As the 2024 race enters its frantic final stretch, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are betting their campaigns on two very different electoral models.
Trump has mobilized what might be termed a “Grand New Bargain” coalition anchored in working-class voters. He has run on taming inflation, tightening the border, cracking down on crime, and restoring stability abroad. This is a different campaign than in 2016. Back then, Trump tried to stress the continuity of his program with the conventional Republican Party platform, as epitomized by his selection of Mike Pence as his running mate. Now that Trump has been the party’s standard-bearer three elections in a row, he has more latitude to re-fashion the GOP in his own image. On abortion and other issues, the former president has distanced himself from traditional social conservatives. Trump 2024 has also received an infusion of energy from a splinter wing of the tech and financial sectors, led by Elon Musk. These tech disruptors see in Trump the opportunity for a shift in favor of innovation. As a sign of this political sea-change, many of Trump’s most prominent surrogates on the campaign trail—such as Musk and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—were affiliated with the Left until recently. The tensions lurking within this coalition of digital innovators and blue-collar voters are obscured by Trump’s status as the challenger, but that could change if Trump reclaims the White House.
Kamala Harris has designed her general-election campaign around a “Belmont+” coalition. In his 2012 book Coming Apart, the social scientist Charles Murray used the wealthy Massachusetts suburb of Belmont as a shorthand for Americans with high social capital and college degrees. While the credentialed elite has been drifting in a Democratic direction for decades, the age of populism has accelerated this trend. Highly educated suburbanites delivered for Democrats in the 2018 and 2022 midterms and proved decisive in the 2020 presidential election. Joe Biden positioned himself to some extent as a link to the hard-hat Democrats of the past; he had strong connections with organized labor and at times resisted the race to the left that characterized Democrats during the Trump years.
With her background in San Francisco machine politics, Harris has instead bet the farm on appealing to Belmont. Enthusiasm among the Democratic base soared when she replaced Biden, but she has struggled with blue-collar voters. While Harris has laid out at least a sketch of an economic platform, her campaign seems fixated on cultural issues designed to turn out college-educated progressives. She has backed party-line court “reform,” nuking of the Senate filibuster, and a nationwide rollback of almost all limitations on abortion. Like Biden, she has tried to make the 2024 campaign a referendum on Trump himself, emphasizing his challenge of the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The Trump fixation has had strategic costs for Harris, however. By keeping him at the front and center of the news cycle, she has been unable to secure coverage of her own policy positions. For weeks, she dodged media interviews and swaddled her campaign in the warm gauze of generalities. While she has walked back many of her former positions through aides, her stands on many issues remain unknown. Polling suggests that voters may see Trump as more moderate than Harris. “Democracy in crisis” branding was not enough to steady Biden’s faltering campaign earlier this year, and it may present similar tactical limits for Harris. Recent Pennsylvania polling from the progressive Center for Working-Class Politics found that “democratic threat” messaging was singularly unappealing to blue-collar voters. That approach even left many anti-Trump professional-class voters unmoved. Allegations that Trump is an existential threat to “our democracy” may play well in cable-news green rooms, but they don’t seem to be winning over Americans dissatisfied with the status quo under Biden.
Both campaigns seem unlikely to hedge their bets in the closing days. Trump and J. D. Vance continue to tour the country, sitting for longform interviews and laying out their indictment of the Biden presidency. Harris and Tim Walz have begun to emerge from their media cocoons, but their messaging continues to put Trump front and center. Echoing Biden’s September 2022 stemwinder denouncing Trump as a threat to the “soul of the nation,” Harris is expected to invoke January 6 in a speech at the National Mall later this week that would yet again attack the former president as a danger to constitutional self-governance.
Polling in battleground states shows a razor-close race, and both the Grand New Bargain and Belmont+ coalitions have plausible routes to victory. A Trump win could look something like this: dissatisfied with Biden’s record, working-class voters of various ethnicities surge for Republican candidates and tip the battleground states in Trump’s direction. There’s some evidence for this scenario. Trump is at his strongest polling position in his political career. In past cycles, his RealClearPolitics national average never rose above 46 percent, and he was more than five percentage points behind both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden by late October. Against Kamala Harris, his national average has never dropped below 46 percent, and the two candidates are basically tied in many recent polls.
