AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
So just how tight might this presidential race be? Much of the electorate is entrenched. Their votes aren't up for grabs. Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at UCLA, is focused on a narrow slice of the electorate that she believes will ultimately decide the election. Welcome to the program.
LYNN VAVRECK: Thank you.
RASCOE: Who are the voters who are up for grabs right now?
VAVRECK: Well, most people already know who they're going to vote for, and that's a function of the fact that these two political parties are far apart from each other. They want to build very different worlds, and voters know that. For example, today, 9 out of 10 voters tell us they see important differences between the parties. In the 1950s, that number was 50%. So the parties want to build different worlds, and voters know it. And roughly 80% of the electorate - they know who they're voting for.
And so that gets us to this set of people that you just asked about. Who doesn't know? And what do they like? And if we look at the set of people who voted for Democrats in 2020 or voted for Republicans in 2020, it's roughly 10% of each side is still telling us that they're not sure they're going to vote for that same side. And those people have some characteristics. They tend to be independents, not partisans. They are people who are not that tuned in to politics, but those are the people that the campaigns are fighting over.
RASCOE: So how are Democrats trying to win over that slice of the electorate?
VAVRECK: I think one of the things that you've seen emerge since Kamala Harris became the nominee is messaging around this idea of freedom. So the Democratic Party stands for your freedom to choose. And you heard Tim Walz say, in Minnesota, we have a golden rule - mind your own damn business. It's an interesting strategy because that concept, maybe historically, we might say, has been a message that the Republican Party has sent. Keep government out of my life. I want less government, not more government. And now we're hearing that message coming from the Democratic Party. And so that's a way to maybe try to put some - kind of, like, stretch the elastic a little bit to cover some of these undecided voters who might be leaning toward Republicans.
RASCOE: What about Republicans on their end? What are they doing?
VAVRECK: So in response to the new Democratic ticket, we have heard Donald Trump and JD Vance saying, these guys - they're too liberal. And California, Kamala Harris being from California - that's their attempt to sort of position the Democratic ticket as far, far away to the left. You know the world they want to build? It's that world that's very far away from where you are, people who call yourselves independent, who are not that interested in the news. And so they're trying to paint the other side as being far away.
RASCOE: Is one campaign's message having more success these days? Can we tell right now?
VAVRECK: Well, I mean, as they say in sports, that's why we play the game. But you can see when you look at the polls over the last several weeks is - that there has been a lot of movement into the Democratic choice. That has tightened this race up. Everybody knew this was going to be a close election. And so now you're starting to see that take shape. Maybe you might say that's a success of the Harris-Walz ticket. But it would be wrong to think that that success is just going to continue, continue, continue.
And when we talk about movement, we're not talking about something's going to happen, and we're going to see a 10-point shift. We're really at the point in this election where shifts are going to be maybe a point, maybe, if something really big happens, two points. So we're working within this very narrow band of, quote-unquote, "persuading people."
RASCOE: That's Professor Lynn Vavreck of UCLA, co-author of a book about the 2020 election, "The Bitter End." Thank you so much for joining us.
VAVRECK: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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