Can Harris win undecided voters?

Heading into the Sept. 10 debate, Harris led Trump by just over a point in the RealClearPolitics polling average. By the weekend, that average lead extended to just below two points, but the vice president fell short of hammering her message home with this, and virtually every, election’s most coveted demographic cell: undecided voters.

Anecdotal reports show some undecided voters in battleground states now giving Harris more of a look than before the debate, but an equal number of media outlets have found since Tuesday that Harris’s penchant for baiting Trump, and not substantially expanding on her policy agenda, left undecided voters wanting more.

However, Patrick Murray, the director of The Polling Institute and Monmouth University, told the Washington Examiner that both candidates should spend more time targeting their base, rather than any remaining undecideds, based on just how well known each of the candidates are.

“The media talks about undecided voters, but take your cue from the campaigns. They’re not looking at undecided voters,” he said in an interview. “They’re looking at unmotivated voters, people who they think for other reasons would vote for them, but they just don’t feel that there’s any point to it, that there’s not going to be any payoff for them to go out to vote. Those are the voters that, particularly on the Harris side, they want to activate, so I think that’s the group that we look at.”

Murray broadly categorized these unmotivated voters as “young voters” who have a “sense that they’re being left behind,” but said it’s virtually impossible to tell which candidate is set up to better reach this demographic without having intimate knowledge of each campaign’s actual resources.

Bakari Sellers, a political analyst and the former co-chair of Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign, similarly told the Washington Examiner that Harris must be just as, if not more, concerned about turnout as Trump, but he believes the vice president‘s campaign has made strides toward addressing that vulnerability.

“It’s Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump versus the couch. How many voters stay home is the question,” he explained. “I tell people that the ‘poller coaster’ is not a real-life experiment. I get that people think polls today are going to be what happens, and polls are just snapshots in time, but it’s palpable as you go out in the street and you meet people at Piggly Wiggly, you meet them at the Bi-Lo, you see them at the post office. People are talking. The energy is different.”

One Democratic strategist with close ties to Harris’s campaign told the Washington Examiner that “absolutely” she’s able to drive turnout in November.

“Just look at all those ‘double haters’ who were going to sit out of a Biden-Trump election. They’re now all backing Harris,” that person declared. “I expect the vice president to continue to swell her ranks over the next two months.”

The Harris campaign has consistently stressed to reporters that the vice president isn’t taking any voters for granted and, thanks to her gargantuan fundraising numbers, they’ve implemented a massive swing state ground game to activate new supporters and reinvigorate any Democrats who may still have doubts about Harris.

The Trump campaign did not answer questions for this story.

Still, despite Trump’s poor performance last Tuesday, the polling shows he isn’t out of the race, and his team remains optimistic of victory in November.

Trump pollsters Tony Fabrizio and Travis Tunis actually claimed that Trump and Harris were tied heading into the debate, but that the former president opened up a two-point national advantage over the vice president after Tuesday.

“We found that despite the best efforts of Kamala Harris and [the] media to portray the debate as some kind of overwhelming win for her, voters did not see it this way as support for her remained flat,” they wrote in a memo released on Thursday. “The only change we saw was a 2-point bump for President Trump in both ballot configurations.”

“We found that despite the best efforts of Kamala Harris and [the] media to portray the debate as some kind of overwhelming win for her, voters did not see it this way as support for her remained flat,” they wrote in a memo circulated on Wednesday. “Clearly, target state voters were not impressed by Kamala Harris’ empty platitudes and while the media would have people believe she is cruising to victory, this couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

Two veteran Republican strategists with ties to the Trump campaign additionally told the Washington Examiner that, unlike Harris, turnout shouldn’t prove an issue for Trump.

“Let’s be honest. Republican voters, at least over the last decade or so, are just more reliable than the Democrats,” one strategist claimed. “They’re going to show up, so that frees up President Trump to focus their efforts on courting traditionally non-Republican demographics, including black and Hispanic voters.” 

Furthermore, should Trump keep to his promise of not having another debate with Harris, the former president would not only rob Harris the opportunity to pitch her case again on the national stage, but also pigeon hole his subpar performance in the minds of his own base.

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“What we saw in the last debate and what we’ve seen of Trump over the years, it’s unlikely that he could improve his performance, which means that it’s better for him to let it sit where it is right now,” Murray explained. “His hope is that the contrast that was drawn in that debate about him just being all over the edge on issues around eating pets and all sorts of things will just fade as things have faded with him in the past.”

Both candidates will spend time campaigning in critical battleground states. Trump is expected to rally in both Michigan and North Carolina, while Harris will spend time in Pennsylvania.