The ‘Shy’ Kamala Harris Voters Who Could Decide the Election

For eight years, pollsters have been striving to accurately capture former President Donald Trump’s level of support among voters. Even today, on the eve of his third campaign for the presidency, there’s no confidence they’ve nailed it. It raises a question that not enough people are asking: If it’s taken that long to adjust for Trump, is 100 days enough to accurately poll potential Vice President Kamala Harris voters?

It’s not just an academic question. There’s reason to believe that, just as proved to be the case with Trump, there is a fuller range of Harris voters who aren’t being measured.

In this election cycle, pollsters have made a clear effort to explore various methodologies that enable a deeper dive into Trump’s areas of support that were previously underrepresented in past polling. But when asked about the challenge of tracking an abbreviated Harris campaign in the wake of an historic candidate swap, some pollsters believed that the polling transition from Biden to Harris would be “relatively seamless.”

The difference in reaction can be attributed to the supposed existence of the “shy Trump voter.” Many have hypothesized in the past that a subset of Trump voters only support their candidate behind closed doors and shy away from revealing their political preference to their friends, family and especially pollsters. But this election feels different. Trump voters have only grown brasher and bolder over the years, and it’s not just the appearance of pro-Trump boat flotillas, car caravans and pop-up MAGA merch stores. The shift away from their supposed “shyness” is also characterized by the emergence of movements like the Courage Tour: a series of multi-day events in swing states that calls upon conservative Christians to speak up more forcefully on political matters by casting them as the “voice to the nation’s conscience.”

While Trump voters have found their voice and the polls have adapted to better hear them, the same cannot be said for many “forgotten” Harris voters that polls are ill-equipped to capture. These voters are not necessarily “shy” with their support for Harris, instead they are overlooked by current polling methods. One such group is a subset of Republicans who increasingly feel politically homeless within their own party: Nikki Haley voters.

A national survey of Nikki Haley’s primary voters conducted in early October by the Democratic polling firm Blueprint has charted this group’s slow but significant shift away from supporting Trump and their increasing willingness to support Democratic presidential candidates over time. (Notably, this survey excludes registered Democrats who voted for Nikki Haley in primaries to ensure the results truly reflect Republican-leaning voter sentiments.) The survey showed that while 66 percent of Haley primary voters supported Trump in 2016, that number dropped to 59 percent in 2020 and is expected to drop even further to 45 percent in this year’s election. Meanwhile, their support for the Democratic presidential nominee has nearly tripled from only 13 percent supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 to 36 percent indicating an intent to vote for Kamala Harris.

Pollsters’ recent embrace of “weighting on recall vote” may be hiding the true effect these Haley-Harris voters will have on the upcoming election. This approach to polling involves pollsters asking respondents who they voted for in the previous election. Statisticians then weight responses they receive to ensure that their predicted electorate mirrors voters who have previously showed up to vote in past years. The problem is this method entirely excludes Haley voters that either supported third-party candidates in the 2020 election or chose to sit out the previous election altogether.

And there’s another red flag here: Statisticians hold a lot of hesitation regarding this type of weighting in political polling more broadly. Many polls only began utilizing this weighting method during this cycle. This is because it’s incredibly difficult for pollsters to ensure that a small sample of voters accurately reflects the exact level of variance present in the larger population that they’re attempting to estimate. Put in more straightforward terms: A weighted sample of Trump voters won’t accurately reflect the true amount of Haley-Harris defectors if the original sample fails to find them in the first place. And given that pollsters are explicitly seeking out underrepresented Trump voters, their outreach may be sidelining Haley voters in favor of reaching lower-propensity Trump supporters.

The Harris campaign has sensed this GOP soft spot and targeted this group of moderate Republicans with a slew of endorsements designed to create the permission structure to vote for a Democrat. What’s most notable this year is that many former Republican officials who declined to endorse either Trump or his Democratic opponent in 2016 or 2020 have explicitly rallied behind the Harris campaign in an effort to block Trump from retaking the White House. These former leaders are convincing many rank and file voters to follow suit.

While Harris is actively scooping up Haley voters, she is also likely to pick up a larger-than-expected proportion of undecided voters who are leftists supporting the Uncommitted Movement. These ‘Uncommitted’ Democrats have been clear in their commitment to withholding their support for Democratic candidates until they see a significant change in the party’s approach to the war in Gaza. Leaders of the movement have declined to endorse Kamala Harris in hopes that they can leverage their support for the party in exchange for a shift in foreign policy that protects innocent Palestinians and their right to self-determination.

However, an uncommitted Democrat withholding their support for their party in polling doesn’t automatically translate to a withheld vote on Election Day. Despite withholding their support, movement leaders have stated their explicit commitment to “register a vote that ensures we are blocking Donald Trump.” This isn’t a small group — more than 700,000 voters across the map opted to vote ‘uncommitted’ in Democratic primaries. It’s convincing evidence that a significant proportion of the existing “undecided” vote is made up of ‘uncommitted’ Democrats who plan to quietly support Harris when it’s time to cast their ballots.

Throughout the campaign, leftists have encouraged one another to “vote for your preferred enemy,” implicitly understanding that a second Trump presidency would be exponentially worse for their cause. The most important signifier of the Uncommitted Movement, after all, is their belief in tactically utilizing the democratic process to enact change. These are voters who participated in primary elections explicitly to support no candidate. They are politically active and deeply engaged in the political process. They clearly understand the power of their votes and know that sitting out this election entirely would simply hand power to those who don’t share their beliefs.

Harris’ ability to boost turnout among certain groups — such as women — can be captured through the fine-tuning of turnout models. But pinning down these other, more elusive groups requires more meticulous work — work that’s been undertaken in the pursuit of so-called shy Trump voters but not for prospective Harris voters that sit on the fringes of her coalition.

It’s an oversight that suggests polls may have shifted from underestimating Republican support to underestimating Democratic support. The billion-dollar question is where, exactly, these polls are wrong, and will it ultimately affect the Electoral College outcome. If the Harris voters that polls are missing live in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina, the polling in those states may be as misleading as in 2016 and 2020.

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