EAST LANSING, Mich.—Kamala Harris is running against a persistent level of negativity about the direction of the country, the kind of which few incumbent party nominees survive. Donald Trump is trying to overcome high unfavorability marks and a public with entrenched opinions about him.
Harris and Trump both face historic headwinds ahead of Tuesday’s election. One of them, however, will defy the odds.
“In the abstract, a normal Republican nominee right now should win this election by 10 points,” said Doug Sosnik, a Democratic strategist. “By the same token, if you had a popular Democratic nominee, he or she should easily be able to beat a guy like Donald Trump, the majority of people never supported and don’t want him back in office for another four years. But that’s not the campaign we’re dealing with.”
The two campaigns are vying for support—with a hectic campaign schedule in the closing moments of the race—in seven battleground states that will determine the outcome of the election. Polls show a tight race within the margin of error ahead of Tuesday’s election.
The Harris team thinks the vice president is overcoming voter concerns about the economy by presenting plans for lowering prices. Republicans are projecting confidence in Trump, though he has muddled his closing message—“Harris broke it, Trump will fix it”—with a string of off-script remarks, sometimes incendiary or filled with violent imagery.
On Sunday, he suggested he wouldn’t mind someone shooting “through the Fake News” while in Pennsylvania, the same state where an attempted assassin shot him and others, and killed one rallygoer in July. Late last week, he suggested anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney be sent into battle with guns “trained on her face.”
A Trump campaign spokesman said in a statement that Trump on Sunday “was stating that the Media was in danger, in that they were protecting him and, therefore, were in great danger themselves.”
Such comments play right into some of his biggest weaknesses: The Wall Street Journal’s late October national poll found more voters said Harris, rather than Trump, had the right temperament for the office and was “mentally up for the job.” By 13 points, more voters said the word “unstable” fit Trump more than Harris.
Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a top Harris surrogate, said Trump has promoted “grievance politics” during the campaign’s final weeks. “I don’t know what it does for an independent voter who’s trying to figure out who’s actually going to care about them,” Whitmer said.
James Blair, a top strategist for the Trump campaign, said that favorability—often a factor voters consider—is “not quite the right metric” in this election, arguing that voters in 2024 were more focused on job approval. On favorability, he argued that the two candidates poll roughly the same.
“What’s not that close is the job approval,” Blair added, speaking to reporters Friday. “With [persuadable voters], she is actually much closer to Joe Biden’s very, very negative job approval than she is to President Trump.”
The October Wall Street Journal poll backs up that Harris’s job approval rating is roughly in line with President Biden’s, albeit slightly better, and that Americans view Trump’s performance while in office better than they did years earlier.
One of Harris’s biggest vulnerabilities—voters’ sour outlook on the economy—was on display in the final stretch. Job growth slowed sharply last month, with workers sidelined by hurricane effects and the Boeing strike, according to a Friday report from the Labor Department. “This jobs report is a catastrophe and definitively reveals how badly Kamala Harris broke our economy,” the Trump campaign said. On the other hand, U.S. gross domestic product increased at a 2.8% annual rate in the third quarter, representing solid growth.
The vice president has released proposals to lower housing and child-care costs as she works to overcome negative perceptions of the U.S. economy under Biden, with voters frustrated by high costs.
“We’re having a conversation regarding what people care about most, and that’s lowering costs,” said Jefrey Pollock, a Harris campaign pollster. He pointed to public polling that has shown Harris competitive with Trump on economic issues, including on inflation.
Harris was bullish in East Lansing, Mich., Sunday evening, telling her supporters: “We have momentum. It is on our side. Can you feel it?”
A senior Harris official said the campaign’s ground game was paying dividends, and that “we do believe that we are on track to win a very close race if we keep doing the work.”
Trump projected confidence in Macon, Ga., on Sunday night, telling a crowd there: “On Tuesday, just go out and vote, and we’re going to close this thing out, and it’s going to be party time,” adding later: “We’re way ahead.”
If Harris wins, she would become only the second sitting vice president to be elected to the White House since 1836, following George H.W. Bush in 1988. She would need to overcome Biden’s high disapproval ratings and large majorities of Americans who think the country is on the wrong track, an attribute that has hurt presidential candidates representing the incumbent party in past election cycles.
The Journal’s October poll found that 64% of Americans said the nation was headed in the wrong direction, compared with 26% who said it was moving in the right direction. In 2020, when Trump was defeated by Biden, a WSJ/NBC News poll found 60% of Americans said the country was on the wrong track, while in 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton, the poll found 65% of the country said the nation was moving in the wrong direction.
“As the incumbent vice president, given the negative sentiment about the Biden administration and with 64% of voters believing the country is off on the wrong track, it is hard for Harris to get much traction as the candidate of change,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff.
An NBC News poll released Sunday showed that dichotomy, though with a potential good sign for the vice president: 46% of voters said Harris represented change compared with 41% who said that about Trump, despite two-thirds of voters thinking the nation is headed on the wrong track.
Since 2015, Trump has been a deeply polarizing political figure. His unapologetic, politically incorrect rhetoric has won him both die-hard supporters and the staunchest of critics. He has publicly mocked a disabled reporter, demonized migrants and questioned whether former President Barack Obama and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley were really born in the U.S. He has struggled to make traction, in particular, with women who are repelled by some of his disparaging and offensive comments, including questioning Harris’ racial identity, accusations of sexual abuse, and his advocacy for overturning Roe v. Wade, the legal decision that had provided the constitutional right to an abortion.
Both nominees have dealt with negative perceptions among the public, but those views have been improving. The most recent WSJ poll found 48% personally approved of Trump, while 50% disapproved; for Harris, 45% approved of her and 53% disapproved. Both were better marks when compared with a similar Journal survey in December 2022.
“Democrats had a horrible enthusiasm problem, particularly with young voters under Biden, and that’s why Trump was winning by so much,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as White House press secretary for former President George W. Bush. “Biden dropping out fixed that, because now the Democrats had a fighting chance.” He added: “What she has done is give people reason to think that they can defeat Trump, the candidate they’d love to beat.”
Mark Campbell, who managed Republican Glenn Youngkin’s winning 2021 Virginia governor’s race, said Harris had done little to distinguish herself from Biden. He pointed to an interview on ABC’s “The View,” where Harris said “not a thing comes to mind” when asked if she would do anything differently.
After Election Day, Campbell said, “you are going to see a whole body of literature about how both campaigns might have been the worst last two or three weeks ever run in U.S. history.”
Xavier Martinez contributed to this article from Macon, Ga.
Write to Ken Thomas at ken.thomas@wsj.com and Vivian Salama at vivian.salama@wsj.com