Most analysts project that seven battleground states will define the election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Harris and Trump are neck-and-neck in those polls, and many averages give Trump a narrow edge in those states. Analyzing the early vote in states is a perilous enterprise (one uniquely susceptible to partisan delusions), but Jon Ralston is the dean of Nevada political reporters and a master of parsing voter data in the Silver State. He reports that Republicans have the lead in the early vote in Nevada for the first time in a presidential year since 2008. That could be a tea leaf auguring a Grand New Bargain victory.
But other tea leaves suggest a Belmont+ win. Setting aside North Carolina, Republicans have won only a single federal statewide race in any of the other six battlegrounds since 2016: Ron Johnson’s photo-finish Senate win in 2022. In the 2022 midterms, only one Trump-aligned Republican won a gubernatorial race in those battlegrounds (Brian Kemp won reelection in Georgia only after beating back a Trump-backed primary challenge). Polls overestimated Republican support in the 2022 battlegrounds, and a strong performance among suburbanite voters could boost Democrats’ chances in 2024.
There’s also some evidence that this more populist GOP might be less efficiently distributed than its party forebears. In 2016, Republicans won the “popular vote” for the House by only a point but still had a majority of almost 50 seats. A House “popular vote” win of almost three points in 2022 translated into a Republican majority of under ten seats. Republicans might do better with working-class voters in California and New York, but they could end up locked out of the White House if they can’t seal the deal with suburbanites in the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Polling at the House district level might also indicate that Democrats retain an edge with these suburbanites. For instance, Biden barely won what is now Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District in the Lehigh Valley by less than a point, but a poll from mid-October found Harris up by three points there.
There’s a “choose your own adventure” element to state polls, too. Many analysts view Pennsylvania as a major bellwether, and it has been decided by less than two points in the last two presidential cycles. The polls have shown super-tight margins since August. According to the RealClearPolling aggregator, Trump has an average lead of half a point. But many of the polls included in the average that give him that lead also over-projected the Republican Senate performance in 2022. The New York Times/Siena College poll actually has Harris up by three points—and it correctly projected the outcome of the 2022 Senate race in the Keystone State.
Even a single poll can provide some evidence for both electoral stories. A poll conducted by the highly respected SurveyUSA gives Harris a one-point edge in North Carolina, leading Trump 47–46. This is the result you would expect if Harris’s Belmont+ majority were to materialize. But other details in the poll complicate this picture. Early voting has already started in the Tarheel State, and Trump leads by two points among those who have already voted. He also wins those who are “certain” they will vote by two points. However, he loses by 15 points among those who say it is “probable” they will vote. This finding suggests that pro-Trump voters are rushing to the polls, implying a change from 2020, when Republicans turned against early voting in many states. But how those “probable” voters will break remains up in the air. A strong closing message from Harris could conceivably get those voters to turn out and put her over the top; or those voters could just as easily stay dispirited and not vote at all (which would likely benefit Trump).
The accumulation of unprecedented elements in the 2024 presidential campaign makes this election cycle simultaneously a pundit’s dream and nightmare. Trump is the first former president to appear on the ballot in over a century. In her own way, Kamala Harris is also an unprecedented candidate: in the modern political age, a president has never dropped out at the last minute, followed by the expedited coronation of his vice president as the nominee. Harris’s presidential candidacy is the least road-tested in living memory. The expansion of mail-in and early voting has changed the fundamental dynamics of political campaigns. In the post-pandemic era, the two parties may be growing less polarized over how and when they cast their votes (with Republicans becoming more open to early voting), but how that will play out remains to be seen. To add even more complexity: polling is undergoing a methodological crisis, as response rates fall through the floor.
Both parties are haunted by recent polling misses. Trump shocked the political world with his 2016 win, and his 2020 loss was surprisingly close. But the supposed “red tsunami” of the 2022 midterms dissipated into a puff of disappointment. In less than two weeks, we’ll see which model is right—and whether the Grand New Bargain or Belmont+ proves the winning ticket to the White House.
Photos: Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images (left) / Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images (right)