Heading into election week, one Democratic strategist described the party’s mood as “nauseous optimism” that Vice President Kamala Harris will prevail, as polls show a startlingly close race against Donald Trump.
A campaign full of twists and turns will culminate on Election Day. Harris and Trump are locked in a dead heat in the seven battleground states that are likely to decide the outcome, which are scattered in the northern Great Lakes region and the Sun Belt.
Here are five keys to Harris’ bid to make history and become the first woman, the first Black woman and the first Indian American person to become president.
Hold her ground with Black and Latino voters
One of the agonizing questions for Democrats in this election is whether they will maintain overwhelming support among Black voters and prevent the further erosion of Latino support. In 2020, Joe Biden carried 92% of Black voters and 59% of Latinos.
Harris cannot afford much slippage with these groups, which are full of low-propensity voters who need encouragement to turn out. But holding on to them is easier said than done in the 2024 election.
Surveys show a significant slice of Black and Latino voters are Trump-curious this year, with the potential to deliver meaningful gains for his party.
Here are five keys to a Trump victory
But will that curiosity materialize into actual votes for Trump at the ballot box? Or can Harris pull them back into the Democratic fold down the stretch? And among the slice that doesn’t end up voting, will they be disproportionately conservative Trump-leaning supporters or liberal Harris-leaning supporters? The answers loom large in Harris’ hopes of victory. She faces the crucial task of turning out her share of nonwhite supporters, including Democratic-leaning Asian Americans.
Abortion powers women to the ballot box
All signs point to a widening gender gap, with women moving further toward Democrats and men — including nonwhite men who historically vote blue — trending toward Republicans. The election could yield one of the biggest gender gaps in modern history and come down to which side turns out in greater numbers.
Harris has zeroed in on abortion and reproductive autonomy to try appeal to women voters, seizing on Trump’s success at ending Roe v. Wade and the possibility that Congress and the president could either enshrine Roe in law or ban abortion nationwide. Harris made a recent appearance on the popular “Call Her Daddy” podcast to mobilize less politically engaged women.
Trump, meanwhile, has doubled down on courting men, including young Gen Z men who are disenchanted with Democrats. He has appeared on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, hyped up cryptocurrency and cozied up to Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy and billionaire Elon Musk — a strategy that Harvard’s youth poll director John Della Volpe calls “bro whispering.”
Will young men defect and turn out for Trump? If so, Harris will need to run up the score with women to defeat him. The early vote shows women turning out in bigger numbers, but there’s no guarantee that remains the case by Election Day.
Grow Democratic support in the suburbs
Harris is working to juice her margins in the suburbs, courting soft Republicans, center-right independents and moderates who are turned off by Trump. She’s campaigning with former Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who have excoriated Trump as an authoritarian, citing among other things his calls for using the power of the state against political rivals and his quest to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.
The well-educated and disproportionately white suburban voters have been a bright spot for Harris this cycle, especially with Trump making no meaningful effort to hold on to the one-fifth of voters who cast ballots for Nikki Haley in the 2024 Republican primaries. They could give Harris a crucial boost because these voters tend to reliably turn out in election after election.
Trump is slated to dominate the rural and less-educated parts of the country. If he overperforms the polling with this group as he has in prior elections, Harris will need to grow her margins among white college graduates, who favored Biden by 15 percentage points in 2020.
Neutralize Trump on the economy and immigration
A high priority for Harris down the stretch has been to cut into the “trust gap” that Trump enjoys with voters on handling the economy, with the cost of living registering as a priority issue for voters in swing states.
Her team believes it needs to fight the issue to a draw in order to prevail and appeal to voters on the question of who cares more about them. Harris, by putting cost-cutting at the center of her agenda, has gained considerable ground compared to where Biden was before he dropped out in July.
Will it be enough? Some surveys show she has all but neutralized the issue. The question is whether that extends to the electorate that turns out. If so, Harris will have covered her biggest vulnerability with swing voters.
In addition, Trump has campaigned heavily on the fears of migration and blamed Harris for chaos at the southern border. It’s a major vulnerability for the vice president, but is it politically fatal? Harris has responded by shifting to the right and attacking Trump for killing a bipartisan border security package that would have made it harder to gain asylum. She doesn’t need to win on this issue, but she needs to mitigate the damage.
Deliver on a superior ground game
If the election is indeed decided narrowly, Harris may need her “ground game” — the unglamorous mechanics of door-knocking, voter mobilization and using local presence to turn out supporters — to deliver the margins that will make the difference.
Much has been made of Trump’s relative lack of a ground game, with the former reality-TV star instead relying on his celebrity status to reach supporters and outsourcing other elements of the turnout push to Musk, his billionaire ally who has no experience in it.
In 2016, Trump won the presidency despite his shaky ground game. In 2020, some Democrats believe they underperformed because they all but shut down their ground game due to Covid-19 and ceded the playing field to Republicans on physically reaching voters. They rectified that in 2022. This year, Democrats are again banking on their ground operation to deliver. Their theory is it could tip a 50-50 election in Harris’ favor. Time will tell if their theory is right.
