As national polls continue to show a neck-and-neck race to the finish between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, more voters recently said they lean Republican than lean Democrat — a first for this stage of a presidential race, according to a new report from Gallup analyzing decades of its own polling.
An average of Gallup polls between July and September found that 48% of adults identify as Republican or lean toward the party, compared to 45% who said the same for the Democratic Party.
Republicans have never had such an “outright advantage” in the third quarter of a presidential election year, the polling firm reported.
It was also just one of several factors in Gallup’s recent surveys that would generally point to an impending Republican presidential victory, including a majority of voters preferring the Republican Party handle the economy and other national issues, the group reported.
“The political climate suggests the election is Trump and Republicans’ to lose,” Gallup reported.
Matthew Foster, who teaches political science at American University, said partisanship tends to have a strong correlation with voting.
And given all the normal factors this year — an incumbent Democratic president, negative feelings about the economy and more — this would historically be a year in which Republicans would do well, he said.
But that may not be the case this year, he says. The way party affiliation affects voting in unprecedented election years like this — Democrats swapping their nominees late in the process, Trump surviving two apparent assassination attempts — makes it harder to rely on the typical indicators of success, Foster said.
“In a normal year, this would be doom and gloom for Democrats,” he said. “But this is not a normal election year.”
Harris has maintained a slight lead in national polls. According to RealClearPolitics, The New York Times and 538, polling averages in recent weeks show it to be 2 to 3 percentage points higher. Analysts have warned that the race is extremely close, especially in seven battleground states that could determine the Electoral College results.
“The truth of election work right now is that it’s a mess,” said Joseph Dietrich, an assistant professor of political science at Towson University, who also said this year’s anomalies make it impossible to use party membership as the defining indicator for success.
Even after the political earthquakes this summer, Dietrich warned that other factors are still developing that will influence the results. These include voter enthusiasm, the technical aspects of voting laws put in place since 2020 and the fact that Harris may have more room to improve due to her late entry into the race. (The Gallup polls analyzed in the recent report took place as Harris was introducing herself to voters and most of it took place before her debate with Trump in September.)
“Those other elements are going to play a fundamental role,” Dietrich said.
While a number of factors can make a significant difference in places like Pennsylvania or Arizona, Maryland is not one of those battleground states.
President Joe Biden defeated Trump in the state by 33 percentage points in 2020, and Foster said he would be surprised if Harris’ projected victory in Maryland was significantly smaller than that, even with the national shift toward Republicans in Gallup polling.
Where Maryland could be a test case of partisanship, however, is in the U.S. Senate, he said.
Democrat Angela Alsobrooks is trying to nationalize the race by tying Republican Larry Hogan to Trump and the Republican Party. She says the former two-term governor would be a reliable voice for the Republican Party, even as Hogan asserts his independence and opposition to the former president.
Hogan will undoubtedly outperform Trump in Maryland, Foster said. The question is whether partisan factors will prevent Democrats, who have supported him in the past, from pulling the trigger again and this time splitting their ticket between a Democratic presidential candidate and a Republican Senate candidate.
“The Marylands of the world, the Ohios (where Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown is running for re-election in a red state), these will be places that will really test whether split ticketing exists in today’s polarized society,” Foster said.
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