On Saturday, the New York Times and Siena College released their latest round of swing-state polling on the Presidential race. It showed Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by five points in Arizona and by two points in North Carolina, while trailing Trump by a point in Nevada and by four points in Georgia. (In 2020, Joe Biden edged out Trump in all of these states except North Carolina.) The cumulative results show a very slight Harris edge. Coupled with the previous set of Times/Siena polls—which had Harris leading Trump by four points across three battleground states in the Rust Belt (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan)—the over-all picture of the race has transformed since President Biden stepped aside from contesting the Democratic nomination in July. Harris is narrowly ahead.
To talk about what it all means, I recently spoke by phone with Nate Cohn, the Times’ chief political analyst who also oversees the paper’s polling. (Full disclosure: Cohn and I worked together at The New Republic, and are friends.) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the surprising ways in which Harris’s coalition appears to differ from Biden’s in 2020, how to think about the Sun Belt versus the Rust Belt, and the prospect of a third straight Presidential election with serious polling error.
You decided to do these polls in two rounds, one in the Rust Belt and then one in the Sun Belt. Why did you make that decision, and do you think it’s helpful for people who are following the election to separate those two areas in their minds?
Well, there’s one practical reason, which is that it is difficult for us to simultaneously and quickly field surveys in seven states. This is a really dynamic race, and so, if we had polled all seven of these simultaneously, we might’ve had to field over ten days, and I think there would’ve been some valid questions about whether the results that we had at the end were still reflective of the race as it is today.
There’s also a substantive reason, which is that the Sun Belt and Rust Belt states, if we can call them that, have been very different this cycle. The Northern battleground states are relatively white, and the polls this cycle have shown Democrats faring relatively well among white voters. As a consequence, even Joe Biden was fairly competitive there. The Sun Belt states, on the other hand, are relatively diverse, and the polls have shown Democrats faring relatively poorly among nonwhite voters this cycle. As a consequence, Donald Trump had a significant lead in the Sun Belt battleground states even as the Rust Belt states remained competitive. So I think there was a pretty good reason to be treating them separately, even beyond the practical reasons.
When you’re looking at these polls, either in the three Rust Belt states [Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan] or the four Sun Belt states [Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina], are you looking at the individual states very closely? Or are you grouping them together in your mind and averaging them out?
Both. Obviously individual states are idiosyncratic, and they can go in their own distinct ways. On the other hand, these two groups of states have a lot in common, and they voted fairly similarly four years ago, and, when we put them all together, we have a larger sample size. So those estimates can be more stable, while the individual states can bounce around. When you’re looking at a single poll, it can be a little challenging to figure out whether you’re looking at something that’s genuinely unique about that state or a thing that’s weird about a smaller sample.
If you take the four Sun Belt states together, you get Kamala Harris ahead by four-tenths of a point. That happens to be the exact result of the 2020 election across those four states. So I see a result that in some ways is profoundly unsurprising. It’s almost exactly what we would’ve guessed two years ago, but it also represents a huge change from earlier in the year when Trump had a large lead across these diverse states.
Now that you’ve been able to do several rounds of polls, what do you feel comfortable saying demographically about how this race is different from when Biden was running, but also compared to Biden in 2020?
In May, we had Trump ahead by five points across the battleground states. Right now, we have Harris ahead by two, so it’s a big seven-point swing. And we show outsized gains for Harris among young and nonwhite voters, and women, and we show smaller gains, but still some improvement, for Harris among men and white voters.
Now, what’s interesting is that, compared to 2020, Harris is still slightly underperforming where Biden finished among young, Black, and Hispanic voters, even though she’s doing better than he was three months ago. We have Harris doing a little bit better among white voters and older voters than Biden did in 2020. It’s possible that this just reflects a continuation of a longer-term trend during the last decade toward somewhat less racial polarization. It’s possible this will change as the campaign continues. Maybe some of the white working-class voters who have seen three weeks of great coverage for Harris, and particularly white working-class women, will eventually turn against her as the campaign goes on. It’s a really unique political moment.
Right, there have been so many headlines about Harris picking up support from young voters and Black voters and Hispanic voters, but that’s just compared to how Biden was doing with those groups in the polls. And it is pretty striking when you say that, compared to the actual result of the last Presidential election, she’s actually doing better among white and older voters and worse among all those other groups.
It’s definitely not what we would’ve guessed two or three years ago. If you told me that Harris, a Black and Indian younger woman, was not going to have any material advantage over Biden among Black and Hispanic voters in the 2020 election, that would’ve surprised me. I do think that we need to see this race settle out a bit before we can say why that’s true and whether it’s going to last. I really do think it’s conceivable that Harris is riding an extraordinary wave of momentum that inflates her numbers just a little bit among swing voters across the board, and that might come back to earth. And ultimately there may be some room for her to make additional gains among Black and Latino voters as the campaign goes on.
Your current poll has largish gaps between Arizona and Nevada and then also between North Carolina and Georgia. I think most people assume that those gaps will end up being pretty close on Election Day.
Well, I certainly share that expectation. Arizona and Nevada have a large Latino population. Georgia and North Carolina have large Black populations. So you would expect those two groups of states to move somewhat in tandem. But it’s worth noting that that’s not necessarily what has been happening over the last decade. Democrats have made big gains in Arizona and Georgia while they have made few gains in Nevada and North Carolina. So it is conceivable that these states can move independently. Still, I don’t think our polling should necessarily be taken as a definitive claim that North Carolina is now going to vote to the left of Georgia or Arizona will vote far to the left of Nevada, not by any stretch.
We have the most to say about Georgia and Arizona because we’ve done a lot of polls in those states by now. The previous times that we’ve polled Arizona and Georgia this cycle, they weren’t that much different from the battlegrounds as a whole. But in this poll both those states diverged from where they’ve been in our prior polling. Georgia is now well to the right of the other states. Arizona is now to the left. My instinct is that this is probably just a little bit of random noise. I think that if we polled those two states again tomorrow, there’s a pretty darn good chance we would find Arizona closer to even, and Georgia closer to even.
