Blog Post

Dear Friend,

First off, we want to celebrate Kamala Harris’ selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. We know him well and think he is a great addition (more on that below). But now to the main event.

Since the last time we updated you there has been an unprecedented upheaval in the presidential race that both defies easy prediction and is certain to reverberate in down ballot races.

We are all in for Kamala Harris and we have responded to her ascendance on the ticket by doing what we do best – gathering voluminous data across all of our many tools, analyzing the trends, and planning our voter outreach accordingly. We wanted to share some of our early observations about the impact of Harris replacing Biden as the nominee. 

Here’s the highlights of what’s below: 

• In places where they’ve asked about Harris, our canvassers found support for her exceeded predicted levels. 
• There are opportunities to increase voters’ positive perceptions of Harris and their negative perceptions of Trump. 
• Our tracking poll suggests the prospects for victory for the Democrats have improved, but there is still lots of work to be done.

Voices from the doors:

We are having about 13,000 conversations a night with working-class voters at the doors in critical swing states.

At this stage, most of our canvass is focused on growing our membership base, not swaying voters to choose a candidate, as previous data has reliably proven that this is the best strategy. As part of the work, we routinely collect feedback from our canvassers about their observations. The data shows a clear trend here: across these thousands of conversations, very few voters raised the presidential election for discussion on their own. So despite our focus on November as campaigners, the voters are not chomping at the bit to talk about it.  

But we have approached Minnesota a little bit differently, because early July polling suggested Trump was pulling within striking distance of beating Biden. 

Minnesota is not traditionally considered a battleground state. But its strong idiosyncratic history of support for third parties may have put it in play. (Recall that in 2016, third party candidates won enough votes to deprive Hillary Clinton of a majority, although she eked out a 1.5 point win over Trump with a 46 percent share of the vote.) So we tasked our canvassers with spending a week asking voters their opinion on the presidential race to learn if Vice President Harris’ nomination changed the trend. 

We canvassed in both heavily Democratic urban turf and swing suburban communities. The partisan makeup of the voters we canvassed skewed Democratic and in aggregate have historically voted to back Democrats 62 percent to 38 percent, or about 1.6 to 1. According to canvass data from July 22 to 30, Harris is performing above these ratios – data from 2,941 canvass conversations gave Harris 49 percent vs. Trump’s 25 percent, or about 1.9 to 1, with third parties earning 3 percent and the rest undecided. While we cannot be certain  who the undecideds will eventually choose, they tend to split in the same proportion as those voters who already have a candidate choice. So Harris is pulling in support over Trump better than the predicted support level, and most importantly, Third Party candidates are not gaining steam.

Perceptions of candidates are fluid:

Our tracking survey collected 15,000 responses from voters across the battleground states in recent weeks–covering both their vote choice and, just as important, their reasoning. Because this sample is an order of magnitude larger than many national polls, it gives us a deep and reliable understanding of voter sentiment in the battlegrounds.

Here’s a little of what they’re saying:

• Harris voters were happy and excited, but they knew little about the Vice President.
• Undecided and third-party voters cannot stand Trump, had little information about Harris, but agreed with her on some key issues (even if they don’t know it yet).
• Trump voters repeated the expected vicious and false talking points about Harris, even though they also had little information about her. But these voters also revealed some telling concerns which present political opportunities.
  • These voters said they are concerned about housing affordability, they want to see taxes cut for the working class instead of the wealthy, and want to see an increase in SNAP benefits.

All of these are issues in which the voters’ preferences don’t match with their candidate’s position. We know from prior years and early testing this year that we can be especially persuasive by elevating awareness of that discrepancy.

Harris improving, but far from safe:

Our ongoing tracking poll has been surveying the same specific voters since the 2020 election. That makes it a highly reliable gauge of how voters’ opinions are changing since they last cast a vote for president. While national horse race polls are trying to guess who will be in the electorate, our tracking poll is instead predicting, with a higher confidence, how key demographics of the electorate will change their vote compared to the last election. 

What we see here is that Harris has improved among some of these key demographics over where Biden had been polling, but across the board is still not reaching the levels of support that drove Biden’s victory in 2020. 

• Younger voters and men have dropped more in Democratic support than older voters and women since 2020. 
• The biggest drop off from 2020 was among those voters modeled as likely Democrats. This segment is a combination of voters either currently choosing a third party or still undecided. This kind of uncertainty for these voters is common at this phase of the cycle, and ultimately many of them are expected to vote for Harris.
• Trump, meanwhile, had seen his support grow most sharply among younger, non-college, white men. But apart from this segment, we saw little evidence of Trump’s support expanding.

A summary of results is below:

We Are on the Case

As you can likely tell, the fuller Working America 2024 program is starting to take shape. We talked to 64,000 voters last week at their front doors; our research tools are capturing feedback from tens of thousands more voters every week; and our in-cycle testing system is finding the messages and targets needed to add hundreds of thousands of votes for Vice President Harris in the most critical battleground states.

Thanks to those of you who have helped us build the system so far. We are just getting started and can not wait to show you more as the cycle progresses.

See you on the doors, 

Matt

P.S. We are so excited about the selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as the Vice Presidential nominee. Working America’s history with the Governor goes back to his first election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2006. We helped Walz win that seat in a largely rural Southeastern Minnesota district that also included Rochester (home of the Mayo Clinic) and other smaller cities. In Congress he was remarkably open to collaborating with Working America both in D.C. and at home in his district, consistently backing working class values and regularly briefing our canvassers. We are proud of our contributions to every one of his elections and grateful for what he has delivered for the people of Minnesota.