Top Pro-Harris Group Warned of Narrowing Chances for Her in October

The Washington Post / Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer

15:38 JST, November 3, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris’s chances of winning the presidential election narrowed in October as polling eroded slightly in key states and turnout assumptions drawn from early vote and voter registrations deteriorated, according to internal documents from Future Forward USA Action, the largest independent Democratic research effort.

The findings – which echo contemporaneous signals in public polling averages – show a Harris recovery in some polling over the last week, leaving a remarkably tight race between Harris and Donald Trump in each of the seven battleground states.

Both the Harris campaign and Future Forward said that Harris has been regaining ground in recent days, arguing that late-breaking undecided voters are favoring her and that she is peaking at the right moment.

Four weekly research reports from Oct. 10 to 30, which were obtained by The Washington Post, show Harris lost about one percentage point in the projected two-way vote share nationally and in the key battlegrounds, with the exception of Nevada, where her decrease was 1.7 percentage points.

When third-party and independent candidates were included, Harris was leading Trump by one point or more in the northern states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, was tied in Nevada, and trailed by more than a point in Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina on Oct. 30. All of those spreads are smaller than the typical margin of error in political polling. Undecided voters, in the same research, accounted for 5 or 6 percent of the vote share in the battleground states.

The group also produced an electoral college win prediction model, which incorporates separate analyses of unexpected Republican-leaning voter registrations and early vote data over the last month, which the group has separately acknowledged is challenging to decode.

“Win probability now stands at 37%, down from 47% last week, and 54% the week before,” according to the Oct. 24 memo about the odds of Harris defeating Trump. The Oct. 30 memo reiterated a 37 percent chance of Harris winning, despite some polling upticks in states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania. A person familiar with the Nov. 2 Future Forward analysis, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said the Harris win probability is now back up at 49 percent.

The Oct. 30 memo noted that the “win probability” statistic had limited value because “there is still significant uncertainty around” the meaning of early-vote data, given uncertain shifts in voting patterns since 2020. The Oct. 10 analysis made a separate finding about surprises in new additions to the voter rolls.

Election probabilities are not always predictive of results. At the end of the 2022 election cycle, the same research team that does work for Future Forward concluded that Democrats had only a 25 percent chance of maintaining control of the U.S. Senate, which they succeeded in doing, according to people familiar with the briefing, who requested anonymity to describe private correspondence.

“If you look at the full data, the conclusion is crystal clear: She’s ahead in the states she needs to win to get to 270 and neck-and-neck across the battleground,” Future Forward president Chauncey McLean said in a statement. “Since voters compared Trump at the Garden with Harris at the Ellipse, the trajectory of the race is increasingly in her favor and she’s on track to win.”

The documents were produced by the non-super-PAC arm of Future Forward, which is the largest outside effort to support Harris this year and has already spent more than $600 million on ads to support President Joe Biden and Harris, including spending with partners, according to AdImpact. The research, which has limited distribution among senior Democratic strategists, is intended for stakeholders and key decision-makers across the Harris campaign, outside groups and the White House. It is primarily used to guide ad purchases.

“Since day one, this has been a margin of error race. Heading into Election Day, it’s a margin of error race,” Harris campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz said in a statement. “From everything we’ve seen so far in early vote data and the historic turnout operation we’ve built, we’re on track to win the one poll that matters: November 5.”

The Harris campaign leadership has publicly argued over the last week that the race dynamics have improved for them, amid backlash to offensive comments at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally.

“It’s helpful, from experience, to be closing a Presidential campaign with late deciding voters breaking by double digits to you and the remaining undecideds looking more friendly to you than your opponent,” Harris senior adviser David Plouffe tweeted Friday. “Close race, turnout and 4 days of hard work will be key. But good mo.”

A Washington Post average of high-quality public polls also has shown slight improvement for Harris in four states over the last week and a slight erosion in two states. Harris peaked with a lead of 2.5 percentage points in national polls in the second week of October, but that has narrowed to 2.1 points, according to The Post average.

