Where joy meets anger: Harris and Trump battle for undecided voters

Devon Howard is not feeling the joy.

Howard, a 25-year-old airport technician, has no use for Vice President Kamala Harris’ displays of optimism. And he doubts whether either candidate can fix what he sees as a country headed in the wrong direction. Like other voters in Las Vegas, Howard is fed up with the costs of gas and rent, as his paycheck seems to cover less and less of his regular expenses.

“I just don’t like the way they’re playing it, telling us we should all be more optimistic when things just are not looking good right now,” Howard said while warming up for a softball game in East Las Vegas. “They’re all out for themselves, not helping people like us over here. We just get the same promises, and not much is changing.”

Howard hasn’t decided whom he’ll vote for — or whether he’ll vote at all. He has grown frustrated by how much former President Donald Trump has divided the country — though he voted for Trump in 2020 — but he has also been unimpressed by Harris. Mostly, he and his friends try to tune out the daily bombardment of political news.

His sourness about the economy, the direction of the country and his own personal finances reflects the feelings of millions of Americans. They’re the so-called undecided or persuadable voters in the seven battleground states who will decide the outcome of the 2024 election.

While the economy has stabilized, many voters have said they don’t feel it in their lives and are facing far higher prices than they once did.

While Harris quickly gained in the polls after she announced her candidacy — drawing back Democrats who were unhappy with President Joe Biden — she is still viewed skeptically by many undecided voters. Polling shows these voters care more about the economy than any other issue. They have lower incomes than the electorate overall, and they’re pessimistic about the country’s future. They are highly transactional. What they want to know from the candidates, above all else, is: What will you do for me?

Contrasting challenges

The allegiances of this group of voters — roughly 3 million voters in the seven states — have shifted from poll to poll. They leaned slightly toward Harris in late August in battleground-state polls by The New York Times and Siena College but have swung more toward Trump in more recent Times/Siena national polls.

These voters are up for grabs, and both campaigns are building their media strategies around appealing to them.

Interviews with more than two dozen voters in four of the seven key battleground states — Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin and North Carolina — show that Trump’s challenge with this group remains his divisive personality, while Harris must reassure voters that she has a plan to make their lives more affordable again.

While abortion and immigration are powerful rallying cries for the Democratic and Republican bases, persuadable voters are half as likely to cite either issue as a driver of their votes. And traditional Democratic lines of attack on Trump’s criminal trials and his offensive rhetoric are of little concern to them.

Las Vegas, where Howard lives, was hit especially hard by the pandemic, as casinos shut down for nearly three months, devastating a region that relies on tourism. The consequences rippled to other industries and left the economy struggling well into the Biden administration.

Harris has begun to respond to the economic concerns of voters like Howard. She has released a handful of policies that she says would lower costs. But her slogan — “a new way forward” — has little to do with her stand on issues. She has done very little, so far, to separate herself substantively from Biden. The change she is promising, voters said, seems more about vibes than specific policy.

Trump and his allies are trying to turn the tone of what Democrats have cast as a joyful campaign against her. They have tried to weaponize Harris’ laugh, in ads and online videos, to portray her as unserious. The way they see it, Harris’ message could prove discordant with the mood of voters she needs.

Trump mocked Harris’ appeal to joy at his recent rally in Las Vegas, contrasting it with his own approach.

“Every family will thrive, and every day we will be filled — you know, the word they use — with joy?” Trump said. “So, I’m not going to use that word, if you don’t mind, but opportunity and hope. We’re going to be filled with ambition.”

Harris frames the race as one in which her opponent is a tired old act, a force of darkness, and she is the opposite. Much of the joy associated with her campaign comes from her Democratic supporters and is visible at her rallies. Harris has publicly channeled an authentic expression of relief and delight from Democrats who had lost faith in Biden.

Two months after Biden quit the race, Harris has won back many voters who were traditionally with the Democrats in the first place. She has made inroads with African Americans, younger voters and college-educated white people who had concerns about Biden. But this is a much warier portion of the electorate.

When asked about Republican criticism of her upbeat campaign, Harris said at an event Tuesday that she wouldn’t let her adversaries turn her “strength into a weakness.”

“I find joy in the American people,” Harris said. “I find joy in optimism, in what I see to be our future and our ability to invest in it. I find joy in the ambition of the people. I find joy in the dreams of the people.”

