The race is close; it should be a GOP blowout

People want a change but MAGA terrifies them

Trump speaks in Aurora, Colorado

I recently took part in a panel discussion with several pollsters at the Colorado Sun’s SunFest event at the University of Denver. And the polling presentation there suggested an important feature of this year’s electoral environment: People are grumpy and apt to take that out on the current party in charge, but their fear of Donald Trump and his supporters is making this contest more competitive.

The bipartisan polling team of Kathryn Hahne (New Bridge Strategy) and Kevin Ingham (Aspect Strategic, and also a former student of mine) gave a presentation on the state of political opinion within Colorado. (You can watch the video below.) Now, they noted that there’s no evidence that Colorado is remotely competitive at the presidential level; Biden beat Trump by 13 points in 2020 there and Harris will likely win it by a similar margin.

That said, Colorado voters are not in the greatest of moods. To wit:

• 53% of Colorado voters say they are worse off than they were four years ago (with 31% saying they are much worse off), and only 34% say they are better off.

• 59% agree with the statement that “a good standard of living is unattainable in Colorado, even if you work hard and play by the rules.”

• Coloradans are evenly split on whether the state is going in the right direction or going off on the wrong track, with a quarter saying it is definitely on the wrong track.

• 51% say they have seriously considered moving due to affordability concerns, especially with regards to housing.

• More than 60% say that Colorado is going to become a worse place to buy a home in the future.

Now, if you’re doing the math, you’ll note that this all means that there is a subset of Coloradans who is really not happy with the way things are going but plans to vote to keep Democratic leadership in the White House anyway. That seems odd — generally when people are unhappy they blame the incumbent party and seek to toss it out. So what’s going on?

As Hahne and Ingham note, this is largely a story about Donald Trump. According to their survey, a majority of Coloradans, including 56% of unaffiliated voters, describe the MAGA movement as “dangerous” for Colorado. Additionally, when they asked Joe Biden supporters (in an earlier survey when he was the presumptive Democratic nominee) whether they were voting for Joe Biden or against Donald Trump, 60% said they were voting against Trump.

Importantly, the percent of Coloradans who describe the Republican Party as dangerous is 20 points lower than the percent describing MAGA as dangerous. That is to say, the GOP without Donald Trump in charge of it is a lot less toxic in the state, and it would likely be in a far better position to benefit from state residents’ general grumpiness and dissatisfaction with their situations.

Of course, this polling was just looking at one not particularly competitive state. But there’s something valuable here for helping us understand the overall national mood. To the extent that the “fundamentals” (however we’re defining those) still determine presidential election outcomes, they lean Republican right now. PS: Political Science & Politics ran a summary of several different forecast models for the 2024 presidential election. There were eight models that forecasted the Electoral College vote; Trump won in five of them. The average forecast for Kamala Harris’ popular vote share was 49.8 percent.

Yet Harris is ahead of Trump in the polls and essentially tied in Electoral College forecasts. Arguably, this is due to Trump’s relentlessly toxic brand, and a different Republican presidential nominee would be doing far better against Harris.

Indeed, those campaigning for Trump right now recognize this and are downplaying Trump’s staying power. In a recent episode of the Runup podcast, Astead Herndon talks to Trump organizers in Georgia. He interviews Lori Wood, a canvasser with the Trump Force 47 team in Georgia. As she describes her pitch to low-propensity voters,

I tell them, I said, if you want eight years of this, that’s what you’re looking at with Kamala Harris taking the reins. She would be in office for eight years. We know Donald Trump’s policies work. You might not like his personality, but his policies absolutely worked. And we’ll have him for four years. He’s not a dictator. That’s the media throwing that out there.

And he would be there for four years and then you’d get all new leadership in four years. It’s like a fresh start for everybody. And when I did that — I’ve talked to many voters. I had a woman yesterday, as a matter of fact, she was on the fence. And at the end of our conversation, she said, I’m voting for Trump and she took two Trump signs from me and bumper stickers, and when we left yesterday, we were like, hugging it out.

This election is essentially being fought among people who are quite unhappy with the state of the country’s leadership and quite unhappy with the available alternative. And Kamala Harris is trying to convince people that she’s not part of the unpopular administration she’s a part of, while Republicans are trying to convince people that Donald Trump is only a small part of the party he’s in command of.