As America once again stumbles toward an election that feels more like a slow-moving civic migraine than a testament to democratic health, we are treated to an early portrait of this peculiar season’s emerging dynamics. A USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll shows Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump by an impressive margin of 63% to 34%—among those who have already cast their ballots.
At first blush, this appears a remarkable endorsement of Harris, a figure who has often struggled to capture the confidence of the electorate. But as with most political polling, the headline belies a more complicated and, dare I say, concerning truth about the state of American politics, particularly the perilous shallows in which both parties now tread.
The contrast between early voters and those planning to vote on Election Day reflects a stark and increasingly familiar divide in American electoral behavior. While early voters break decisively for Harris, Election Day voters plan to deliver their ballots with equal fervor for Trump. This bifurcation between the timing of votes hints at deeper, systemic problems in the body politic, problems that go beyond the immediate political fortunes of either candidate.
For Harris, the early lead is hardly an unequivocal triumph. Her 63% dominance among early voters, a group skewed by the issue of abortion rights and women’s rights, tells us something not just about the vice president’s appeal but about the narrowness of her coalition. The fact that Harris is losing the Election Day vote by a considerable margin, 52% to 35%, should temper any celebration in Democratic circles. It is a familiar tale in recent years: Democrats banking on early votes, Republicans turning out en masse on Election Day. The latter phenomenon has led to the so-called “red mirage,” where early returns show Republicans with outsized leads before absentee and early votes are counted.
Yet this phenomenon has broader implications than mere electoral strategy. What does it say about a democracy in which half of the electorate increasingly distrusts the mechanisms of the vote itself? The GOP's historical reticence toward early voting, stirred by Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud in 2020, has created an odd pathology among Republican voters, who now disproportionately insist on voting in person. Meanwhile, Democrats are casting their ballots weeks in advance, leaving candidates like Harris to benefit from voters motivated by a handful of hot-button issues, most prominently abortion.
But here lies the problem: for all the numerical advantage early voting may offer Harris and her fellow Democrats, the electorate’s fixation on single-issue voting reflects a hollowing of broader civic engagement. That one in five early voters volunteer "abortion rights" as their top concern speaks to the constriction of the political imagination, a narrowing of focus that prioritizes specific grievances over any meaningful engagement with the deeper, structural issues facing the nation—chief among them, the economy. Harris’s 52% to 39% lead among early voters is padded by concerns over women’s rights, but what of the vast majority of voters, many of whom, come Election Day, will be casting ballots based on economic anxiety, inflation, and perceived cultural decline?
In this light, the Harris campaign’s task becomes less about mobilizing the already-convinced early voters and more about persuading those elusive Election Day participants—the ones who, we are told, have drifted away from the Democratic Party in recent years. Indeed, it is younger Black and Latino men who represent the “drift” that haunts Democratic strategists. Their disenchantment with a party they once supported by substantial margins signals something more significant than the ebb and flow of election-year enthusiasms. It suggests a deeper disillusionment, a sense that the Democratic Party, in its quest to galvanize voters through identity politics and social issues, has neglected to address the real, material concerns that impact the everyday lives of these voters.
This election season, like so many in recent memory, is shaping up to be less a contest of ideas than a duel of voting blocs. Each side rallies its core constituencies, while the center—a center that once acted as the ballast of American democracy—shrinks into insignificance. Voters are increasingly sorted by when and how they vote, a reflection not just of partisan allegiance but of a deeper, cultural sorting. The Democrats, it seems, will dominate in the early vote, banking wins on abortion and social justice. The Republicans, rallied by Trump’s blend of economic populism and cultural grievance, will dominate on Election Day. But what of the larger issues that once commanded bipartisan attention? What of governance?
And then there is Trump, who hovers over all of this like a spectral figure from a bygone political age. His insistence on rallying his base to vote in person, as though casting a ballot is itself an act of defiance, signals that, for Trump, this election—like all elections—is a referendum on him. His adherents’ refusal to vote early is as much a statement of loyalty to his narrative of grievance as it is an electoral tactic. The lesson of 2020, that early votes are no less valid than Election Day ballots, has been lost on the former president and his followers.
So, as Kamala Harris’s early voting numbers trickle in, Democrats may take solace in the momentary boost they provide. But beneath the surface lies a troubling reality: a fractured electorate, disconnected from the larger questions of governance and policy, and consumed instead by the culture war battles that define our era. A victory for Harris based on early votes may be a victory in the technical sense, but it represents something far less triumphant for the health of the American republic.
This election, like so many in recent years, seems destined to leave us not with answers but with further evidence of our national fragmentation. As the early votes are tallied and Election Day dawns, one cannot help but feel that this will be an election won, not on vision or leadership, but on the fleeting whims of a divided populace. And when the votes are counted, we will be left to ask once again: who governs?
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