I’m ready for it to be over’

Despite Trump’s often unrealistic promises — he has vowed to somehow halve automobile insurance costs — many persuadable voters are holding out on him. It’s a result, strategists in both parties say, of concerns these voters have about Trump’s behavior.

Nationally, voters see Harris as more intelligent and more temperamentally fit for the presidency than Trump, according to recent Times/Inquirer/Siena polling. Voters are much more likely to describe Trump as extreme, 74% to 46%. The gap is even wider among undecided voters.

And yet for many voters, viewing Trump as extreme may not be a negative. He wins the group who said extreme describes him “somewhat well” by more than 50 percentage points. And the candidate they associate most with change is Trump.

“I feel like instead of focusing on joy, Kamala should focus on comfort and security when it comes to things like food, medical care — things that matter to people,” said Stephanie Somsen, 34, of Hammond, Wisconsin.

Somsen is leaning toward voting for Trump because she said he is best positioned to address her economic concerns. Yet she remains open to Harris and spoke of how hard it is for women who run for president. She said she wanted to see Harris succeed where Hillary Clinton did not.

“I think the message of joy is fine,” she added, “but I want to hear her elaborate on how she plans to get there.”

In a statement, Tony Fabrizio, the Trump campaign’s lead pollster, described Harris’ message to persuadable voters as “tone-deaf.” He added, “When these voters are faced with the choice of Kamala’s record of economic misery, inflation and failure versus President Trump’s record of success and strong vision for the future — we are confident they will cast their ballots for President Trump.”

Harris campaign officials say people are conflating Democrats’ wave of relief that the race has become more competitive — and the tone of her rallies — with her central message to voters. And they said the joy contrasts with an often apocalyptic posture from Trump that reminds voters of the chaos of his time in the White House.

“The economics are an enormous part of it,” said Molly Murphy, a pollster for the Harris campaign. “But it ignores the other pieces that people weigh and factor in terms of what makes life comfortable for them.” She added that people feel as if they’ve been through many years “of feeling like things have been unstable underneath them.”

One challenge both campaigns face is that undecided voters’ pessimism often bleeds into cynicism.

“I have burnout over the election. I’m ready for it to be over,” said Michael Boaz, 62, of Marietta, Georgia.

“I’m glad Kamala is not as angry as Trump,” he said. “But at the end of the day, our government is the only entity in the world that can operate on that kind of debt. So I guess if she can be happy and pretend it’s going to be OK, then that’s good. Ignorance is bliss.”

Boaz, an electronics engineer who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, now describes himself as “anybody but Trump” after Jan. 6, though he is still weighing whether to vote for Harris.

Trump’s pollster, Fabrizio, has homed in on roughly 11% of voters in the battleground states that he refers to as “target persuadables.” They are more likely to be male and under the age of 50 and are more racially diverse than the population overall. In an electorate that is in a sour mood overall, these voters are disproportionately so, especially about high prices.

To reach these voters, Trump has done a spree of interviews on nontraditional, nonpolitical channels, including some with podcasters. Many of these internet personalities, such as comedian Theo Von, reach large audiences of young men.

Harris has done far fewer interviews than Trump, but her early policy rollouts show that her team understands the hurdles they are facing with undecided voters. Her policies have included a vague but popular poll-tested plan to combat “corporate price gouging.” Instead of framing Trump as an existential threat to democracy, as Biden did, Harris has instead portrayed him as a rich guy who only cares about himself and his wealthy friends.

Ambivalent, not enthusiastic

Pocketbook concerns resounded at the Big League Dreams ballpark in the Latino neighborhood of East Las Vegas one recent evening. In interviews with more than a dozen men, most said they had no plans to vote. Even those who said they might vote were more ambivalent than enthusiastic.

“The older I get, the less convinced I am that any of these politicians are working for my best interest,” said Howard Bond, 42, a sales representative who said that if he cast a ballot, it would be for Harris. “The problem for all of us is that they keep talking about what they’re against when we want to know some stuff to be for.”

Still, he said, he does harbor some optimism.

“I don’t know about joy, but it is a breath of fresh air to move on from the same old men,” Bond added. “But what are we supposed to do, have joy for inflation? For rising rent? What am I supposed to be joyful about?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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