On Saturday, the New York Just and Siena College released their latest round of swing state polls for the presidential race. They showed Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by five points in Arizona and two points in North Carolina, while trailing Trump by one point in Nevada and four points in Georgia. (In 2020, Joe Biden outperformed Trump in all of these states except North Carolina.) The cumulative results show a very small lead for Harris. Combined with the previous set of Just/The Siena polls – which showed Harris ahead of Trump by four percentage points in three Rust Belt swing states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan) – showed that the overall picture of the race has changed since President Biden withdrew his bid for the Democratic nomination in July. Harris is narrowly ahead.
To talk about what this all means, I recently spoke with Nate Cohn, the Just’ chief political analyst who also oversees the paper’s opinion polls. (Full disclosure: Cohn and I worked together at The New Republicand are friends.) During our conversation, which has been condensed for length and clarity, we discussed the surprising differences between Harris’ coalition and Biden’s in 2020, how to think about the Sun Belt versus the Rust Belt, and the prospect of a third consecutive presidential election with serious polling errors.
You decided to conduct the polls in two rounds, one in the Rust Belt and one in the Sun Belt. Why did you make that decision, and do you think it’s helpful for people following the election to separate those two areas in their minds?
Well, there’s a practical reason, which is that it’s difficult for us to poll in seven states at once and quickly. This is a very dynamic campaign, so if we had polled in all seven states at once, it might have taken us over ten days to do it. And I think there would have been legitimate doubts about whether the results we ended up with still reflected the campaign as it is today.
There’s also a substantive reason, which is that the Sun Belt and Rust Belt states, if you can call them that, have been very different this election cycle. The northern swing states are relatively white, and polling this election cycle has shown Democrats doing relatively well with white voters. As a result, even Joe Biden was pretty competitive there. The Sun Belt states, on the other hand, are relatively diverse, and polling has shown Democrats doing relatively poorly with non-white voters this election cycle. As a result, Donald Trump had a significant lead in the Sun Belt swing states, while the Rust Belt states remained competitive. So I think there was a pretty good reason to treat them separately, even beyond the practical reasons.
When you look 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), do you look very closely at each state individually? Or do you mentally sum them up and average them out?
Both. Of course, individual states are idiosyncratic and can go their own way. On the other hand, these two groups of states have a lot in common and voted pretty similarly four years ago. If we put them all together, we have a larger sample, so these estimates can be more stable, whereas individual states can fluctuate. When you look at a single poll, it can be a little difficult to figure out whether you’re seeing something really unique about that state or something odd about a smaller sample.
If you look at the four Sun Belt states together, Kamala Harris is ahead by four-tenths of a point. That happens to be the exact result of the 2020 election in those four states. So I see an outcome that is, in some ways, profoundly unsurprising. It’s almost exactly what we would have guessed two years ago, but it also represents a huge change from earlier this year, when Trump had a big lead in those disparate states.
Now that you’ve been able to conduct several rounds of polling, what can you say from a demographic perspective about how this campaign differs from that during Biden’s candidacy, but also compared to Biden in 2020?
In May, Trump was ahead by five percentage points in the swing states. Now Harris is ahead by two percentage points, so that’s a massive seven-point jump. And we’re seeing disproportionate gains for Harris among young and non-white voters and women. Among men and white voters, we’re seeing smaller gains, but still some improvement for Harris.
What’s interesting is that compared to 2020, Harris is still doing slightly worse than Biden among young, black, and Hispanic voters, even though she’s doing better than she did three months ago. Among white and older voters, Harris is doing slightly better than Biden did in 2020. Perhaps this just reflects the continuation of a longer-term trend over the past decade toward slightly less racial polarization. It’s possible that this will change as the campaign continues. Perhaps some of the white working-class voters who have seen three weeks of great coverage of Harris, and particularly white working-class women, will eventually turn against her as the campaign continues. It’s a truly unique political moment.
Right, there have been so many headlines about Harris gaining support among young voters, black voters, Hispanic voters, but that’s just compared to Biden’s poll numbers among those groups. And it’s pretty remarkable to say that compared to the actual outcome of the last presidential election, she’s actually doing better among white and older voters and worse among all those other groups.
This is definitely not what we would have thought two or three years ago. If you had told me that Harris, a young black and Indian woman, would not have a material advantage over Biden among black and Hispanic voters in the 2020 election, I would have been surprised. I think we need to wait until this campaign settles down a little bit before we can say why that is and whether it will continue. I really think it is conceivable that Harris is riding an extraordinary wave of momentum that is pushing her numbers up a little bit among swing voters across the board and that could then come back down to earth. And ultimately, there could be room for her to make further gains among black and Latino voters as the campaign progresses.
Your current poll shows big differences between Arizona and Nevada and also between North Carolina and Georgia. I think most people expect those differences to be pretty small on Election Day.
Well, I certainly share that expectation. Arizona and Nevada have large Latino populations. Georgia and North Carolina have large black populations. So you would expect those two groups of states to move more or less in lockstep. But it’s worth noting that that hasn’t necessarily been the case over the past decade. Democrats have made big gains in Arizona and Georgia, while they’ve made small gains in Nevada and North Carolina. So it’s conceivable that those states could move independently. Still, I don’t think our polling results should necessarily be taken as a definitive statement that North Carolina will now vote to the left of Georgia or that Arizona will vote far to the left of Nevada, not by a long shot.
We can say the most about Georgia and Arizona because we’ve done a lot of polling in those states now. In previous polls this cycle, Arizona and Georgia weren’t that different from the battleground states overall. But in this poll, both states are moving away from where they were in our previous polls. Georgia is now way to the right of the other states. Arizona is now to the left. My gut tells me this is probably just a bit of random noise. I think if we polled those two states again tomorrow, there’s a pretty good chance we’d find Arizona and Georgia closer together.
