Sofia Barruti
(CNN) Democrats have staked the fate of the White House on the premise that once voters remember the chaos and divisiveness of Donald Trump’s presidency, he will suffer a fall that will define their election.
The former president’s weeks of flamboyant rhetoric revived memories of the cacophony of his four years in the White House and shattered perceptions that he is running a more disciplined campaign than in 2020 or 2016. But the nature of the race — a tight contest in key swing states — has not changed.
Trump spread baseless rumors that Ohio immigrants are eating pets. He warned that Jewish voters will be to blame if he loses in November. He refused to openly condemn a protégé in the North Carolina gubernatorial race who described himself as a “black Nazi” on a porn site, as CNN’s KFile reported last week. Trump also reacted to a second apparent assassination attempt by suggesting that Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats are inviting such attacks when they highlight his refusal to accept his 2020 election loss and say he is a danger to democracy.
Trump says he won’t run in 2028 if he loses in November
Despite all this, the former president remains locked in what CNN political reporter Harry Enten described Sunday as the closest presidential race since Democrat John F. Kennedy’s narrow victory over Vice President Richard Nixon.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whose political network will be critical to Harris’ hopes in the must-win state for Democrats, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” program: “I can only tell you this: This election is going to be close. We’ve always known that.” She added: “In a state like Michigan or Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, we know this is going to be a close race.”
The close nature of the race was underscored by the candidates’ comments and strategies during a weekend of tense campaign exchanges.
ANALYSIS | Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump is the closest presidential race of the century in the US
Harris suggested the former president was “looking for an excuse” to avoid debating her after she accepted CNN’s invitation to a second debate on Oct. 23. The former president, for his part, attempted to narrow the wide gender gap with women that threatens his election with a frenzied, all-caps Truth Social post. Trump promised: “I will protect women at a level never seen before. They will finally be healthy, hopeful, safe and secure. Their lives will be happy, beautiful and great again!”
In a rare moment of introspection on Sunday, Trump told Sharyl Attkisson on “Full Measure” that it doesn’t look like he’ll run again in 2028 if he loses in November. “I think that’ll be it. I don’t see it at all,” he said.
Without a clear leader
But despite the growing heat on the campaign trail, the race remains where it has been for weeks: stagnant.
National polls have improved slightly for Harris since her debate with Trump earlier this month, though there is still no clear leader. The vice president is at 50% to Trump’s 47% in CNN’s latest polling average. The poll incorporates five surveys conducted entirely after the Sept. 10 debate. A poll aggregated into the average Sunday from NBC News showed Harris at 49% support to Trump’s 44% — the lowest level of support for the former president in a poll that meets CNN’s standards since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee in July.
Even as Harris’s record is improving and her supporters are optimistic, the presidency will be decided by the Electoral College, giving great weight to the results in a handful of states, including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina, where polling averages put the race within a few points of each other. Just a few hundred thousand voters could have the power to choose between the vastly contrasting paths that a Trump or Harris victory would mean for the United States and the rest of the world.
So why does the race remain so tantalisingly close?
Trump’s comeback bid is, after all, a surprising story, considering he left office in disgrace after inciting an attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and after refusing to accept that he lost the election. Trump, who was impeached twice, is a convicted felon facing more serious criminal charges. It is inconceivable that any other politician could have survived such a torrent of scandal and still be within reach of the Oval Office again.
A core tenet of the Biden campaign before the president dropped out of the race was that once voters saw Trump’s unfiltered bombast, their memories of his tumultuous tenure would come flooding back and he would lose. But Biden’s failure in the CNN debate in June, when his advanced age was painfully obvious, erased the comparison. Harris, who upended the race when she replaced Biden, has sought to highlight the contrast between her pragmatism and Trump’s extremism. At last month’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, she set up a narrative that Trump was an “unserious man” who poses an “extremely serious” threat. But the best version of Harris’s campaign with just over six weeks to go in the race is that the vice president has returned a race that Democrats seemed very likely to lose to the neck-and-neck fight it always seemed likely to be.
Trump is an extraordinarily resilient politician, but will he rise to the challenge?
To understand what lies ahead, we must begin by acknowledging Trump’s extraordinary resilience as a political figure. He has transformed the Republican Party in his image and achieved an unassailable hold on the Republican base as a candidate in a third consecutive election.
And for all the recriminations about his first term, polls show that many voters think their economic security (reflected in lower rent, car and food prices) was better with Trump in office — at least until the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
But those sentiments may not win Trump a victory. His support in the CNN poll of polls (47%) underscores a weakness that has dogged him throughout his political career: his inability to win the support of a majority of Americans.
With that in mind, it’s worth asking whether an alternative Republican candidate — one who doesn’t behave in a way that alienates crucial moderate and suburban voters in key swing states and disaffected Republicans — might fare better in a head-to-head race with Harris. The party had a chance to make headway, but it overwhelmingly rejected candidates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley during the primary race earlier this year.
Harris, for her part, is a last-minute replacement for a president seeking reelection who voters long ago concluded was unfit for a second term. The task the vice president inherited is also daunting: saving the party from likely defeat in November while simultaneously serving as what many Democrats hope will be a savior for democracy itself. While she has cast herself as a new generational force for change, Harris remains a member of an unpopular administration amid a deeply unfavorable political environment.
Foreign leaders race to meet Trump and Harris
The NBC poll offers an explanation for this contradictory dynamic. The top concern expressed by voters (28%) was inflation and the cost of living. That figure was up from 23% in April. Voters’ second-top concern was threats to democracy (19%). While this issue appears to favor Democrats, it could also reflect growing support among conservatives for Trump’s claims that Democrats (with what he falsely claims is a weaponized justice system) threaten democratic freedoms. The third most important issue for voters in the NBC poll was immigration and the border (14%), another area where polls show persistent vulnerability for Harris. Abortion, one of her top issues, was viewed the same way by just 6% of voters.
The argument that could decide the election
Voter concerns about the economy suggest either candidate could gain the upper hand in recent weeks. Trump has been unveiling new, sometimes seemingly off-the-cuff economic proposals, including his proposal to not tax tips and repeal a provision of his own administration’s tax plan related to state and local taxes.
Harris is promising to help people afford housing, child care and health care, and has sought to persuade voters that she truly understands the pain of high grocery prices, which remain elevated despite a slowing inflation rate that prompted the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates last week.
The vice president will try this week to counter criticism that she is not being specific enough about her plans, as swing voters in key states ponder whether they can trust her to improve their lives. “I’m going to give a speech this week … to outline my vision for the economy,” she told reporters Sunday. “I’ve called it an economy of opportunity, which is really, in a nutshell, about what more can we do to invest in the aspirations, the ambitions, the dreams of the American people while also addressing the challenges they face, whether it’s high food prices or the difficulty in affording a home.”
Harris accepts CNN invitation for debate; Trump declines
Harris’s tactics underscore the reality of an election cycle in which voter frustrations appear to favor the Republican nominee, but the race remains competitive in large part because of Trump’s tendency to alienate available voters, despite his surprising loyalty among his supporters.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a leading Trump supporter, summed up the state of the race in a conversation with NBC’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” Sunday. He said: “65% of people in your poll say the country is on the wrong track. Who is better able to solve crime? Trump by 6. Who is better on the economy? Trump by 9. Inflation, Trump by 8. The border, Trump by 21.”
“So what do I take from this poll? On the issues that matter most to the American people, Trump is winning decisively. In a head-to-head matchup, he is not.”