Inside the last-ditch hunt by Harris and Trump for undecided voters

WASHINGTON – US Vice-President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump are carrying out a virtual house-to-house hunt for the final few voters who are still up for grabs, guided by months of painstaking research about these elusive Americans.

Inside the Delaware headquarters of Ms Harris’ campaign, analysts have spent 18 months curating a list of which television shows and podcasts voters consume in the battleground states. Her team has assigned every voter in these states a “contactability score” from 0 to 100 to determine just how hard that person will be to reach – and who is best to deliver her closing message.

The results are guiding Ms Harris’ media and travel schedule, as well as campaign stops by brand-name supporters. For instance, movie star Julia Roberts and basketball great Magic Johnson earned high marks among certain voters, so they have been deployed to swing states.

At Trump’s headquarters in south Florida, his team recently refreshed its model of the battleground electorate and found that just 5 per cent of voters were still undecided, half as many as in August.

The Trump team calls them the “target persuadables” – younger, more racially diverse people with lower incomes who tend to use streaming services and social media. Trump has made appearance after appearance on those platforms, including on podcasts aimed at young men.

This furious search for a fickle sliver of the country has grown more urgent because the presidential contest is as close as any since the advent of modern polling, with the two candidates nearly deadlocked across the battleground states. The election could now ride on undecided Americans who have unplugged almost entirely from political news – making them tricky to find even for billion-dollar campaigns.

“These people are not super political,” said Mr James Blair, the political director of the Trump campaign, “and so we’re doing non-super-political media.”

In interviews, senior Harris and Trump advisers divulged some details of whom, exactly, they still view as up for grabs. Both see a group that is younger, with a disproportionate share of black and Latino voters.

The Harris campaign believes it can still win over some white college-educated voters, particularly women, who have historically voted Republican but are repelled by Trump.

An analysis of polling in the battleground states from The New York Times and Siena College found that a mere 3.7 per cent of their voters, or about 1.2 million people, were still truly undecided.

The Times analysis closely mirrored what the campaigns describe: a group heavy on younger voters, people of colour and those without college degrees. Black voters make up about 21 per cent of the undecideds, which helps explain Ms Harris’ explicit push for them.

Many undecided Americans are unsure if voting is even worth their time.

“I’m not seeking out a ballot to vote because I don’t care,” said Mr Kyler Irvins, 22, a telehealth specialist from San Tan Valley, Arizona, in the Phoenix area, who has never voted and said he registered only at his mother’s insistence.

He did not watch the debates, does not follow news coverage and does not believe his vote will make a difference. But he did say he remembered the pride he felt when, as a black elementary school student, he watched Mr Barack Obama win the 2008 election.

Yet the campaigns and their allies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in these final weeks to persuade people like Mr Irvins to vote – and to choose their side.

“If the mail-in ballot comes, I’ll send it in for Kamala,” Mr Irvins said. “If it comes to my front door.”

The Harris campaign considers its audience of winnable swing voters to be up to 10 per cent of voters in battleground states, slightly larger than what the Trump operation sees for itself or the Times polling indicates.

That is because the campaign includes a large number of Republican women who, it believes, dislike Trump, particularly on abortion policy, but want to hear Ms Harris’ message on the economy and the border before they are persuaded.

This strategic thinking has informed the Vice-President’s campaign speeches.

On Oct 17 in Wisconsin, she made a direct call to Republicans, particularly those put off by Trump. She reminded the audience that she had the backing of Ms Liz Cheney, the conservative former member of Congress from Wyoming, whom Ms Harris is campaigning with in three states on Oct 21. Last week, Ms Harris appeared in Pennsylvania with dozens of Republicans.

“I’m campaigning for every vote because I want and intend to be a president for all Americans,” she said. “No matter their political party, where they live or where they get their news.”

Ms Harris’ recent interview on Fox News came during her most aggressive media tour as the Democratic nominee – just as early voting was beginning in many states.

