Can Kamala Harris rebuild America’s anti-Trump majority? 

As the Paris Olympics wind down, it’s hard to say which has been the more riveting spectacle, the games or the 2024 presidential race. The upcoming Democratic National Convention in Chicago will cap a summer of high political drama with dizzying plot twists. 

It began with Donald Trump’s history-making criminal convictions, which perversely seemed to help him sew up his party’s nomination. 

Then came President Biden’s mercilessly revealing debate performance, Trump’s narrow escape from an assassin’s bullet and a GOP national convention in Milwaukee that looked more like a royal coronation. 

Biden then upstaged the Republicans with his eleventh-hour handoff to Vice President Kamala Harris. This rattled Trump by depriving him of the grudge-match he’s been itching for ever since his stinging 2020 defeat. 

Now, with little debate or dissent, Democrats have nominated Harris, who won not a single primary or caucus vote this year. Such is Trump’s power to unify a normally fractious party.  

The switch to Harris is bringing back young, Black and Hispanic voters who had bailed on Biden. It has also mollified despondent donors; Harris raked in more than $300 million in campaign contributions in July. 

She’s narrowed Trump’s lead in national polls and may even have inched ahead in some battleground states. Giddy Democrats, however, shouldn’t forget that their path to victory in November still runs uphill. 

For one thing, U.S. voters haven’t taken the measure of the untested Harris. And fundamentals aren’t working in Democrats’ favor. Voters say they trust Trump and Republicans more to tackle top concerns like the cost of living, immigration, crime and foreign policy.

Nonetheless, the apparent rapid rebound in Democratic fortunes reminds us that Trump’s Achilles Heel is his low political ceiling. In two presidential races, he has won less than 47 percent of the popular vote. 

Trump relies instead on intense support from working-class voters to win the right states to give him an Electoral College majority. That worked in 2016 when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 48.2 percent to 46.1 percent, but lost too many states. It didn’t work in 2020, as Biden assembled a national anti-Trump majority (51.3 percent) that helped him prevail narrowly in swing states Clinton had lost. 

Biden won that election in the middle, outperforming Clinton with independent and moderate voters, especially college-educated suburbanites. According to data analyst Ruy Teixeira, Biden also improved slightly on Clinton’s performance with white working-class voters, losing them by 26 points rather than 27.

But Harris has inherited a massive 38-point deficit with these voters. To win in November, she’ll have to narrow that gap, stem the defection of Hispanic and Black men and shore up support among independent voters.  

That won’t be easy for a liberal from ultra-progressive California. So Harris has tried to balance the Democratic ticket by choosing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) as her running mate. Trump will have trouble caricaturing the folksy Walz as a left-wing fiend bent on destroying America. The former teacher, high school football coach and veteran looks and sounds like an everyman from Middle America.

On the other hand, Minnesota is no swing state, and it’s unclear whether Walz can help Harris connect with discontented blue-collar voters and independents in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.  

A recent survey of working-class voters conducted by my organization, Progressive Policy Institute, in conjunction with YouGov found that 60 percent believe Democrats have moved far left while just 49 percent think Republicans have moved too far right.   

At the convention, Harris and Walz should unfurl new ideas to change these voters’ minds, not just energize their base. Fortunately, our poll also illuminates chinks in Trump’s working-class armor.   

Abortion is the widest. A majority (52 percent to 42 percent) of working-class voters say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. A mere 6 percent support a total ban. No wonder Trump is crab-walking away from the red state crusade to quash Americans’ reproductive freedom.    

Calls for universal school vouchers drew cheers at the GOP convention, but giving affluent parents public subsidies to pay for private schools is hardly a slam dunk with working-class voters. In Michigan, they opposed vouchers, while narrowly favoring them in North Carolina and Arizona.  

When framed as a choice between funding public and private schools, it’s no contest: Working Americans overwhelmingly (76 percent to 24 percent) prefer improving the quality of public schools to subsidizing private schools.   

More pragmatic energy policies also would help Democrats make headway with working Americans. They are enthusiastic about America’s bounteous shale oil and gas reserves but aren’t climate deniers. 

Only 24 percent of working-class voters favor Trump’s “drill-baby-drill” posture.  A majority (54 percent) opt for an all-of-the-above strategy that uses renewable wind and solar, fossil fuels and nuclear power to ensure abundant and affordable energy while steadily reducing carbon emissions. 

Non-college voters will back a gradual clean energy transition that doesn’t force them to choose between fossil fuels and renewable energy and doesn’t threaten them with big job losses and higher fuel bills.   

While they exhibit considerable ambivalence about the risks and burdens of U.S. international leadership, non-college voters also aren’t sold on Trump’s call for a selfish “America First” foreign policy.  

A plurality (47 percent to 42 percent) backs U.S. military aid to Ukraine and worries that a cutoff would lead to further Russian aggression in Europe. They strongly support NATO (61 percent to 39 percent) and reject the neo-isolationist claim that U.S. alliances “put America at risk of being dragged into foreign conflicts and needlessly provoke other countries.” 

On these and other contentious issues, Trump is leveraging his supermajority among working-class voters to foist minority views on the country. Staking out center-ground positions in Chicago will help Harris and Walz rebuild America’s anti-Trump majority. 

Will Marshall is president of the Progressive Policy Institute.