Trump Stumbles to the Finish Line

Trump won late deciders in 2016 and 2020, things don't look as good this time around

In close races, nothing is more important than closing strong. And with four days to go, Donald Trump is most definitely not closing strong. Just look at the last week of his campaign:

• On Sunday, Trump held a disastrous rally in Madison Square Garden filled with racist, misogynistic regret including the Puerto Rico joke heard around the world;

• On Tuesday, Trump talked about the major role that anti-vaccine crank Robert F Kennedy Jr. would play in setting health care policy in a Trump Administration;

• On Wednesday, Trump brought up both his history of sexual assault and his role overturning Roe v Wade when he said would protect women “whether they like or not;”

• On Thursday, Trump sued Sixty Minutes for $10 billion for a laughable series of reasons; and

• Also on Thursday, Trump suggested that Liz Cheney should be shot for not supporting him.

I am writing this midday Friday, so it’s likely Trump will find another way to self-immolate politically between now and when you read this post.

Trump’s surrogates like Speaker Mike Johnson, Elon Musk, and Trump Transition Chair Howard Lutnick make matters worse at every turn.

Kamala Harris, on the other hand, has been closing very strongly. I have seen polling on her ellipse speech in front of 75,000 people, and she knocked it out of the park. Over the last week, her campaign played offensively, dictating the terms of the political conversation. Trump is reacting to her and is clearly off his game.

Why Closing Well Matters

While most voters made up their mind months if not years ago, there is a slice of voters who don’t decide until the final week.

The news environment in the final week is very influential with these voters. They have either been going back and forth for months or, more likely, are just tuning into politics in the final days before the election. This is particularly true because our media ecosystem makes it challenging for all but the biggest junkies to follow political news. Campaigns track what voters are hearing about the candidates. In focus groups, the first question asked of respondents is often how much they have heard about a candidate and whether what they heard made them feel better or worse about that candidate. The poll often includes an open-ended question asking voters to volunteer what they have heard. Those responses are then put into a word cloud to see what’s breaking through. Here’s an example from a recent Navigator Research poll about Project 2025.

Unbelievably, Trump closed strong in his two previous presidential campaigns. According to exit polls, 5% of voters decided during the last week in 2020 and 13% in 2016. Both times Trump won those late-deciding voters. He won them by 3 in 2016 and by 12 in 2020.

Absent those late deciders, Trump would have lost in 2016, and 2020 would have been nearly as close.

Why Trump’s Closing Gaffes Are Particularly Damaging

Check out Donald Trump’s closing ad.

The campaign is spending tens of millions of dollars on this ad to blanket the battleground states. If you are watching football in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin this weekend, you will see this ad countless times. The ad hammers Trump’s best arguments — he’s better on the economy, he’s tougher on the border, and Kamala Harris represents another four years of Joe Biden. This message was supposed to be the thrust of Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. It’s what his campaign handlers want him to be hitting in these final rallies. However, looking over news coverage and social media surrounding Trump’s events, there is barely a mention of any of those issues. His word cloud would have (in large print) words like Puerto Rico, chaos, anti-vaccine, abortion, and Liz Cheney.

This is not what his campaign wants for two reasons.

First, the Trump Campaign cannot handle a big conversation about abortion at the end of the race. Trump’s “whether women like it or not” comment pushed that conversation to the forefront. One simplistic way to think about this race is as follows: we know that the economy will be the top issue for voters. Abortion and immigration have been jockeying for second place. If abortion is more salient than immigration, that is good news for Harris.

Second, undecided voters are cross-pressured between their distaste of Trump’s chaotic conduct and divisive rhetoric and their belief that he will be better on the economy. Over this last week, Trump excelled in reminding voters what they like least about him. The drama and division. It’s exhausting; and for some voters it might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

According to Harris Campaign Senior Advisor David Plouffe, Trump antics are hurting him. On Friday, Plouffe tweeted:

It’s helpful, from experience, to be closing a Presidential campaign with late deciding voters breaking by double digits to you and the remaining undecideds looking more friendly to you than your opponent.

Let’s hope we get a few more days of Trump being Trump.