By Reid J. Epstein and Shane Goldmacher
The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are carrying out a virtual house-to-house hunt for the final few voters who are still up for grabs, guided by months of painstaking research about these elusive Americans.
Inside the Delaware headquarters of Harris’ campaign, analysts have spent 18 months curating a list of which television shows and podcasts voters consume in the battleground states. Her team has assigned every voter in these states a “contactability score” from 0 to 100 to determine just how hard that person will be to reach — and who is best to deliver her closing message.
The results are guiding Harris’ media and travel schedule, as well as campaign stops by brand-name supporters. For instance, movie star Julia Roberts and basketball great Magic Johnson earned high marks among certain voters, so they have been deployed to swing states.
At Trump’s headquarters, in south Florida, his team recently refreshed its model of the battleground electorate and found that just 5% of voters were still undecided, half as many as in August. The Trump team calls them the “target persuadables” — younger, more racially diverse people with lower incomes who tend to use streaming services and social media. Trump has made appearance after appearance on those platforms, including on podcasts aimed at young men.
This furious search for a fickle sliver of the country has grown more urgent because the presidential contest is as close as any since the advent of modern polling, with the two candidates nearly deadlocked across the battleground states. The election could now ride on undecided Americans who have unplugged almost entirely from political news — making them tricky to find even for billion-dollar campaigns.
“These people are not super political,” said James Blair, the political director of the Trump campaign, “and so we’re doing non-super-political media.”
In interviews, senior Harris and Trump advisers divulged some details of whom, exactly, they still view as up for grabs. Both see a group that is younger, with a disproportionate share of Black and Latino voters. The Harris campaign believes it can still win over some white college-educated voters, particularly women, who have historically voted Republican but are repelled by Trump.
An analysis of polling in the battleground states from The New York Times and Siena College found that a mere 3.7% of their voters, or about 1.2 million people, were still truly undecided.
The Times analysis closely mirrored what the campaigns describe: a group heavy on younger voters, people of color and those without college degrees. Black voters make up about 21% of the undecideds, which helps explain Harris’ explicit push for them.
Many undecided Americans are unsure if voting is even worth their time.
“I’m not seeking out a ballot to vote because I don’t care,” said Kyler Irvins, 22, a telehealth specialist from San Tan Valley, Arizona, in the Phoenix area, who has never voted and said he registered only at his mother’s insistence.
He did not watch the debates, does not follow …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
