| Seven questions for … Nick Gourevitch: Gourevitch is a partner at Global Strategy Group and was part of the polling team for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign. He is also a pollster for Navigator, which released its post-election survey this week. We talked with him about why Harris lost and why many Democratic House and Senate candidates outran her. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. How surprised were you by the election results? Not incredibly surprised. When you are a partisan pollster, you’re always rooting for your side. But we knew it was an incredibly close, 50-50 election. Certainly after 2016, I was surprised. You’re always talking yourself into reasons why you might be wrong in the direction you want it to go. But the bottom line is that the data did kind of point us in this direction. Did you see President-elect Donald Trump with a slight edge heading into Election Day? Or did you see a 50-50 race? I think an honest read of the data would have been a slight edge for him, on aggregate, across all of our work. But I reject the premise of the question a little bit, because I think there is an overemphasis on [the] very consequential dividing line of 50-50, [because] it means the difference between winning and losing. The expectation that polling can tell you the difference between 49-49 and 50-48 is probably a false expectation around what polling can actually do. Why do you think Harris lost? I generally think reasons number one, two and three are the economy and inflation. If you look at the 15 percent middle of the electorate, the swing voters, they said inflation was their top issue. They gave President Biden 73 percent disapprove on the economy. And they retrospectively approved of Trump’s performance on the economy, even if they held mixed opinions of him personally. When you have people who are essentially [saying], “My personal financial situation is very challenging and very expensive, I need somebody to fix that” — that was a really challenging dynamic. To be honest, if you ever did a focus group with anybody over the last year, it is the first thing that comes up every single time. How much better do you think Trump did with Black and Hispanic voters? There was definitely disproportionate movement from voters of color, including Black, Hispanic and probably Asian American voters, although we have smaller samples on that last one. In the Navigator exit poll, we saw Black voters moving from [voting for Harris by] 84 [points in 2020] to [voting for her by] 67 [points this year], Hispanic voters moving from plus-38 to plus-11, [Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders] moving from plus-31 to plus-20. So that’s real. Harris struggled in some blue states. Biden won New Jersey by 16 points. Harris won it by six points. Biden won New York by 23 points. Harris won it by 12 points. Biden won Massachusetts by 33 points. Harris won it by 25 points. What’s happening there? Harris did better in the battleground states, where turnout was higher. So one interesting thing will be just to understand the degree to which that gap was due to turnout in non-contested states. I do not believe that will be the whole story, but it will probably be part of the story. The other part is vote switching. A lot of those states [have substantial numbers of] voters of color. Those are states also with high cost of living. I think that sort of cocktail was problematic in those places. Why do you think Democrats ran stronger than Harris in House and Senate races, including Rep. Elissa Slotkin in Michigan and Rep. Ruben Gallego in Arizona? I think abortion was actually more potent outside the top of the ticket as a negative on some of the Republicans. Some amount of people voted national economy at the top of the ticket and then voted how they typically vote downballot. I don’t think anybody expects their member of Congress necessarily to fix the economy in the same way that they want the president to. It was a confluence of things, but I think ultimately [House and Senate candidates] weren’t necessarily penalized as much as Harris was on the macroeconomics. This was the first presidential election since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. What role do you think abortion ended up playing in this election? There were a lot of abortion ads [in House and Senate races], and Democrats won in many of the places where those were run. At the top of the ticket, it proved a little harder — in part because Trump actively tried to distance himself from his position [on abortion]. And, frankly, economics was just such a dominant issue that it blocked out the sun a little bit. | 
Theodoric Meyer and 
