3 reasons to feel hopeful for Harris on Election Day
Heading into a coin-flip election, Harris dissolved the economic trust gap, centered the fallout from the repeal of Roe v. Wade and is disliked by fewer people than Trump.

“Stop the chaos and end the dramala.”
That’s what Maya Rudolph and Vice President Kamala Harris said the American people want during the cold open on this past weekend’s Saturday Night Live after nearly a decade of former President Donald Trump’s racism, sexism and anti-LGBTQ+ attacks.
But there’s another condition a Harris victory would cure for several of her supporters: The residual traumala from the 2016 election when former President Donald Trump shocked the world in a nation-altering electoral upset that still reverberates through American politics and society.
Instead of simply offering Harris supporters more vibes to carry you into Election Night though, I wanted to provide a substantive case for hopium before the anxiety of Election Night really sets in. So last night I called up Bryan Bennett, the lead pollster at Navigator Research, to ask him to walk me through what the latest findings from their surveys and focus groups reveal about the vice president’s odds of, as she says, turning the page on former President Trump.
In short, Harris dissolved the trust gap between Biden and Trump on the economy and inflation. The fallout of the repeal of Roe v. Wade two years ago is as salient now as it was then. And honestly, fewer people dislike Harris than Trump. Keep reading as Bennett unpacks each of these arguments below.
1) Harris and the economic trust gap: Bennett told me Navigator’s polling and several other public polls show that since the vice president became the presumptive Democratic nominee this summer, she has closed the gap in terms of trust to handle economic issues—the number-one concern most Americans think the next Congress and president should prioritize.
“I think for a lot of economically anxious voters, it seems that there might be a good number of them who might be supporting Vice President Harris because of her economic policies,” Bennett said. “And she’s actually talked about the economy quite a bit in a lot of her paid advertising and in her campaign speeches.”
In fact, in her final speech before Election Day in Philadelphia last night, she reiterated her pledges to ban corporate price-gouging, lower costs of child care and housing, provide tax cuts to lower- and middle-income families and small businesses and reduce the cost of long-term care for seniors—all popular policies across the electorate.
2) The Dobbs effect: As popular is Harris’s promise to restore the national right to abortion care that the conservative Supreme Court supermajority—comprised of three justices nominated by Trump—overturned in 2022 in their landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision.
Beyond the politics, the statewide abortion bans that have gone into effect in two out of every five states have had fatal consequences—proven by the stories of women in Texas and Georgia who were denied emergency care due to the state’s restrictive laws that prohibit abortion after six-weeks and before most people know they’re pregnant and threaten to prosecute doctors for performing the procedure until women are sick enough to die.
“This country is composed of nearly a two-to-one electorate that is pro-choice and pro-abortion rights, and Donald Trump has a very defined issue has been very defined as being anti-abortion, having put justices on the court that overturns Roe v. Wade,” Bennett said. “And there's still a lot of antipathy. I think that’s part of what’s driving the gender gap that we see a lot of a lot of the polling, and in addition to some of the economic issues as well.
3) The money game: Harris built on the fundraising advantage she inherited from former President Joe Biden to the tune of $1 billion, including $378 million in the three-month period ending in September.
“I think she's had a bit of a spending advantage in terms of advertising, the ground game, in terms of how many doors the Harris campaign is knocking relative to the to the Trump campaign to try to get out the votes and talk to talk to voters,” Bennett told me. “I think you you could look at the at all the polls that are out there and kind of tilt your head and squint and say, ‘This is a toss-up with maybe a slight Harris advantage going in.”
The fundraising upper hand powered a ground operation that mobilized 90,000 volunteers to knock on nearly three million doors across the seven battleground states over the weekend—a feat that could make the difference in a race that’s expected to be decided by a handful of voters in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It’s also enabled the campaign to pull off political firsts such as advertising on the Las Vegas Sphere and fund a nimble digital rapid response operation that’s pounced on every Trump controversy, gaffe or unflattering story with blistering speed.
3) Trump’s unfavorability: Finally, Bennett said the case for optimism is that in Navigator’s polling, he and his colleagues have seen that Vice President Harris has significantly higher favorability than Trump.
Following the September presidential debate, Harris’s favorability grew to 50 percent, while Trump’s unfavorability sunk to 57 percent as he lost ground with independent voters, and the vice president increased her standing with independents and Democrats. Navigator found that among lower-engaged Americans, Harris has a favorability advantage over both President Biden and former President Trump.
What about the polls? With all that said, the election is still a coin flip. The 2016 race was decided by 70,000 votes in three states and 2020 was decided by 40,000 voters in three states.
“We won’t know how good the polls performed until we get to Election Day. And I think a lot of pollsters are traumatized by what happened in 2016 and 2020,” Bennett said. “All the polls are largely within the margin of error. I think there’s certainly a scenario where there is a polling error that underestimates Trump’s support again for the third consecutive election cycle. Depending on how voters break out in this election, the Electoral College could be tipped by a very small number of voters across seven battleground states, and it could be a disadvantage to Vice President Harris at the end and an advantage for Donald Trump. So I think, just given the closeness of it, the biggest red flag is are the polls correct? And we’ll find out tomorrow.”