In one week, she appeared for interviews on 60 Minutes, The View, Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, the Call Her Daddy podcast and Howard Stern’s radio show. It was a wide-ranging media blitz designed to break through to voters across her 0 to 100 “contactability” scale, spurred in part by Trump’s refusal to participate in a second debate.

The Harris campaign methodically measured who saw her on each programme. Internal surveys showed that two-thirds of undecided voters in the battleground states had consumed at least some of her interviews during the week. But in a sign of the fragmented media environment, and underscoring the challenge, no single program reached more than one in three of those undecided voters.

“They are very hard to reach – they are not watching traditional news platforms or other programming with large, mainstream audiences,” said Ms Meg Schwenzfeier, chief analytics officer for the Harris campaign. “To talk to them, we have to take a layered approach – we have to be on TV, nontraditional platforms, door-knocking, billboards, digital ads, mail – everything really.”

The campaign’s data drove its decision to invest in advertising time during Fox News’ daytime programming, when more women are watching than in the evening, when opinion hosts draw an audience that skews male and less persuadable. It also factored into Ms Harris’ interview on Fox News.

The Harris campaign also used its polls to figure out which moments had helped change minds.

One example came during Ms Harris’ appearances on The View and with Stern, where she announced a plan to extend Medicare coverage for at-home care for seniors.

Of the more than 100 clips during her media blitz that were tested for their effectiveness at increasing her support, that proposal ranked at the top, a campaign official said.

The Trump campaign’s research found that up-for-grabs voters were about six times as likely as other battleground-state voters to be motivated by their views of Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip. The campaign also found that undecided voters were less likely to be white than those in the battlegrounds overall and more likely to be black. About 25 per cent of undecided voters are black, according to the Trump team.

“The fact that they don’t have younger black men locked in with less than three weeks to Election Day is a big problem for them,” Mr Blair, the Trump campaign’s political director, said of Ms Harris and Democrats. “Historically, that would be part of their base.”

The Trump team’s research shows that undecided voters are particularly focused on the economy, and are often financially struggling. They are more likely to work two jobs, and on average they earn US$15,000 (S$19,700) less per household than the battleground voters who have made up their minds.

About a quarter of the undecided voters in the Trump team’s research describe themselves as non-ideological, and the campaign has for months studied what issues move them the most.

By late summer, voters targeted by the Trump campaign said they were most concerned about immigration and inflation, particularly the prices of groceries and housing. Not surprisingly, two of Ms Harris’ first economic plans sought to directly address price-gouging on groceries and housing costs.

Trump’s team typically tends to project bravado, and his aides believe that voters who made their decision in the last two months have tilted in his favour.

In the campaign’s refreshed model, the Trump campaign moved 1.5 million voters out of the persuadable category and into its camp. It shifted just 924,000 to Harris’ side.

Mr Jim Messina, who was the campaign manager for former president Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election bid and is now the chair of a Democratic super political action committee, said he viewed the remaining undecided voters as fitting into two broad groups: young people and people of colour in one, and suburban women in the other.

“She now leads the suburbs, and this is where I think she has room to grow and he doesn’t, because these are the voters we’re talking about,” Mr Messina said.

Harris allies think they can win over voters like Ms Angela Beers, 44, a real estate agent from Brookhaven, Pennsylvania, who said she would not vote for Trump but remained unsold on Ms Harris.

Ms Beers was a fan of Mr Robert F. Kennedy Jr when he was running as an independent and said she might write him in as a protest.

Ms Beers said she was aware of some of Ms Harris’ policies to help first-time home buyers, but thought they would serve only to make housing more expensive and drive inflation.

“This whole concept of ‘give everybody money, let’s help people with down payments, let’s get the interest rates lower’ – all it does it make prices go higher,” Ms Beers said. “I don’t see either of the candidates talking about the supply issue.”

Whether Ms Harris can break through to voters like Ms Beers in the next two weeks will determine whether she can carry the key battleground states.

“The long and short of it is, every community out there is wanting more information,” said California Senator Laphonza Butler, a close Harris ally. “There are pockets that exist in every community that want more information and want to know how the campaign and this election is going to impact their everyday life.” NYTIMES