Pollster reveals 'one of the deepest fissures in the body politic' that’s holding Harris back

06 September 2024

Despite consistently outraising former President Donald Trump since entering the race in July, packing stadiums full of supporters and posting huge ratings at the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Kamala Harris is still roughly neck-and-neck in the polls. One polling expert has a theory about why she hasn't yet been able to take a commanding lead.

In an op-ed for the Hill, Democratic pollster Brad Bannon argued that Harris is primarily struggling to gain ground among a significant voting bloc when accounting for education level. Bannon posited that as the first Black and Asian woman to be a major party's presidential nominee, Harris faces a major roadblock in her efforts to pull ahead of her Republican rival.

"The great racial and gender divides that afflict our democracy are well known. But one of the deepest fissures in the body politic is the difference between college-educated white voters and white voters who don’t have a four-year diploma," Bannon wrote. "In 2020, each of these two groups constituted about one-third of the electorate, but they made significantly different choices. The stark discrepancy between these two voting blocs illustrate the divisions in America that are as wide and deep as the Pacific Ocean."

According to Bannon, seven out of 10 nonwhite voters supported President Joe Biden in 2020, regardless of their education level. But two thirds of white voters without a four-year degree backed Trump, and a significant majority of white voters in households making less than $50,000 in annual income also support the former president.

He explained that because Trump is able to deftly "exploit the social conservative tendencies of these voters to keep them from backing Democrats," they're pre-conditioned to vote for the Republican ticket. The pollster noted that Trump's "racially-tinged rhetoric" is "especially potent in a contest against a Black opponent."

"[T]hese low-income white voters, who lack a college education, are social conservatives," Bannon wrote. "A clear majority of these voters were opposed to abortion in all or most cases and a plurality of them disliked the Black Lives Matter movement in the last presidential election."

In order for the vice president to pull ahead of Trump with poorer, less-educated white voters, Bannon argues that she needs to embrace economic populism and try to peel off the GOP base by talking about policies geared towards low-income families. She may already be starting to do this by running on an expansion of the child tax credit, and proposing a new $6,000 one-time credit for families with newborn babies.

Bethany Mandel — a conservative mother of six who once wrote for the far-right Heritage Foundation — praised Democrats in a recent Newsweek op-ed for having better policies for families with children. She specifically pointed to Democrats' consistent advocacy for an expanded child tax credit like the one during the Covid-19 federal emergency, which raised the credit from $2,000 per child to $3,600, and included 17 year-olds in the covered group.

After Bannon suggested Harris lean into economic policy, he added the caveat that good policy may still not be enough to win over the non-college educated white demographic. He wrote that Democrats shouldn't "expect groundbreaking movement on progressive economic initiatives as long as low-income white voters vote their social prejudices instead of their economic interests."

"The social and racial views of low-income white voters have undermined the movement for progressive economic populism throughout our history," Bannon wrote. "For Harris to be a successful candidate and president, she must overcome social and racial divisions that stand in her way."

Click here to read Bannon's full op-ed in the Hill.

From Your Site Articles