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With polls nearly tied both nationally and in many swing states, candidates are fighting for every last voter. Which voters will be the ones to push one side over the edge? Aaron Zitner discusses the race and which voters are crucial to victory in The Wall Street Journal, writing:
The Trump and Harris campaigns are racing to reach undecided voters in the final weekend of the presidential election. But their main focus isn’t the voters undecided on which candidate to back. Instead, they are doing more to target those who are undecided on whether to vote at all.
Most occasional voters—those who sometimes cast ballots and sometimes skip elections—lean toward one candidate or the other, and the campaigns see them as a vital source of untapped support. They account for more than one-quarter of the voter pool, strategists say, though estimates vary. By contrast, Wall Street Journal polling finds that only 3% of registered voters are truly undecided on a choice of candidate.
“I feel very strongly that there’s a much smaller number of undecided voters than there are people deciding whether to vote,” said Bill McInturff, a veteran Republican pollster who has worked with GOP groups this year. Which GOP- and Democratic-leaning groups turn out most will affect the election outcome more than will the voters “who are still agonizing over Trump or Harris,” he said.
That is why MAGA Inc., the main super PAC supporting Donald Trump, in early October started targeting ads on streaming-TV services to nearly 3.5 million battleground-state voters who it believes tilt toward the former president but have spotty voting records. That is on top of a longer-term program of putting ads in front of about 4 million voters who are registered or likely Republicans but have skipped the last three presidential elections.
Priorities USA, a leading Democratic super PAC, is trying to increase the social pressure on infrequent voters who lean toward Kamala Harris, about 11% of all voters in its estimation, in an attempt to get them to commit to participating this year. “Your voting history is public…so your friends, family and the barista you like could know whether you show up to the polls—or not,” a narrator says in one of its ads, which features a young woman placing her coffee order. It cautions: “Avoid the embarrassment.”
Wall Street Journal polls show that the election outcome turns heavily on the decisions of low-frequency voters.
Habitual voters, those who showed up for the last two presidential and two midterm elections, have favored Harris over Trump by at least 4 percentage points in every Journal survey this year that tested her as a presidential candidate. That means that Trump is looking to the other half of the voter pool to make up those 4 or more points.
He holds a substantial lead among several categories of infrequent voters. For instance, the Journal’s late-October survey found Trump ahead of the vice president by 14 points among voters who cast ballots in the last two presidential elections but skipped the last two midterms. He led by 10 points among those who were old enough to vote in the last two presidential elections but skipped one or both of them.
Read more here.
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