If you’ve made it this far, I hope you share my confidence that Harris will win the popular vote, and understand why: that those who have already voted in at least one of the last four elections (1) favor Harris, (2) have switched partisan sides in very small numbers, and nearly equally on each side, and (3) will constitute such a large share of all voters as to be too much for first time voters to overcome even if they favor Trump by implausibly large numbers.
Sadly, the same cannot be said with confidence for the Electoral College battleground states. Harris needs the kind of high turnout from contingent new voters that pushed Biden over the top (barely) in those states, and which contributed to the Democratic near-sweep in those states in the 2022 midterms (even as they ran against the usual strong winds against the party in power).
As I’ve explained, evidence indicates that this high turnout has been motivated by loss aversion – the belief and fear that MAGA will take away fundamental freedoms. It’s not clear whether those stakes will be clear enough to contingent voters this year to motivate similar turnout. As I wrote in “About that Times Poll,” while Harris has done a terrific job reconsolidating and inspiring Democrats, perceptions of how dangerous a second Trump Administration will be have stalled. If that doesn’t change, we risk that too many of those new voters who came out before will stay home in November. If that happens, it will be an unforgivable failure of the media and civil society to alert Americans to the very avoidable consequences of MAGA regaining power.