The Harris Electorate

Kamala Harris inherited a Democratic coalition that was badly frayed. In polls, young, Black and Hispanic voters abandoned President Biden in droves. And for the first time in years, more Americans said they leaned Republican than Democratic.

To win, the vice president will need to win back the deserters without alienating the anti-Trump moderates who put Democrats over the top in 2020. It won’t be easy.

Although it’s still early, polls suggest she has already made some progress. But while she’s running ahead of where Biden stood when he left the race, she’s still short of hitting traditional Democratic benchmarks.

Young, Black and Hispanic voters

Democrats have long assumed overwhelming support from young, Black and Hispanic voters. For many strategists, the only question was whether these voters would vote, not whom they’d vote for. This year, though, enough of them lost faith to give Donald Trump the lead in national and battleground state polls. And it raised questions about why, exactly, Biden was so weak.

Already, recent polls signal that Harris is not so weak. It’s too soon to tell how strong she really is among young and nonwhite voters. Some polls — like New York Times/Siena College polling last week — find her running far ahead of Biden, while others show little change. But either way, even her best tallies still fall short of typical Democratic margins over the last 15 years. She doesn’t even fare as well as Biden did in 2020, and his performance among these groups was relatively weak for a Democratic presidential candidate.