Kamala Harris Is Running Hard, So Why Isn’t She Getting Anywhere? | Opinion

For Democrats, the 2024 campaign is beginning to feel like that moment in Star Wars when the good guys get trapped by the Death Star’s tractor beam. They can’t seem to move an inch, even as the crew pours everything they’ve got into the Millennium Falcon’s engines.
Just look at how much Democrats have been revving: they are vastly out-communicating Republicans down the stretch of the 2024 election, both on digital platforms—where Vice President Kamala Harris has between a 3:1 and an eye-popping 16:1 advantage over former President Donald Trump—and in TV ads, where Democrats outpaced Republicans by a staggering 117,000 spots in September.
In fact, Harris’ campaign is doing everything associated with winning elections way more than Trump’s—ads, offices, phone calls, postcards, buttons, speeches—because Harris has raised $1 billion since entering the race. Her staggering cash advantage means that she can soak every swing state in swag. Her overall campaign is actually now about three times the size of Trump’s, and all of that campaign outreach is getting delivered via a massive outpouring of volunteers, leaving Republican insiders fretting about how badly outmatched they’ve become.
So, with all that juice, is Harris pulling away in the polls? Nope. Not one bit.
After an initial 6 point surge in the wake of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race—almost entirely through consolidating support that probably should have belonged to Democrats in the first place—and a small bounce from a convention that observers almost universally agreed was about as ideal as she could have wanted, Harris crested on Sept. 1.
Since then, during her biggest deluge of advertising and outreach, Harris’ poll numbers haven’t statistically moved. Ever have one of those nightmares where you’re running as fast as you can but not going anywhere? Democrats are having one right now.
So, what’s going on? There are three potential explanations.
One: ads don’t work. At least, not that well anymore. One of the most widely cited studies on campaign methods by Joshua Kalla and David Brockman found that these days “the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general elections is zero.”
Yes, there is some evidence that advertising may work a bit more in down-ballot races where voters are paying less attention (that may account for some of the mild blue drift recently at the Congressional level) and some evidence that a handful of ads do break through. But overall, at the presidential level, the upshot seems to be that campaigns are in a Catch-22: voters who are paying attention are awash in so much information that ads don’t make a difference, but voters who aren’t paying attention are deliberately tuning out ads.
There’s been a pretty convincing real-world test of this proposition. Hillary Clinton enjoyed a 3-1 advantage in TV ads down the stretch in 2016, but she not only lost, she lost based on voters who made up their minds exactly when the ad blitz was happening. And then in 2020, Democrats aired 202,878 more presidential ads than Republicans in the top 6 swing states post Labor Day, and there was never any obvious effect in those states’ polls.
Two: actually, there is movement happening, but we can’t see it yet. One of the trickiest things about polling is figuring out who will show up to vote. Pollsters make educated guesses, and they’re usually reasonably accurate. But sometimes (see 2020) they are wrong, which is why two-thirds of pollsters are applying a controversial technique (weighting by recalled vote) in 2024 that they previously scorned in order to make sure they don’t under-count Trump support again.
But if that correction is wrong, or if there are any number of other hidden factors affecting the makeup of the electorate next month, it could mean that polls are missing what’s happening with undecided voters right now. And even if pollsters have everything right, they still won’t be able to see what is happening with late deciders. Those voters broke for Trump in the last two elections, but might not this time, especially with all of that Harris communication.
Three: there’s nowhere for the race to go. Democrats might be right that media coverage tends to sanitize the Trump extremes that might make voters react negatively (how else to account for the fact that going into the summer, about half of voters had no idea about Trump’s felony indictments?). And Republicans might be right that Trump carries an appeal that liberal elites simply can’t fathom. The combined effect is like a sea anchor for an already polarized electorate: voters simply won’t move that far no matter how hard the wind blows.
And are any of these explanations right? The answer is probably like Murder on the Orient Express (spoiler alert)—all the suspects are guilty.
There truly isn’t a lot of room to maneuver within the electorate to begin with: recent polls suggesting that as many as 15 percent of voters could still change their minds are probably wildly overstating things, since previous estimates of the true swing vote are about half that. Polling is probably not capturing the electorate quite right, especially since a lot of Trump’s support throughout 2024 has come from low-turnout voters. And ads are almost certainly delivering diminishing returns, given the mountain of evidence.
If there’s any good news for people who would like to see a more dynamic political environment, it’s that this amount of stasis probably won’t persist. Trump is a uniquely polarizing figure. Once he departs the political scene, there’s a good chance that the parties will begin to reposition themselves, voters will break out of their worn grooves a bit, and we’ll see a more fluid politics among both voters and politicians.
But of course, we won’t know how soon that’s happening until after Election Day.
Matt Robison is a writer, podcast host, and former congressional staffer.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.