dwindling Black support in my first update. To summarize what I implied in that post, it seems to me based on the available data that nonwhite voters, especially Black voters, have been repelled by the the Democratic Party over the past four years due to perceptions about its permissiveness toward violent crime—particularly in specific media markets such as the New York City area (which alone accounts for 5-10% of Black people nationwide). Secondarily, the emergence of religiously sensitive issues like abortion and transgender rights as important features of the Democratic platform may be turning off some evangelical Black voters.
If my analysis is correct, especially regarding the importance of regional crime coverage, Democrats may detect a silver lining. In particular, this would suggest that their losses among Black voters may be geographically concentrated in areas that are unlikely to impact the electoral college.
Indeed, the polling seems to support this. Consider that Harris is currently polling ahead of Trump in New York state by an average of about 13 points. That’s a comfortable lead, but Biden won there in 2020 by a much larger 23 points. This apparent 10-point gain for Trump in the state, which would be consistent with the drastic Democratic midterm losses there that I wrote about in the first update, would represent a gain of a staggering 850,000 votes—but these votes would be utterly useless to Trump, since he’s poised to lose the state regardless. In fact, a swing of this magnitude in New York would lessen his electoral college advantage by a full 0.5% alone. In other words, whereas Biden needed to win the popular vote by 4% to win the electoral college in 2020, Harris would only need to win by 3.5% in 2024 if this shift in New York held—and, again, this is only taking into account a change in one state.
Relatedly, the latest poll of California shows Harris ahead by 22 points. As with New York, she’s in no danger of losing the state. But in 2020, Biden carried California by a larger 29 points. If Harris were to win by only 22 points there, that would afford Trump an enormous 1.2 million votes in the total count compared to 2020; unfortunately, again as with New York, he would be essentially flushing these votes down the toilet. Their only effect would be to further reduce his electoral college advantage by about 0.8%. Combining New York and California, then, Trump is already looking at a potential 1-1.5% reduction in his electoral college margin from 2020.
So it seems to me that the Democratic losses among Black voters are real, but not as damaging as they might initially appear, thanks to the electoral college. Yes, Harris would lose a devastating 5 points in Georgia if she lost 17 points of Black voting share compared to Biden in 2020. But it seems to me that she’s more likely to suffer a disproportionate loss of Black voters elsewhere—specifically in NYC, LA, Houston, and Miami, where Democrats performed poorly in the midterms and have polled poorly this cycle. By contrast, in swing state metros like Atlanta, as I wrote about in the second update, Democrats in the midterms actually over-performed, suggesting that Black voters there haven’t been subject to the same discontentment with the Democratic Party as those in, for instance, New York City.
As I’ve previously speculated, this, to me, can only be explained by sensationalist coverage of violent crime in these specific media markets. And it also makes sense to me that Black people may be more alarmed by this coverage, since Black people are more likely to live in the neighborhoods that the news characterizes as dangerous. Thus, in contrast to Trump’s fatuous theory that Black people sympathize with and relate to criminality, the opposite is true: they perceive it as a more urgent political problem, since it poses a more immediate and concrete threat to their communities’ safety.
Another factor in Harris’s apparent underperformance with Black voters might be a general, systemic underestimation of Black support for Democrats. I’ve done some aggregating of my own, examining the final national polls in the 2020 cycle. These are the crosstabs for Black voters among those polls:
As you can see, Biden’s final polling average among Black voters put him ahead of Trump by a sizeable 73 points. But that was actually a significant underestimation, as he ultimately won the demographic by 83 points (despite the polls overestimating him elsewhere). So there’s reason to believe that the current polls may be underestimating Harris with Black voters, too. One possible reason for this could be flaws in the way polls identify “likely” voters. Consider that many polls gauge likelihood of voting by simply asking the respondents how likely they are to vote. The pollsters then use this information to weight their data to better reflect the likely electorate. That’s a reasonable strategy, but it doesn’t work with certain demographic subgroups: young black men, for example, have been statistically shown to vote at sub-50% rates even after telling pollsters that they will “definitely” vote. Older Black women, on the other hand, almost always vote if they tell pollsters they will. Trump’s best subgroup among Black voters? Young Black men. His worst? I think you know the answer.
None of this is to say that Harris will avoid any losses of Black voters in swing states in 2024. Data since 2012 shows that Trump has made gradual gains with Black voters in each cycle on the ballot. Specifically, he’s managed to gain about 6 points with Black voters every four years (by taking 3% more Black voters while the Democrat correspondingly loses 3%).
I predict that he’s likely to make a similar gain in 2024 in most areas. To be sure, this will help him in swing states, especially in Georgia and North Carolina. However, those gains may be offset by losses among White voters, especially those with college degrees. As a hypothetical exercise, imagine that Trump were to gain 6 points with Black voters in Georgia but lose 4.5 points there among college-educated Whites, as Carlson’s aggregator reflects. That would lead to a net gain for Trump of only 0.5 points in the state. That’s theoretically enough to reverse Biden’s 0.2 point margin of victory in 2020, but this is before factoring in additional growth of the Atlanta suburbs since that time.
So all in all, the trend for Democrats among Black voters is bad, but there are reasons to hope that the damage won’t be as bad as the national polls currently show. And even nationally, there are signs that Harris will close strong. Consider the trend in Black support for the Democratic ticket over time using Carlson’s polling aggregator:
- June (Biden at top of ticket): 30 points behind 2020 support
- July 21-Aug 18 (in aftermath of Harris replacing Biden): 25 points behind 2020 support
- Aug 19-Sept 10 (post-DNC): 21 points behind 2020 support
- Sept 11-Sept 30 (post-debate): 16 points behind 2020 support
Harris appears to be clawing away. Will it be enough?
If I’m correct that a large percentage of the stickiest losses are coming from a handful of metro areas that lie outside of swing states—and if the polls are underestimating her support with Black voters, as they did Biden’s in 2020—then it just might be.
–Jim Andersen
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