Americans watching the presidential campaign may feel as if they’re suffering from whiplash. Going into the June 27 presidential debate, Donald Trump held a 1.5% lead in the RealClearPolitics average and was the clear frontrunner. But the contest blew wide open after President Biden’s catastrophic performance. In the debate’s aftermath, it looked like smooth sailing for Mr. Trump. And it would have been had Mr. Biden not withdrawn on July 21. That changed everything.
Democrats rapidly coalesced behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Now the RCP average shows Ms. Harris with a 0.5% lead. That will likely grow as she campaigns through the battlegrounds this week with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and if she follows with an effective convention starting Aug. 19.
Ms. Harris isn’t making inroads with independent voters or soft Republicans, but she has energized previously dispirited Democrats. For months Democratic enthusiasm lagged behind that of Republicans. That’s flipped: A July 27 ABC/Ipsos poll found 88% of Democrats are enthusiastic about Ms. Harris, while 82% of Republicans are enthusiastic about Mr. Trump.
An election many thought would be determined by voters who liked neither candidate—“double haters”—is now nothing of the sort. Before the debate, 2024 looked as if it might be the first election since 2012 in which the overall turnout rate would drop from the last election. Instead, voters may set a new record for this century.
This race will be decided by each party’s success in two fundamental tasks—turning out its base and persuading independent, swing voters.
Democrats have a head start on turnout. The Biden-Harris campaign began building its ground game early this year. Its field staff has been training and deploying volunteers for months. Democratic state parties in five battleground states—Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—have significantly outraised their GOP counterparts and had lots more cash on hand as of June 30. The parties are at parity in Georgia, this year’s sixth battleground, but there the GOP is spending heavily on lawyers to defend against charges that party leaders schemed to overturn the 2020 election.
While Republicans play catch-up on their ground game (disclosure: I’m assisting a National Republican Senatorial Committee effort on this), the best that can be said for the GOP is that Mr. Trump’s campaign is more focused on get-out-the-vote efforts this year than it was in 2016 or 2020.
Yet the race is still tight. This makes the second variable—who persuades undecided and swing voters—the decisive one.
It could come down to a smaller percentage than you think. At first glance, the pool of independents appears large, ranging from 24% of all voters in an Aug. 4 SurveyUSA poll to roughly 31% in an Aug. 2 CBS poll. But University of Missouri political scientist John R. Petrocik argues convincingly in a recent report that most self-described independents, while rejecting party labels, are actually faithful Republicans or Democrats in their voting patterns. Mr. Petrocik writes that those “without a tilt toward either party” make up roughly 15% of the electorate.
A former colleague of Mr. Petrocik, Daron Shaw of the University of Texas at Austin, suggested over email that the genuinely up-for-grabs voters consist of three groups: true independents who don’t lean toward either party, non-MAGA Republicans, and less-motivated low-interest voters. Mr. Shaw, who is also Fox News’s poll director, says voters within these three groups who remain undecided or weakly linked to their current choice make up as little as 1.8% of the electorate. I’d suggest this share could be as high as 5%, given the number of undecided voters in national polls. That’s not a large figure, but in a tight race it would matter.
