When Vice President Kamala Harris became her party’s nominee, she inherited a Democratic coalition in shambles.
As she wraps up her party’s convention one month later, she’s well on her way toward stitching it back together.
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In this month’s New York Times/Siena College battleground polls, she led former President Donald Trump by 2 percentage points across the seven states likeliest to decide the presidency, compared with Trump’s 5-point lead in May.
It’s an enormous shift, but Harris didn’t improve equally among all demographic groups. Instead, she made big gains among young, nonwhite and female voters, and made relatively few or no gains among older voters and white men.
If you drew up a list of President Joe Biden’s challenges this cycle, you could probably find a demographic group corresponding to each one on this list of Harris’ biggest gains.
There’s young, nonwhite and low-turnout voters, and the places they tend to live. There’s the lowest-income voters, who suffered through rising prices. There’s even the TikTok users immersed in the bad vibes of the Biden era. The Muslim and Arab voters angry about the war in the Gaza Strip don’t make the list, but only because of their small sample size (just 55 respondents in August) — they would have been No. 1 on the list with a net swing of 49 points toward Harris.
The top of the list, however, is led by an entirely different group: those with a “somewhat” unfavorable view of Trump. In an extraordinary measure of Biden’s weakness, Trump actually led voters who had a somewhat unfavorable view of him back in May. Now, Harris has a wide lead among this group — at least for the moment.
And there’s one group that reveals Harris’ distinctive mark on the race: women. She didn’t simply make gains among young and nonwhite voters; she made outsize gains among young women.
Overall, Harris gained 11 points compared with Biden among women while she improved just 3 points among men.
The shift among women is broad and includes nearly every demographic group, including older white women and white women without a college degree.
On the other end of the spectrum, the top 10 groups where Harris didn’t gain much support look very different.
Many of the groups sticking by Trump are those where no Democrat can realistically make big gains, like Republicans, Trump 2020 voters, self-described “very conservative” voters and those with a very favorable view of Trump. But beyond those, many of the groups reflect Harris’ relative weaknesses or Biden’s relative strengths.
Harris’ worst group is somewhat conservative voters. No, Biden wasn’t winning many conservatives, but his moderate political orientation gave him a path to peeling away a sliver of Trump-skeptical conservative-leaning voters. Harris, who ran to the left in her 2020 campaign, does not have that same appeal, at least not yet.
One group stands out for not being a relative strength for Harris: nonwhite voters over 45. Biden held his own among these voters and still held around 70% of their votes in our last round of Times/Siena polls. Harris didn’t seem to gain much among this more loyal group of Democrats, even as she made big gains among younger nonwhite voters.
But perhaps the most telling area of weakness of all for Harris is among white men. Although she made outsize gains among women and nonwhite voters, white men barely budged at all. And white men over 65 — a level of granularity not included in the table — actually shifted 6 points toward Trump.
Of course, it’s still early in her campaign, and these numbers could move around post-convention and post-debate. The possible exit of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., on the other hand, should not be expected to make a notable difference.
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