ANALYSIS — As former President Donald Trump served french fries and manned the drive-thru at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Sunday, the close presidential race seemed to shift into a new phase as analysts predict a wild finish.
Polling in the Republican nominee’s general election race against Vice President Kamala Harris has been relatively stable for weeks, with some battleground state polls recently shifting slightly to Trump before a series of polls released Monday showed slight shifts to Harris. While these polls all point to a toss-up race, two forecasters — ABC News’s 538 and Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin — upgraded Trump’s chances at winning the Electoral College at 52 percent and 53 percent, respectively.
At this point in the 2020 race in Pennsylvania, for instance, Joe Biden led Trump by 3.8 percentage points, according to polling calculations by RealClearPolitics, which four years before had former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton leading Trump in the must-win swing state by 6.2 percentage points.
Trump, who out-performed his polling numbers in the commonwealth in 2016 and 2020, leads by 0.7 point, according to RealClear’s metric.
This is all playing out as both candidates are spending extended time in the Keystone State. Some Democrats mocked Trump’s appearance at a Golden Arches franchise in Feasterville-Trevose, in sought-after Bucks County in the Philadelphia suburbs, but it was a highly choreographed retail move.
Trump did some mocking of his own, continuing to claim without evidence that Harris did not, as she claims, work at a McDonald’s when she was younger. McDonald’s corporate media relations department did not respond to emails and tagged social media posts seeking comment; the company reportedly stated in an internal memo it does not possess employment records dating to the early 1980s.
“Well I think this. These people work hard. They’re great. And I just saw something … a process that’s beautiful,” Trump said of his on-the-job training when asked by a reporter if he supported increasing the minimum wage, as his torso — clad in a blue apron with McDonald’s yellow strings — and head emerged from a drive-thru window.
“I’ve now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala” at McDonald’s, he said, again without evidence.
The former president’s event prompted Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative organization Turning Point USA, to post on X: “This whole scene is masterful.”
Even before, as the New York Post called it, “McDonald Trump,” FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls also showed a slight shift toward Trump. On Oct. 12, its metric put Harris ahead by 2.4 percentage points (48.5 percent to 46 percent). By Monday, Harris’ lead was 1.7 percentage points (48.2 percent to 46.4) — though still a razor-thin difference nationally.
‘A lot of concern’
One source, granted anonymity to be candid, reported “a lot of concern” among some former Democratic officials about a Trump victory. That collective worry has ramped up in recent weeks as “people are coming to terms that it could happen again,” the source added in a Sunday conversation.
Part of those feelings are rooted in lessons learned from 2016 and 2020, when Trump did better than polling predicted, Amy Walter, publisher and editor in chief of the Cook Political Report, said at a Monday event at The Economic Club of Washington. One big reason why is that pollsters struggle to locate and contact many Trump supporters who have not always voted and “don’t want to talk to people like us.”
Another reason for Democrats’ concerns, as Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia and managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, another political handicapper, recently wrote online, is “the theme of the past week has been that the ‘vibes’ seem to be getting worse for Kamala Harris and better for Donald Trump.”
“We do think one thing going on that is potentially more helpful to Trump than Harris is the fact that this campaign is not building to a final big event — there’s no debate scheduled,” Kondik added, saying in a Monday email that his thinking has not changed since the blog post went live last Tuesday. “While the campaigns are both of course active, we do wonder if the lull is helpful to Trump because of his seeming ability to regenerate support when he’s not receiving maximal attention.”
Despite that perceived lull, Walter and other panelists at the Economic Club event stressed that anything is possible over the campaign’s last two weeks — including multiple polling shifts, however slight.
‘I love Gen Z’
Harris was on the campaign trail on Monday and focused squarely on her opponent, holding events with former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the former vice chair of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
The vice president was asked to preview her potential presidency, and she made one of her cleanest breaks yet with President Biden.
“Needless to say, mine will not be a continuation of the Biden administration. I bring to it my own ideas, my own experiences,” Harris replied before then focusing on Trump.
“But it is also about moving past what, frankly, I think, has been the last decade of the American discourse being influenced by Donald Trump in a way that has had the effect of suggesting we as Americans should point the finger at one another, in a way that has been using the power of the presidency to demean and to divide us,” she said. “I think people are exhausted with that, rightly, and it, frankly, does not lead to the strength of our nation.”
Harris also spoke of a need to revamp American factories for new industries, and said she would remake some federal positions to open them up to skilled workers rather than just candidates with an undergraduate degree. Notably, during her first event of the day in Malvern, Pa., she made a play for young voters in the must-win state.
“I love Gen Z,” she said with a smile, calling “these young leaders” both “clear eyed” and “wonderfully impatient — that’s good. They’re ready to get in there. Let’s invest in them.”
Cheney said she was campaigning for Harris as “a conservative” because “I know that the most conservative of all conservative principles is staying true to the Constitution,” adding of Trump: “We watched how he acted after the last election, we watched how he acted on Jan. 6.”
For his part, Trump was in battleground North Carolina, touring hurricane-ravaged Asheville. He used part of his remarks there to tout his plan to slap tariffs on a range of foreign-made items, saying, “businesses are going to be moving back into our country through the proper use of … incentives and tariffs, one of the most beautiful words that nobody understands.”
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