This small sliver of late-deciders could swing the election

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are locked in a tight race with less than a month until voting ends, according to the latest PBS News/NPR/Marist poll. The Democratic and Republican nominees maintain clear and distinct advantages with different groups of voters, as people have begun heading to the polls in several states.
Among likely voters, Harris leads Trump by 2 points – 50 percent to 48 percent, within the margin of error. The Republican nominee holds the lead among independent voters, now by 4 points. That’s a group President Joe Biden won by 15 points in 2020.
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“This is an absolute razor-thin race. No room for error,” Republican strategist Kevin Madden said. “The band of undecided voters is getting narrower and narrower by the day.”
Graphic by Vanessa Dennis/ PBS News
These numbers remain virtually unchanged from last month’s poll, conducted before the candidates’ first and only presidential debate. Despite the historically late shakeup at the top of the Democratic ticket, few events are likely to dramatically affect perceptions of Harris and Trump at this stage.
Eight in 10 registered voters say their minds are completely decided and nothing will change their votes.
The poll also found a deepening gender gap since the 2020 election. Fifty-seven percent of men in this poll say they will vote for Trump, giving him a 16-point advantage over Harris. Four years ago, Trump beat Biden among men by just 5 points, according to AP VoteCast surveys of voters.
Likewise, 58 percent of women support Harris, an 18-point advantage over Trump, up from Biden’s 12-point lead with this group in 2020.
The divide along education levels has similarly widened over the last four years. In the poll, 54 percent of likely voters without a college degree say they plan to vote for Trump, a 10-point advantage over Harris and more than double the 4-point lead Trump had in 2020, according to AP VoteCast data.
Harris holds a 21-point lead – 60 percent to 39 percent – over Trump among likely voters with a college degree, up from a 16-point difference in the 2020 election.
At the same time, the candidates’ margins of support among various racial groups have narrowed since the 2020 election, as both candidates have worked to expand their bases.
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Biden’s lagging support among non-white voters earlier this year was a significant concern for Democrats who encouraged the president to drop out of the race in June. While Harris has seen her support among voters of color grow in the last month, she still has not fully rebuilt the coalition of these voters Biden was able to win in 2020.
Harris has support from 61 percent of non-white registered voters, growing her lead over Trump from 10 points last month to 25 points in this latest poll. She still lags 12 points behind the 73 percent who voted for Biden in 2020, according to AP VoteCast data.
Her support among Black voters has jumped nine points in the last month, inside the margin of error for this group. Eighty-three percent now say they would vote for her. Seventeen percent of Black voters support Trump, double the number who voted for him in 2020.
Eight in 10 registered voters say their minds are completely decided and nothing will change their votes, according to the latest PBS News/ NPR/ Marist poll. Composite of photos by David Dee Delgado/ Reuters
Meanwhile, Trump’s support among white registered voters grew 3 points since last month, with 53 percent saying they’ll vote for him compared to 44 percent for Harris. He won white voters in 2020 by a 12-point margin.
Trump’s 13-point advantage among likely voters who are white women without college degrees should be a warning sign for Harris, Madden said. They are a critical voting bloc in some suburban areas of her must-win blue wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
“That could be a crucial, crucial demographic,” Madden said, which is why Harris has focused on reproductive rights to drive turnout.
The presidential campaigns will spend significant time and money over the next five weeks fighting to win the support of the remaining 20 percent of voters who say they are still swayable. In this poll, 15 percent of registered voters say they have a good idea of who they will support but could still change their mind, and 5 percent say they have not made up their mind about who to vote for.
The number of self-described undecided voters is both concerning and an opportunity, said Democratic strategist Faiz Shakir, who managed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. It’s why Harris has campaigned as an underdog since she clinched the Democratic nomination in July, he added.
There are still “too many” unsure voters, he said, but that makes sense because they want to learn more about a relatively new Democratic nominee.
“There’s a chance to win them,” Shakir said. “The fact that they’re unsure is a better place to be than they’re against you.”
But as Harris contends with Trump’s strategy to disqualify her as out of the mainstream, Madden said, she is running out of time to define herself.
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“She’s got exactly one month to fill in the blanks for a lot of these voters about what she would do differently from the [Biden] administration,” he said.
“She has the change argument [on] her side because she is not Joe Biden; she’s a new person,” Shakir said. “But to fully complete the argument on change, you have to make people believe you’re going to come in and be action-oriented.”
That small sliver of late-deciders can swing the election, and Harris should focus on persuading them that she’ll enter the Oval Office “like a ball of fire” focused on their lives and concerns, he said.
Vivian Hoang contributed reporting.
PBS News, NPR and Marist Poll conducted a survey on Sept. 27 through Oct. 1 that polled 1,628 U.S. adults with a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points, 1,514 registered voters with a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points, and 1,294 likely voters with a margin of error of 3.7 percentage points.