Dem
49
GOP
51
Every victorious presidential candidate pieces together a different electoral puzzle. Sometimes, the coalitions they build are such a dramatic departure from the past that they enter political lore. The FDR/New Deal coalition is one of those, the Reagan coalition is a second and the Trump coalition is a third.
There were a couple of interesting bits of news yesterday when it comes to the winning coalition that Kamala Harris is trying to cobble together. To start, each election cycle, the nonpartisan groups APIAVote and AAPIData conduct a poll of Asian-American voters, to see where they are at as a (very heterogeneous) group. At this time in 2020, 46% of Asian-American voters supported Joe Biden, 31% supported Donald Trump and 23% were undecided or planning to vote third party. Harris, being half-Asian, is doing a fair bit better with this demographic, as you might imagine. According to the 2024 AAPI Voter Survey, released yesterday, 66% of Asian-American voters say they will cast their votes for Harris, as opposed to 28% for Trump and just 6% who are undecided or are planning to vote third-party. AAPI Data head Karthick Ramakrishnan also noted that enthusiasm among Asian-American voters in 2024 is higher than in any other year that AAPI has conducted a voter survey.
Moving along, another key part of the Harris coalition, of course, is younger voters. The latest Harvard Institute of Politics youth survey was also released yesterday, and boy howdy, is she crushing Trump among the whippersnappers under 30. Among likely voters in this cohort, she has the backing of 61% while Trump is the choice of 30%. That's a 31-point gap. In addition, 75% of 30-and-under Democrats now plan to vote, as compared to 60% of 30-and-under Republicans. That's a 15-point gap; when Joe Biden was on the ticket, the gap was only 2 points. Also, less than half of young Democrats supported Biden enthusiastically; for Harris the number is 80%.
The Washington Post had a story yesterday that certainly complements the findings of the Harvard youth survey. According to the Post, it took Harris just 9 days to pile up more unique donors than Biden had during his entire campaign. Further, Harris' donors are younger than Biden's (about 9 years younger, on average) and are less partisan (only 58% of her donors are registered Democrats).
The upshot here is that the Harris coalition, whether it does the job or not, is different from the Biden coalition in substantive ways. We will remind readers, yet again, that when pollsters got to work building their models for the 2024 election, they started with the 2020 electorate. If the 2024 electorate is meaningfully different from the 2020 electorate (say, more Asian voters, more young voters, more low-engagement/nonpartisan voters), that's not easy to correct for on the fly, especially with only a month or so of Harris candidacy to make adjustments.
Incidentally, in our (brief) remarks on yesterday's presidential polls, we wrote: "Siena continues to have a very Trumpy lean this cycle." Several readers wrote in to say that Siena is a good pollster founded by a former Democrat, etc. Note that "very Trumpy lean" does not mean that Siena is wrong/bad (or that it is right/good). It means that they are clearly using a model of the electorate that is Trumpier than the other pollsters. Once the votes are in, around 6 weeks from now, we'll know whose model was right. The folks at Siena might be saying "We told you so!" but they might also end up with egg on their faces. Either is well within the realm of possibility, though note that very few high-quality pollsters have been on the same basic page as Siena this cycle (Emerson has been pretty much in agreement, though). (Z)