Double Haters No More: How Harris Reset The Race

A record number of voters were dreading November's election... they're not anymore.

Democratic presidential candidate, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris arrives to speak on stage during the final day of the Democratic National Convention. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images.

Earlier this year, Time magazine dubbed the 2024 Biden-Trump rematch “the dread election.”

The 2024 presidential election is a rematch between one man widely seen as too old for the job and another man widely seen as too dangerous. The prospect has left much of the country feeling both paralyzed and horrified. Call it the Dread Election. 

This dread was most acute among the so-called “double haters,” voters who didn’t like either Joe Biden or Donald Trump, a group that I identified here back in March as a crucial swing voter bloc.

As CNN’s Harry Enten put it last August, this group was made up of “around a fifth, maybe a little bit more, 21, 22% of voters who say they have an unfavorable view of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump.” 

According to a Pew survey conducted this past May, that number clocked in at 25% of the electorate, a record high.

In 2016, when both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were historically unpopular candidates, and the double haters made up 20% of the electorate, according to Enten:

“Double Doubters went overwhelmingly for Donald Trump and therefore gave him the election.”

The reason, as Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center put it, was straightforward:

“They were disproportionately Republican men who liked Trump on issues but didn’t like him on character.”

But in a race between Biden and Trump, whether it was 2020 or 2024, that voting bloc was a much different breed, having broken for Biden by 15% in 2020 and then running at only about half that in 2024.

This largely explained how Biden beat Trump nationwide by 4% in 2020 but could hardly maintain a tie against him in 2024. It’s not an accident that in that same period, according to Pew the share of double haters nearly doubled from 13% to 25%. Many voters who liked Biden—and even voted for him—in 2020, no longer did. 

Enter Kamala Harris, whose historic campaign is now running more than 3% ahead of Trump nationwide, a shift of 6-7% better than Joe Biden was polling when he dropped out of the race on July 21. In today’s piece, I’ll dive into how the 2024 double-hater landscape has completely shifted now that it’s a Harris v. Trump race and how this voting bloc has helped Harris completely reset the race.

Who Were The Biden-Trump Double Haters?

Unlike in 2016, the 2024 Biden-Trump double haters were not a Republican-leaning bunch.

AEI’s Survey Center for American Life (SCAL) poll from last July found that in this year’s election, the universe of double haters skewed more to the left, preferring Biden to Trump by 7%. 

According to SCAL, the group was better educated, more moderate, and younger than the electorate as a whole. They also were largely pro-choice and believed Joe Biden was legitimately elected in 2020. And they were also more likely to consider themselves Independent.

This was confirmed by a Washington Post-Schar School poll of the six most competitive battleground states from April 15 to May 30, 2024, which found that the double haters made up 18% of the swing state electorate and that most of them

say they’re unlikely to vote for Trump or Biden in November; 53 percent say they will probably or definitely vote for Kennedy, while 25 percent say the same for Biden and 18 percent for Trump. 

Notably:

That pattern could hurt Biden more than Trump — when asked which major party they lean toward, 55 percent of double haters lean Democratic while 45 percent lean Republican.

Or as Tony Fabrizio, a Trump campaign pollster, tried to spin it to The Washington Post:

“To say that Biden is winning double haters is kind of a misnomer, because the fact of the matter is that half or more of these voters are Democrats to begin with.”

Fabrizio did have a point though. It was always evident that Joe Biden was leaving more voters on the table than Trump was. Biden had a ceiling of 51% based on his 2020 vote share, so had room to grow, while Trump was consistently polling closer to his ceiling of 47%. The double haters’ reluctance to coalesce behind Biden was clearly a candidate-specific problem.

So in the lead up to the Biden-Trump debate on June 27th, the goal from the perspective of the Biden campaign was to shake up the race by reminding these voters of what they liked about him (and what they didn’t like about Trump) and reassure them that President Biden could do the job. Unfortunately, what actually happened was that Biden only confirmed their worst fears.

This in part explains why many Democrats felt strongly that Biden could not ultimately prevail in November. These double-hater voters, who should have been gettable by the Democratic candidate, had not been convinced prior to the disastrous debate and were unlikely to come back into the fold after it.

The hope was that whichever Democrat replaced Joe Biden at the top of the ticket would see a shift among the Biden-Trump double haters in their direction by virtue of simply not being Joe Biden. What no one expected was that Kamala Harris would completely reset the race in the way that she has, largely due to many of these voters coming home to her.

Bye Bye Double Haters!

A Monmouth University poll taken August 12-14, 2024, tried to track the shift in these double-hater voters in the aftermath of Harris taking over the top of the Democratic ticket from Biden. And what they found is that she single-handedly cut the number of double haters in half.

