This year of voting in America began on a frosty night in Iowa, when thousands of people gathered in places like a high school gymnasium outside Des Moines to hear speakers like Joel Akers.
The longtime Republican voted for Donald Trump twice, but he – the neighbor insisted in this Iowa caucus last January to move on; He said his bond with Trump was irrevocably severed by the violence that occurred on January 6, 2021.
His request fell through. Trump dominated in Iowa and cruised to the Republican nomination, easily defeating Nikki Haley, Akers' preferred candidate.
Months later, millions of voters like Akers remain a wild card in this election. The question now is: Where will Haley's supporters turn?
“I don't think I'll be voting for Trump,” Akers said when recently contacted by CBC News ahead of the Nov. 5 general election.
The farm equipment salesman said he couldn't support someone who made jokes about being dictator for a day – regardless of whether Trump said it in jest.
He's not thrilled with his choices this election, and he's not a fan of Kamala Harris either. However, he believes that he will support her or choose a candidate from a third party.
Anecdotes like this give Harris some hope and vindication. It would confirm the strategy she built her campaign around: playing to disgruntled Republicans.
- This Sunday, Cross Country Checkup asks: What are at stake for you in the US election? Inflate this form and you can appear on the program or read your comment on the air.
In other words, he's betting on Haley's voter.
This is the reason why Harris keeps talking about having a gun – and would use it. Why her summer convention sometimes resembled a Republican rally, from the crowd's chants of “USA!” to the numerous Republican protests featured speakersto Harris praising the lethal force of the American army. That's why she was remembered past leftist politics.
He is courting Central America until opening the can Wisconsin soap suds on late night television. She even promised to include Republicans in her office.
This strategy is based on simple electoral arithmetic. Haley's campaign has shown that there is a critical mass of GOP voters opposed to Trump.
Recall one striking example: Long after Haley suspended her candidacy, she still had nearly 17 percent among registered Republicans who voted in Pennsylvania basic — in other words, a group large enough to decide the election.
Does it work? The evidence is mixed
Did Harris' bet pay off?
Some polls indicate this may be the case. However, the data is inconsistent. In conversations with some of these voters, there are signs of this uncertainty.
Take, for example, retired nurse Leslie Cochrane, who attended a rally in Haley just before the South Carolina primary election.
Cochrane, a frequent Republican Party voter, is unpredictable. She volunteered for Gerald Ford in 1976 and ended up admiring the man who defeated Ford, Jimmy Carter, and voted for Carter against Ronald Reagan; she later voted for both Bushes, as well as Barack Obama.
These days, she has no patience for Trump anymore – she calls him malicious and vindictive – and says she's nervous about him staying in power again. But Harris doesn't convince her either, he finds her a bit too refined and her public statements too conservative.
“(Harris) strikes me as the type of person who will say whatever he needs to say in the moment — whether it's accurate or not,” Cochrane said this week.
“(But) I like her more than Trump.”
So what will Cochrane do? He's still struggling with his choice. Her current favorite option: vote in protest by writing in Haley's name.
These kinds of ongoing personal dilemmas make it difficult to read polls that are unsure whether Harris has broken into the right wing.
“I'm seeing it in some polls and not in others, so it's hard to say anything definitive,” said Marc Trussler, director of data analytics at the Opinion and Elections Research Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
“There is some movement, but it's hard to pick up in the polls.”
The bigger picture: changing the direction of education
On the one hand, the New York Times poll shows Harris with nine percent of the Republican vote – an outstanding result for her compared to past compared to Trump, who had just three percent self-identified Democrats in the same survey. Harris does it too surprisingly well in another poll conducted by Haley Republicans, winning over a third of them and was considered leading in the Republican vote Pennsylvania congressional district.
Still other polls show Harris with slightly less, or A lot less, support among Republicans than those from the above-mentioned studies.
Trussler predicts that we won't know until after the election whether Harris' gambit paid off.
He says the bigger picture is still coming into focus, and Haley's voters are just one part of it. This is the broad history of American politics today, with voters reorienting along educational lines, with college-educated voters, including Haley's voters, drifting one way toward Democrats, and non-college-educated, non-white voters drifting the other way. Trump's website.
It is difficult to predict in advance who the net winner of this swap will be.
Another election analyst says one reason the polls cover the entire map is because of the way pollsters can define the Republican voter: Is he or she a registered Republican? Self-proclaimed Republican? A person who usually votes Republican?
Key: attendance, attendance, attendance
“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” is repeated every election. “It's a cliché because it's true.”
McCoy says the reason candidates appear on the ballot is voter uncertainty non-political podcastsI'm trying reception people who are not interested in politics.
WATCH | Harris and Trump turn to influencers to boost voter turnout:
US presidential campaigns were all about influence this week: Kamala Harris appeared on the popular podcast Call Her Daddy and Elon Musk jumped on stage at a Trump rally. The National explains why unconventional electoral moves are a strategy to attract quality voters in key states.
On the other hand, in a political podcast, a prominent Democrat discussed his mixed feelings about courting votes from the right.
“Sometimes I look at it and wonder, 'We're really running a Liz Cheney campaign?'” Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama White House official, said on his Pod Save America show.
“But then you 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 it, including Liz and – I hate to even say it – Dick Cheney.”
Meanwhile, Trump tried his own version of the situation, including former Democrats like Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at campaign stops.
Conservative worried in the Washington Post about one notable politician who wasn't invited to appear with Trump at rallies: Haley.
“Why doesn't Trump send it?” wrote Marc Thiessen, George W. Bush's speechwriter, describing Haley as an individual who speaks to center-right voters who dislike Trump.
“It could very well cost (Trump) the presidency.”
