This American election year began on a freezing night in Iowa, when thousands of people gathered in places like a high school gymnasium outside Des Moines to listen to speakers like Joel Akers.
The longtime Republican voted for Donald Trump twice, but he asked his neighbors in that Iowa caucus last January to move forward; his bond with Trump, he said, was irrevocably severed amid the violence of January 6, 2021.
His plea fell to the ground. Trump dominated in Iowa and won the Republican nomination, easily defeating Nikki Haley, Akers' preferred candidate.
Months later, millions of voters like Akers remain unknown in this election. The question now is: Where will Haley's supporters go?
“I don't think I'm going to vote for Trump,” Akers said when CBC News recently spoke to him ahead of the Nov. 5 general election.
The farm equipment salesman said he simply can't support someone who jokes about being dictator for a day – it doesn’t matter if Trump said it in jest.
He's not enthusiastic about his choices in this election and he's not a fan of Kamala Harris either. But he figures he will support her or choose a third-party candidate.
Anecdotes like this offer Harris a degree of hope – and revenge. That would validate the strategy she built her campaign around: playing for disaffected Republicans.
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In other words, she's banking on Haley's voters.
That's why Harris keeps talking about how she owns a gun — and would use this. Why your summer convention sometimes resembled a Republican rally, from the crowd chants of “USA!” to the numerous Republican protests featured speakersto Harris extolling the lethal power of the American military. That's why she has a broken memory past leftist policies.
She's courting middle America until opening a can of Wisconsin foam on late night TV. She even promised to include a Republican in her closet.
This strategy is based on simple electoral arithmetic. Haley's campaign demonstrated that there is a critical mass of Republican voters resistant to Trump.
To note a notable example: long after Haley suspended her candidacy, she still polled nearly 17% among registered Republicans who voted in Pennsylvania. primary – in other words, a group large enough to decide an election.
Is it working? The evidence is mixed
So is Harris' gamble paying off?
There are some signs, in some research, that it might be. However, the data is inconsistent. And you detect signs of this uncertainty in conversations with some of these voters.
Take the case of retired nurse Leslie Cochrane, who attended a Haley rally just before the South Carolina primary.
A frequent Republican voter, Cochrane's partisanship is unpredictable. She volunteered for Gerald Ford in 1976, ended up admiring the man who defeated Ford, Jimmy Carter, and voted for Carter over Ronald Reagan; she later voted for both the Bushes as well as Barack Obama.
These days she has no patience with Trump – calling him spiteful and vindictive – and says she is nervous about him taking back power. But she also doesn't believe Harris, describing her as a bit shifty and her public statements too canned.
“[Harris] He strikes me as someone who will say whatever he needs to say in the moment – whether that's necessary or not,” Cochrane said this week.
“[But] I like her more than Trump.”
So what will Cochrane do? She is still struggling with her choice. Her favorite option at the moment: voting in protest by writing Haley's name.
These kinds of ongoing personal dilemmas make it difficult to read the polls, which are confusing about whether Harris has made inroads to the right.
“I see this in some polls and not in others, so it's hard to be definitive,” said Marc Trussler, director of data science at the University of Pennsylvania's Opinion Research and Election Studies Program.
“There is some movement, but it is difficult to see it in the polls.”
The Big Picture: An Educational Realignment
On the one hand, a New York Times survey shows Harris with nine percent of the Republican vote – an excellent result for her compared to past elections and compared to Trump, who, in that same poll, had just three percent of self-identified Democrats. Harris also does incredibly well in another poll among Haley Republicans, winning over a third of them and was considered the leader in a Republican poll Pennsylvania congressional district.
However, other polls show Harris with a little less, or very less, support among Republicans than the aforementioned polls.
Trussler's prediction is that we will only know in retrospect, after the election, whether Harris' gamble paid off.
He says there's a bigger picture still in focus, and Haley's voters are just a snippet of it. It's the broad story of American politics right now in the realignment of voters along educational lines — college-educated voters, including Haley's, are drifting one way, toward the Democrats, and non-white and non-white voters college graduates are veering the other way, toward Trump.
It is difficult to predict in advance who the net winner of this exchange might be.
Another election analyst says one of the reasons the polls are all over the map is the ways pollsters can define a Republican voter: Is he a registered Republican? A self-described Republican? A person who generally votes Republican?
The key: participation, participation, participation
“You don’t know until people actually show up,” says Drew McCoy, president of Decision Desk headquarters.
He jokes that there's a reason why the old cliché “It's all about turnout” keeps getting repeated every election. “It’s a cliché because it’s true.”
Reaching out to swing voters is why, McCoy says, candidates are showing up in non-political podcaststrying to reach people who don't really like politics.
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On the other hand, on a political podcast, a prominent Democrat discussed his mixed emotions about courting these right-wing votes.
“Sometimes I look at this and think, 'Are we really campaigning with Liz Cheney?'” former Obama White House staffer Dan Pfeiffer said on his show Pod Save America.
“But then you take a step back and think [and] It makes incredible sense,” he said. “We need to build a big tent and we should invite everyone who wants to defeat Donald Trump into that tent, and that includes Liz and — I hate to say it — Dick Cheney.”
Trump, however, has tried his own version of this, including former Democrats like Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
A conservative worried in the Washington Post about a notable politician who was not invited to appear with Trump at rallies: Haley.
“Why isn’t Trump mobilizing it?” wrote Marc Thiessen, George W. Bush's speechwriter, describing Haley as a natural person to speak to center-right voters who don't like Trump.
“It could very well cost [Trump] the presidency.”