Public forecasting models by 538 and Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin also showed Harris’s win probability declining since early October but rebounding in the past week to about 50 percent, which is more positive for Harris than the latest Future Forward projections.

The Future Forward memos do not offer a reason for the October drop-off in support for Harris, which had risen steadily through August and early September before leveling off late that month. The slight movement coincides with multiple events, including the aftermath of two hurricanes that hit the country, Harris’s Oct. 8 appearance on “The View,” where she initially failed to distance herself from Biden, and a shift in broadcast advertising patterns by both sides.

Harris and her allies like Future Forward continued to dominate digital and radio advertising through October, after vastly outspending Republicans on television as well in September. But starting in the second week in October, the Trump campaign took the lead in broadcast advertising over the Harris campaign.

Trump took a slight lead in all television advertising – including broadcast, cable, satellite and connected TV – at the end of October, according to AdImpact. Future Forward calculates that Democratic advertising in the presidential race remains at parity with Republicans in all types of battleground ad “impressions,” a metric that quantifies how many times an ad is displayed to a viewer. The Harris campaign has also argued that Democrats are advertising at parity with Republicans in the race.

The change in broadcast spending patterns prompted Future Forward USA Action to release a memo on Oct. 16, also obtained by The Post, suggesting that the Harris campaign’s reliance on 60-second ads had decreased the visibility of its spots, and that the campaign needed to step up its spending since it receives lower advertising rates than outside groups. Future Forward calculated that $50 million in additional spending by outside groups was needed to make up the gaps in the closing weeks.

“The gap between Trump + Allies and Harris + FF in some markets is significant,” the memo warned. “It is difficult for anyone but the Harris campaign to meaningfully close these gaps.”

The research analysis found that major third-party and independent candidates in the race are all polling below one percentage point in the key states. If forced to choose between Trump and Harris, the Oct. 24 memo said that 67 percent of supporters of Green Party candidate Jill Stein and 53 percent of supporters of dependent candidate Cornel West would choose Harris. By contrast, only about a third of supporters of Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver would choose Harris.

The analysis also concluded that Harris needed a much smaller national polling victory to win the electoral college than Biden achieved in 2020. “The Electoral College bias against Democrats has decreased since July, meaning Harris needs less support (50.9%) to reach a 50% win probability in simulations of the election,” the Oct. 24 analysis said.

The documents disclosed few details about how the online surveys were conducted, including how samples were drawn and weighted. A note on the Oct. 24 document said the data was based on 223,000 “IDs” collected nationally, including 56,000 in the battlegrounds, over the previous two weeks.

In a video released Tuesday, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon spoke directly to anxious Democrats, telling them that while the race is close and the stakes are high, Harris is on track to win.

“We are growing with our support and momentum, and because of that, every single state – the blue wall: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania; the Sun Belt: Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina – every single one of these states are in play,” she said, in what she billed as a “campaign update.”

On Friday, in a phone call with reporters, senior Harris campaign officials said the campaign’s internal data shows Harris winning by double digits among voters in battleground states who made up their mind the last week. The officials added that focus groups show that Trump’s rally last Saturday at Madison Square Garden – in which a comedian who appeared before him called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage” – damaged his standing among late-breaking undecided voters.

“It really broke through, “a senior campaign official said on the call. “It’s helped gel their feeling about this race.”

A Future Forward analysis of two focus groups with undecided voters in Flint, Michigan, last Monday after Trump’s New York City rally, also obtained by The Post, found that some of these voters “say they have become more negative toward Donald Trump in recent weeks due to his rhetoric, with many having heard about racist jokes made at his Madison Square Garden rally, his disparaging comments about Detroit, and – for women – some of his misogynist rhetoric.”

But, the analysis continued, few of these voters said the incidents were “a complete dealbreaker,” adding that “many swing voters are still wanting to hear more specifics from Harris, with some saying they have not heard any policies from her that would directly benefit them and their families.”