What are voters saying about Donald Trump and Kamala Harris? Expert looks beyond the polls
BOSTON – Polls are a snapshot in time, goes the cliché, good for fueling horse race analysis of elections but little else. That's why a political expert is using a different way to find out what are people saying about former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of November's election?
Public opinion of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump
Boston market research expert Diane Hessan had an idea better than polling for gauging public opinion about the 2016 presidential race. She set up a demographically-diverse online panel of 500-plus voters and checked in with them every week by email and, sometimes, by phone, winning their trust and sampling their opinions over a long period of time.
Her work yielded dozens of columns in the Boston Globe and a 2021 book "Our Common Ground: Insights from Four Years of Listening to American Voters." And while she thought she was through with the survey, Hessan recently restarted it to get a handle on the wild 2024 presidential contest.
In her book, Hessan wrote: "The assumptions we make about each other are horribly inaccurate, and our inability to hear each other, our speculation and our impatience are tearing us apart."
Are things any better now?
"In some ways they're worse," Hessan told WBZ-TV. "My data says that there's so much that we agree on, but we get sucked into these crazy stories about people who are on the extremes. And whether it's a story about someone on the very far left or the very far right, it tends to make you feel like the other side is absolutely crazy."
What people say about Donald Trump
One example - Hessan notes that some Democrats complain about Trump voters, "How can they like this guy, they don't realize who he is?"
So she asked hundreds of her panelists who say they will vote for Trump to describe him in one word.
"What do you think the words were? Buffoon, crazy, a false God, low integrity, they use all these negative words. The other side of it is, [they say] 'I think he's crazy, but I'm voting for him anyway, because I miss having $2 gas' or whatever else. But it's not as if there's this big love affair on the other side."
What voters say about Kamala Harris
With Harris being the first Black woman to be the nominee of a major party, some of Hessan's respondents cast the election as a referendum of sorts on race and gender. But she says the data doesn't support that take.
"Most of their issues are about what they don't know about a particular candidate, or they worry about the candidate being too far left or too far right. So Kamala Harris right now has a couple of issues that are really, really challenges for her in the minds of most voters," Hessan said. "One is people perceive that she is too progressive. Second is that people don't think that she has the gravitas to be able to do the Presidential job, which, of course, could be a gender thing, could be a racial thing, but they don't see her being serious enough and having the chops to be able to deal especially with foreign policy, and the third one is immigration. Those are perception issues that she really can overcome, whether it's in a debate, whether it's in a speech, whether it's in a one on one interview or whatever, and she's got time to do that, but those are the issues that I hear about from people much more."
Negative voting
Hessan sees this election as a continuation of our descent into negative voting.
"My data says that people in November will largely vote against the other side. They will not say, I love Kamala Harris, I love Donald Trump. They will say, I am voting for Harris because I can't stand the other guy or voting for him because she's too far left, or I don't like the way she dances, or, you know, whatever else," Hessan said.