In the August poll, 17% of respondents indicated they had unfavorable views of both Biden and Trump, which tracked closely with their June result that found the Biden-Trump double haters made up just shy of 20% of the electorate.

When asked the same question about Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, however, the share of double haters fell dramatically from 17% to 8%.

And as for whom the original Biden-Trump double haters would support in the election now, there was a huge shift there as well. In June, Monmouth had found that 

54 percent of the double haters who had unfavorable views of Biden and Trump would not support either candidate, while 28 percent said they would support Biden and 19 percent said they would back Trump.

Suddenly with Kamala Harris in the race, 53% of the Biden-Trump double haters said they would support Harris, while just 11% said they’d support Trump.

This has resulted not only in a rise in Harris’s support against Trump relative to Biden but also a cratering in support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was the primary beneficiary of the discontent double-hater voters had with their candidate choices.

According to Real Clear Politics, the multi-candidate polling average prior to Biden dropping out had Trump ahead with 43% to Biden’s 39.5% and Kennedy with 12.5%.

After Harris got in the race (and before Kennedy dropped out last week), RCP found Harris ahead with 46.9% to Trump’s 44.9% and Kennedy way back at 5%. 

As election analyst Lakshya Jain put it in Semafor: 

“The biggest factor that was unique to this election cycle was a deep distaste of both candidates, which opened the door to elevated third-party voting even in a time of record polarization. Kamala Harris’ ascension seems to have completely changed this dynamic.”

Thanks to Kamala Harris, the primary dynamic that characterizes the 2024 election has been completely flipped on its head.

It’s The Enthusiasm, Stupid

Back when the double haters were at their height, “dread” was the operative adjective for the 2024 election.

Now, as David Weigel puts it:

The unprecedented Biden-Harris switch added a frisson of chaos to this race, while also making it far more normal. Every third party candidate expected to benefit from voter dread about the unpopular red and blue choices. And much of that dread is just gone.

Not only is the dread gone, but it has been replaced by genuine enthusiasm for November’s election.

Well, among everyone except Republicans that is.

Two weeks ago, Monmouth University asked voters if they were enthusiastic about the election and found a marked increase, most notably, as would be expected, among Democrats.

While the number of voters who were at least somewhat enthusiastic about the Trump versus Biden rematch had been increasing throughout the year, it never topped 50%. Now that the contest is Trump versus Harris, voter enthusiasm has risen to 68%. 

The biggest jump has been among Democrats (from 46% in June to 85% now), but there has also been a notable increase in enthusiasm among independents (from 34% to 53%). Among Republicans, enthusiasm for the Trump-Harris contest (71%) is identical to what it was for the Trump-Biden rematch in June (71%).

In fact, Gallup is finding Democratic enthusiasm at levels rivaling 2008.

But this increased enthusiasm is not merely motivating Democrats to vote for Harris. It is changing the electorate itself.

As The Fuller Project reports on the response of women voters to Harris’s candidacy:

The shift in enthusiasm was even greater among women, especially women between the ages of 18 and 44. Only 33 percent of all women and a moribund 18 percent of those under 45 had been motivated to vote when Biden was still in the race. Since Democratic candidates need a strong showing from women to overcome Republicans’ traditional dominance among men, that augured poorly for the president’s reelection chances. Once Harris replaced him as the likely nominee, women’s motivation to vote shot up 49 points to 82 percent, EMILYs List reported. Women under 45, meanwhile, showed an astounding 57-point increase, to 75 percent.

And as election analyst Tom Bonier has reported, voter registration among Harris supporters is through the roof.

As Bonier explains in his X thread:

Young Black women are leading the way, seeing their registration almost triple, relative to the same point in 2020. Young Hispanic women aren't far behind, with a 150% increase in registration. Black women overall have almost doubled their registration numbers from 2020.

These changes are, unsurprisingly, substantially to the benefit of Democrats. Democratic registration has increased by over 50%, as compared to only 7% for Republicans. These new registrants are modeled as +20 pts Dem, as compared to +6 during the same week in 2020.

With the double haters evaporating and Democratic enthusiasm rising—and now even eclipsing that of the GOP, it’s little wonder that Donald Trump longs openly for the days when he had the luxury of running against Biden, who struggled to rally his base back to his side.

In this new race, Trump has yet to adjust fully to the new dynamics and find his footing against a surging Harris. As the clock continues to tick down, his campaign advisors are casting about for an answer and an attack that lands. What they don’t seem to yet realize is that the double haters they were relying on to bring Biden down are no longer a factor.

If they are unable to adapt, the numbers we are seeing could start to bake in, leaving Harris leading narrowly across most swing states and on the national level. 

And that would be very bad news for Trump.