With less than a week to go until Election Day, political pundits, operatives, and election watchers are relentlessly scouring swing state polls, demographic trends, and early voting numbers to finalize their analyses of who will occupy the Oval Office come January 2025—and how close the margins will ultimately be. Although swing state polls and early vote tallies are important, the real test for who will win on November 5 is likely far simpler—and could very well come down to one key metric.
Late last month, Gallup quietly released a dataset that has largely fallen under the radar in favor of polling averages and other trendier election-related news. But nonetheless, it could provide strong insight into the results of this November’s election.
On September 24, Gallup released data on “party performance on issues”—a measure that “has been highly predictive of election outcomes in Gallup trends” for the past 19 elections. Going back to 1952, every presidential election save two has been won by the party that voters trusted more to address the issue (or issues) they deem most important. The two exceptions were the 1980 election, when neither party had a discernable issue-based advantage, and the 2000 election, when the question was not asked of voters.
This cycle, perhaps unsurprisingly, the two issues most important to voters are the economy and immigration, where Republicans enjoy a five-point advantage over Democrats.
“By 46% to 41%, Americans say the Republican Party is better able than the Democratic Party to address what they think is the most important problem facing the country,” the Gallup report states. “The top issues Americans currently name as the most important are ones that tend to favor the GOP, including the economy (24%) [and] immigration (22%).”
In 2020, Democrats had an eight-point advantage over Republicans on COVID-19, which voters then saw as the most important issue. In 2016, when Trump won his first term in the White House, Republicans enjoyed a four-point advantage on the top-rated issue of the economy.
During the 2012 and 2008 elections, both of which were won by Barack Obama, Democrats wielded sizable advantages on the economy. And in 2004, when George W. Bush won a second term, Republicans commanded a narrow three-point lead on the Iraq War and the economy.
In other words, if Kamala Harris hopes to eke out a victory against Donald Trump this fall, her biggest challenge may not be substantially improving her standing in the must-win battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada—each of which she is currently losing to Trump in polling averages. It may be overcoming this powerful historical polling trend that stretches back more than seven decades.
With millions of votes already banked through early voting and so little time left before Election Day, it seems highly unlikely that Harris will be able to overcome Trump’s issue advantage.
Moreover, in the critical final days of the race, Harris has made head-scratching, and perhaps even campaign-defining, mistakes—from skipping out on the legendary Al Smith dinner to insisting that Christians are not welcome at her rallies, stating that she would do nothing different from Joe Biden, and face-planting in humiliating fashion during an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier.
In 1980, when Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory over Jimmy Carter despite not having a polling advantage on the issues, it was thanks to his magnetic personality and ability to articulate a hopeful vision for the future of the country. (Reagan would, of course, quickly earn the confidence of voters on the issues, as shown in the 1984 Gallup poll and his even more overwhelming landslide victory that year.) Harris has nothing close to Reagan’s personal charm or rhetorical skill.
In addition to—and perhaps as a result of—voters’ lack of trust on Harris’s ability to handle the economy and immigration, she is also struggling with Latino voters, black voters, young voters, and even the Arab-American community. Media reports characterize Democrats as increasingly “jittery,” “anxious,” and panicked. Donald Trump also continues to outflank Kamala on the campaign trail—as most recently seen with his viral visit to a McDonald’s restaurant and appearance at a Wisconsin rally in a garbage truck following Biden’s maligning of Trump supporters as “garbage.”
Of course, none of this is to say that Republicans should be complacent or overconfident heading into Election Day. History shows that Democrats will do everything in their power to deprive conservatives of their electoral power. And trends, strong as they may be, can always be broken. Republicans, especially those in swing states, must, as Trump says, make a victory “too big to rig.”
But as the race currently stands, voters are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the state of the country. And no matter how many manufactured stunts or desperate ploys the Harris team makes in the waning days of the campaign, there may be nothing that Kamala Harris can do to alter that reality.
Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.
