With four days to go until election day, over 64 million Americans have already cast their ballots. That’s 40% of the total vote in 2020, putting this year on pace for record turnout.
So where do things stand? We asked Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican strategist who helped lead George W. Bush to two victories and now serves as an advisor to the Lincoln Project. He told Countdown 2024 there’s about 53% of the country that isn’t “MAGA or open to MAGA,” and Vice President Kamala Harris’ task is to get as many of them on her side as possible.
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“We wake up today in a world where Liz Cheney and Bernie Sanders are on the same side, so I think they’re doing a pretty good job of building a coalition,” Stevens said.
He said recent data shows undecided voters are breaking about two to one for Harris.
“There's nothing new information about Donald Trump that people are receiving,” he said. “If you wanted to be for Donald Trump, there was no reason not to be for Donald Trump. The question was, do you want to be for this alternative?”
Stevens said the Harris campaign “haven’t had a bad day yet,” citing her recent star-studded Houston rally as a standout moment.
“I think that she probably is advantaged by the fact that she hasn’t been running for a year and a half,” he said. “At this stage in a presidential race, most candidates are just hanging on, trying not to make any catastrophic mistakes. They’re so tired. And she seems to be getting better.”
While recent polls show a neck-and-neck race, Stevens expects Harris to win easily. He said the polls’ modeling may be underestimating the number of women who will turn out to the polls in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
“You guys were talking about the 60-plus million who have voted, there’s a 10% gender gap in that vote. So 10% more women are voting than men,” he said. “Now, we don't know how they voted, secret ballots, but we know that Harris, in every poll, is winning more women than she is losing men.”
But even if Harris wins, Stevens warned that Trump likely won’t concede, and the period between the election and inauguration could be “very rocky.”
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