Trump Ripens in the Sun Belt

The former President Donald Trump got some much-needed good news out of the Sun Belt states this week. 

The latest NYT/Sienna polling of the southern region that extends from North Carolina to California finds Trump leading Democratic nominee Kamala Harris by comfortable margins only a month after the same poll found Harris holding a sizable advantage in parts of the region.

According to the latest figures, Trump has opened leads in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. In Arizona, Trump now leads Harris by 5 points according to the NYT/Siena figures as voters raise concerns over the porous border. A Fox News poll released Thursday also found Trump ahead by a shorter margin of 3 percent.

Immigration is the key issue for voters in Arizona. More than 1 million illegal immigrants are estimated to have crossed through the Yuma sector alone during Biden’s presidency and Trump’s campaign has repeatedly sought to attach escalating tensions along the border to Harris. Owing to the importance of the three states, and Arizona specifically, Harris is scheduled to visit the Southwest this weekend as her campaign attempts to pitch her as tough on crime, citing the vice president’s time prosecuting transnational gangs when she served as California’s attorney general. 

Whether that message plays is another question altogether. Harris has struggled to shore up what many voters see as her weakest issue; immigration. And although Harris enjoyed a summer surge in popularity that has assuaged the worries of many of her Democrat critics, she still trails Trump by 14 percentage points on the issue.

Trump appears to have made significant inroads with the Hispanic voting base as well. A shocking, newly-released Quinnipiac poll finds Trump ahead of Harris by eight points. That number has been disputed, however, by Pew Research Group, which found Harris leading by 18. Other critics have pointed to an Economist poll which finds Harris holding a 28-point advantage over Trump with Hispanics. Even Trump’s worst-case scenario with the Latino voter block finds him polling stronger than most Republican presidential candidates of the past. The last GOP standard-bearer who even came close with the demographic was then-President George W. Bush, who lost the bloc to John Kerry by 18 points in 2004.

More troubling for Harris, the Arizona Police Association, who represents over 12,000 members of local and statewide law enforcement, endorsed Trump for president in late August. The Association split its endorsement down ballot, choosing to back the Democratic candidate for Senate, Ruben Gallego, over the MAGA firebrand Kari Lake. Lake’s poor polling numbers and inability to resonate with centrist voters have yet to drag down Trump’s numbers in the state. 

“Donald Trump creates his own weather,” noted former Arizona Republican lawmaker Stan Barnes.

Trump’s ability to escape the controversies of his down ballot counterparts will play a significant part in the North Carolina race where Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson is under fire for salacious comments he allegedly made on a pornography forum in the early 2000s.

Many of Robinson’s staff have abandoned his campaign, and the MAGA flamethrower is down double digits and falling as he combatively claims the disturbing posts were “manufactured” by artificial intelligence despite strong evidence to the contrary. Since the allegations broke, Trump has steered clear of the man he once dubbed “Martin Luther King on steroids” and both his and vice president nominee JD Vance’s teams have barred Robinson from further campaign events. 

According to the NYT/Sienna poll, which was conducted before the Robinson scandal hit the wires, North Carolina is the tightest race of the three. The state, which went for Trump in 2020 by less than 75,000 votes, is essentially a toss up and the Harris campaign has spent considerable time and money in Tar Heel country. Whether that down payment pays off in a state that has consistently voted Republican for president over the years is yet to be determined.

Trump is also showing strength in Georgia, a state President Biden narrowly and controversially carried in 2020. Not only is Trump ahead in the most recent selection from NYT/Sienna but the former president is also leading by 2 points according to the latest polling from CBS News. Fox News countered the bullish narrative in a poll released late on Thursday, which found Harris up 3 points in the state. 

Voters in the region list rising housing costs as their top concern and that’s good news for Trump who has consistently polled ahead of Harris on the economy. Harris has attempted to pitch herself as a pro-labor capitalist who can reinvigorate the middle class but voters remain skeptical of her ability after four years of rising costs under the Biden-Harris administration.

One area in the Sun Belt that could surprisingly spell trouble for the Trump campaign is in his home state of Florida, a region that no Democratic presidential candidate has captured since Barack Obama did it back-to-back in 2008 and 2012. Harris is polling better than expected in the Sunshine State and a just-released survey from The Independent Center and The Bullfinch Group finds the 59-year-old only down by one. That poll comes on the heels of a Florida Atlantic University poll published last week which found Harris leading Trump by slim margins.

