Here in the blue bubble of New York City, I often hear people express puzzlement that polls show a close race for the White House between Kamala Harris and Donald J. Trump. This puzzlement is because so many things would seem to disqualify Mr. Trump from the presidency, including his frequent incoherence and strange behavior at public events, his “lying sprees” (as CNN calls them), his affection for dictators and “strongman” regimes, his promotion of racism and xenophobia, and his cruelty toward immigrants and other vulnerable groups (and what seems to be a determination to destroy the image of Americans as a caring people). Not least, there is the refusal of Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, to accept the results of the 2020 election, which Mr. Trump lost to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Despite all this, polls show a tight race that does not seem to have appreciably changed in months, even after what was seen as a disastrous debate performance by Mr. Trump in early September. It is clear that nearly half of the country sees the election in a completely different way than it is seen in heavily blue precincts. Here are five reasons why a close race should not be surprising.
1. The Democratic Party has its own ceiling of support, and it’s not much above 50 percent. This is another way of saying that the United States has become deeply polarized between the two major parties, and many have been hesitant to cross party lines for even one election, including “anti-Trump” Republicans like Mitt Romney and Chris Christie. But this is not simply a matter of blind loyalty to the Republicans; the Democrats are just not considered a mainstream party in much of the United States. This is partly because of ideology; almost all nationally known Democrats hold the same views on many issues where overall public opinion is far from unanimous, including abortion and issues around transgender youth. (In Texas, the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, Colin Allred, felt compelled to release a campaign ad in which he said, “Let me be clear, I don’t want boys playing girls sports,” but the ad may jeopardize his efforts to raise funds in solidly blue states.)
The New York Times columnist David Brooks, a longtime Republican who is backing Ms. Harris, recently explained why he is still not “fully comfortable” with the Democratic Party. One reason is the self-congratulation that Democrats can’t seem to help displaying as they dominate the most highly educated segments of society: “The more they dominate the commanding heights of society, the more aggressively progressive aristocrats posture as marginalized victims of oppression.” But most of my Democratic acquaintances have a response to this: They refuse to read anything by David Brooks.
2. Not only are there two competing political realities in the United States, there are two competing socioeconomic realities. All elections are affected to some degree by current economic indicators like inflation, but the long-term political division in the United States has been deepened by the fact that some regions have benefited from globalization and deindustrialization (in particular, the “superstar cities” on both coasts) and others have never recovered from the loss of manufacturing jobs. The latter group has been Mr. Trump’s political base since 2016.
With respect to immigration, which has become one of the top issues of the election, it is difficult to have a national conversation when more than one in four residents of one state are foreign-born (California) and fewer than one in 50 residents of another state fit that description (West Virginia). In the blue states of the Northeast and the West Coast, immigrants help to alleviate a labor shortage, and multiculturalism has long been viewed positively. But in many closely contested states, like Georgia and North Carolina, a large immigrant population is a new phenomenon, part of a population boom that is also bringing in new residents from other parts of the United States and putting pressure on school systems and other government services. And in many red states, immigrants are still rare and largely an abstraction, so some voters are easily persuaded by Mr. Trump to think the worst of newcomers. The result is that almost every statement on immigration provokes opposite reactions in different parts of the country.
3. There is a bipartisan dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, and that helps Mr. Trump. For decades, most Americans have told pollsters that they are “dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States,”and an NBC poll in September found that 65 percent of voters say the country is “on the wrong track.” It is inevitable that the Democrats are going to be blamed more for this dissatisfaction, both because they now hold the White House and because they are held responsible, as the “pro-government” party, for more of the major changes in public policy over the past 50 years. Being the “pro-democracy” party in this election may not help as much as the Harris campaign hopes, as the United States is part of a global trend of declining faith in “the way democracy is working.”
The Democrats may also be hurt by news of persistent problems in the United States, reporting that is accurate and valuable but that can leave the impression that the country has made no progress at all in the past half-century on poverty, racism, homelessness or police misconduct. On some issues, things seem worse because they are no longer hidden, but if you persuade people that things are rotten, it is not so easy to steer them in the political direction you want. Mr. Trump is more likely to get the votes of Americans who think radical changes are needed.
4. There is no longer a mainstream media that most voters trust to report accurately about Mr. Trump. Media critics have been highly critical of The New York Times and other news outlets based in blue cities for “sane-washing” Mr. Trump and failing to tell readers the full dangers of a second Trump presidency. In fact, the Times, the Atlantic and other national publications have done a thorough job of reporting on Mr. Trump’s explicit threats to democratic institutions, but half of the country may not be paying attention.
A Gallup poll released in early October found that only 31 percent of Americans had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the news media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly”—down from about 70 percent in polls taken a half-century ago, when daily newspapers and nightly television newscasts may have been at their peak influence. In another sign of partisan differences, 54 percent of Democrats in the latest poll still had confidence in the media, but that number was only 27 percent among independents and 12 percent among Republicans.
Americans may trust their regular sources of news more than they trust the media as a whole, but there are big differences on what those sources are. According to a poll by the Pew Research Center, also released in early October, most Democrats in all age groups say they use CNN, but not Fox, as a regular source of political news. But for most Republicans across all age groups, it’s the reverse: Fox but not CNN. As for The New York Times, it was most popular among Democrats under 30 (with 67 percent citing it as one of their news sources) and least popular among Republicans over 65 (only 12 percent citing it as a news source).
5. Many voters simply do not believe the most alarming characterizations of Mr. Trump. Mistrust of the mainstream media is one reason for this, but Mr. Trump also benefits from already having served as president, which may lead some voters to reason that “we’ve survived him before.”
This assessment overlooks the fact that dozens of national security officials from Republican administrations signed a letter that concluded that Mr. Trump demonstrated “dangerous qualities” while in the White House. And “the people that stopped him from his worst desires last time around won’t serve again,” said Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman now backing Ms. Harris.
Mr. Trump’s campaign rhetoric comes ever closer to a textbook definition of fascism, threatening to imprison political opponents and suggesting that unfriendly news outlets should have their broadcast licenses revoked. And as Ms. Cheney points out, the Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this summer that Mr. Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for certain official actions he took while in office may embolden him to test his powers further than he did in his first term.
Yet when Mr. Trump talks about deporting millions of migrants from the United States, or having “one really violent day” of police action to curb crime, many of his supporters dismiss his rhetoric. “He may say things, and then it gets people all upset,” one Trump voter told The New York Times, “but then he turns around and he says, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’It’s a negotiation. But people don’t understand that.”
In other words, Mr. Trump is benefiting from the support of people who are wagering that he is not as bad as he sounds. That is a tough belief to crack in this cynical age, and it is one reason Mr. Trump is likely to remain a strong candidate right up to Election Day.
