3 big things to watch in the final stretch of the 2024 race: From the Politics Desk (2024)

Welcome to the online version ofFrom the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the campaign trail, the White House and Capitol Hill.

In today’s edition, senior national political reporterSahil Kapur breaks down three key dynamics that will shape the final stretch of the 2024 race. Plus, national political correspondent Steve Kornacki examines whether the polls may be again underestimating Donald Trump's support.

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3 big things to watch in the final stretch of the 2024 election

By Sahil Kapur

Labor Day traditionally marks the unofficial start of the final stretch of a presidential campaign. With just nine weeks to go before Election Day, here are three key dynamics looming over an already unprecedented 2024 race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

1. Can Harris sustain the momentum?

In just six weeks, Harris has taken a race that was rapidly slipping away from President Joe Biden and turned it into a dead heat, in large part by recapturing support from key Democratic-leaning cohorts that had broken from Biden, most notably young and Black voters. Her polling surge has rejuvenated a party that was in crisis after a June debate turned Biden’s biggest vulnerability, his age, into an insurmountable obstacle. Harris, 59, has turned the age issue into an asset against the 78-year-old Trump.

Still, the Harris campaign is telling everyone who will listen that she is still the underdog. Bill Burton, a political consultant who worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, said the race is “a dogfight” and praised Harris for running a “perfect” campaign so far.

Republicans say it’s a coin flip. “It’s a toss-up race,” GOP strategist Brad Todd said, admitting that the GOP’s fortunes are not as bright as they were when the Democratic nominee was the 81-year-old Biden.

2. Will the next debate be a turning point?

The first Biden-Trump debate turned the race on its head. The first Harris-Trump debate comes next week on Sept. 10. Will it be another turning point? Trump’s team hopes so, while Harris will seek to consolidate her gains when they meet face to face.

GOP allies, frustrated with Trump’s retreat into self-destructive tendencies, are pleading with him to use the debate as an opportunity to refocus on portraying Harris as a “far-left candidate” based on positions she took in 2019 as a presidential candidate. Harris has since sought to pivot to the center, while saying that her “values haven’t changed” in the last five years.

The former president was campaigning with confidence when Biden was his opponent. But he has appeared rattled at times by Harris, launching personal and racial attacks against a rival who would be the first woman and the first Indian American to be president. Harris has refused to engage or give the attacks more oxygen.

3. Unique dynamics in the race for Congress

The change in the presidential race has also had down-ballot effects. And this year’s battle for Congress comes with unique dynamics: The Senate majority runs through red states like Ohio and Montana, while the race for the House goes through blue states like California and New York.

In the closely divided House, Democrats have improved their numbers slightly on the generic ballot, which asks voters which party they want to control Congress, but it’s still tight.

The Senate map has provided Republicans with a golden opportunity to capture control, even if Democrats have a strong year. Democrats currently hold 51 seats and have conceded that they’ll lose West Virginia with the retirement of Sen. Joe Manchin. That means Republicans can clinch the majority by defeating Democrats in one of two red states where Trump has won twice and is favored again: Sen. Jon Tester of Montana and Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

Most public polls show Tester trailing — unlike 2018, when he led his GOP opponent and won — while Brown is narrowly ahead.

Are the polls underestimating Trump's support again?

By Steve Kornacki

For the third consecutive election, Donald Trump trails in polling as the presidential campaign enters its post-Labor Day phase. And for the third consecutive election, the question looms whether this polling might be underestimating his support.

Nationally, an average of recent major polls puts Kamala Harris ahead of Trump by 3 points, 49% to 46%. This marks an improvement for Democrats from where the race stood when Joe Biden was their candidate.

But it’s a narrow advantage that is made more tenuous by the fact that national polling overstated Democrats’ strength in 2016 and (especially) in 2020. Here’s how the final, pre-election national averages for two of the leading polling aggregators — FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics — compared to the actual results:

If national polls are even modestly lowballing Trump’s support, he would be well positioned to win in the Electoral College, where he has the advantage of a more efficient geographic distribution of support. Even with no polling miss, Harris’ current 3-point national edge might not provide her with a sufficient Electoral College buffer.

Then there are the state-level polls. The quantity and quality vary by state and the same two aggregators diverge slightly in how they process the available data. Here are their current battleground state averages:

The overall picture is of a super-tight battleground. But in each set of averages Harris fares best in the trio of Great Lakes swing states: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. From an Electoral College standpoint, these could be Harris’ keys to the kingdom. If she sweeps them (and hangs on to Nebraska’s Omaha-based 2nd Congressional District, where Biden won an electoral vote four years ago), she will have exactly 270 electoral votes.

The catch is that these states were also the source of the most dramatic polling misses in 2020, with Trump faring better in election than polling tended to indicate:

Obviously, similar errors this time around would — at least based on current polling — tip those Great Lakes battlegrounds into the Trump column. And even smaller misses could boost him decisively in the rest of the swing states.

Why exactly Trump’s support wasn’t accurately measured in the last two elections remains an open discussion. As mentioned, there seems to be a geographic component to it, with the biggest errors coming in demographically similar northern states with large populations of blue-collar white voters. A prevailing explanation points the finger at nonresponse bias; the idea that a disproportionate number of Trump supporters from this demographic group choose not to participate when contacted by pollsters.

Whether pollsters have solved this puzzle is one of the biggest variables over the next two months, adding a layer of uncertainty to each new survey that comes out. For that matter, there’s also the possibility that this election will bring about an entirely different kind of polling miss — one that redounds to Harris’ advantage, not Trump’s. Or there will be no miss and the polls will prove uncannily spot on. The answer won’t be known until Election Night.

That’s all from the Politics Desk for now. If you have feedback — likes or dislikes — email us at politicsnewsletter@nbcuni.com

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