Harris’s startling strength in the state is likely owed, in part, to Amendment 4, a November-ballot initiative to protect abortion rights that could prompt Democrat voters to turn out in big numbers. Florida currently has a six-week abortion ban that Trump has waffled about, first saying he would vote yes on the ballot initiative before quickly amending his answer after facing backlash from conservative voters. Similar abortion measures have won approval in politically red areas throughout the country, and the Florida initiative could help Harris pull the sort of numbers that Obama used to defeat John McCain and Mitt Romney.

On Thursday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee announced it would spend millions in Florida and Texas in an effort to snatch an upset in the reliably red states. Although the incumbent Sen. Rick Scott looks headed for a comfortable reelection in Florida, Sen. Ted Cruz appears vulnerable in Texas. New polling from Emerson, who correctly called a narrow victory for Cruz over Beto O’Rourke in 2018, finds Democratic Rep. Colin Allred down only 4 points to Cruz with 6 percent of respondents undecided. Trump, who defeated Clinton by 9 and Biden by 6 in the Longhorn State, safely holds a 5-point advantage over Harris for the time being.

Nevada and its seven electoral votes are in toss-up territory according to polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight. The latest Emerson poll from the region finds the two candidates locked in a statistical dead heat. Trump, who lost the state by nearly 3 percentage points in 2020, has attempted to make inroads with service workers by promising “no tax on tips.” Harris is scheduled to campaign in Las Vegas this weekend following her visit to Arizona. 

But even if Trump wins every contested Sun Belt state, he would still need to pick off a Rust Belt state to win reelection, a task that grows more daunting by the day. Harris, who selected Wisconsin’s Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, has shown surprising strength in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin since entering the race in late July. 

Trump’s stunning 2016 upset victory over Hillary Clinton was largely in part due to his performance in the Blue Wall states. His sincere message to those struggling to make ends meet in the bombed-out husk of what was once America’s palatial manufacturing hub rang true in a way that no other politician on the left or right could enunciate. 

Michigan-born filmmaker Michael Moore, whose brilliant 1989 film Roger and Me depicted the economic devastation wrought by the exodus of car manufacturers in Michigan cities such as Flint, understood better than anyone Trump’s appeal to those abandoned by America’s wealthiest:

Donald Trump came to the Detroit economic club, and stood there in front of the Ford Motor executives and said, ‘If you close these factories as you’re planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico, I’m going to put a 35% tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody is going to buy them. It was an amazing thing to see. No politician, Republican or Democrat, had ever said anything like that to these executives. And it was music to the ears of people in Michigan, and Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The Brexit States.

Trump’s 35 percent tariff threat never materialized. In 2019, Trump unexpectedly levied a 5 percent tariff on all goods imported from Mexico. The decision was heavily criticized by Trump’s own administration and was quickly scuttled, although Trump claimed the measure had abated illegal immigration. 

In a throwback to the 2016 campaign, Trump said on Tuesday that he will impose a 100 percent tariff on all cars imported from Mexico if he is reelected president. “The only way they’ll get rid of that tariff is if they want to build a plant right here in the United States, with you people operating that plant,” Trump told a crowd in Georgia. 

The 100 percent tariff proposal came only a day after Trump, flanked by John Deere equipment, threatened the company with a 200 percent tariff if they go through with a plan to move a significant part of its manufacturing base to Mexico. A spokesperson for the company refuted Trump’s claims, noting that John Deere has had a presence in Mexico since 1952. “We are not moving to Mexico,” read a tersely-worded missive released in response to Trump’s remarks. 

Whether Trump’s tough talk on tariffs resonates with voters remains to be seen. Voters in the Rust Belt have certainly watched the former president fail to deliver on such promises in the past and his numbers in the Rust Belt aren’t nearly as positive as the Sun Belt figures show, although Pennsylvania appears to be in play heading into the final stretch. 

The shifting nature of the 2024 election is indicative of the sublimely chaotic and rare air Americans find themselves in today. Late Thursday night, a new poll from Bloomberg/Morning Consult put Harris ahead thinly in all of the swing states. If one thing is certain, this race can shift on a dime. For Trump, the hope is he lands heads up at the right moment.