How the Harris and Trump Campaigns Seek to Latinos and Persuadable Voters in Last Push Before Election Day

With around two weeks to go until Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump are making their closing statements to the electorate, seeking to gather the support of the remaining undecided voters as they face a virtually tied race.

As the elections quickly near, and with early voting in the majority of states in full force, the Harris and Trump campaigns are digging through data to find crucial Americans, particularly Latino, younger and Black voters, to persuade them to vote, according to a new report by The New York Times.

In Delaware, where the Harris (previously President Biden) headquarters are located, analysts have spent 18 months curating a list of which television shows and podcasts voters consume in the battleground states. From that list, the team has ranked from 0 to 100 a "contactability score" to voters to determine how difficult that person will be to reach, and who will be successful to deliver the campaign message.

The results are guiding Harris's media and travel schedule, as well as campaign stops by supporters, The New York Times reports. Julia Roberts and basketball star Magic Johnson have been deployed in key battleground states as they earned high remarks from voters.

By comparison, in South Florida, where the Trump headquarters are located, the team has refreshed its model of the battleground electorate and found that just 5% of voters were still undecided, about half as many as in August, according to the Times.

From this data, the Trump team is fixating on what they call "target persuadables," most of which consist of younger, more racially diverse people with lower incomes who tend to use streaming services and social media. As a result, the former President has spent a great deal of his time in media appearances on these platforms, including podcasts aimed at young men, such as The Nelk Boys' "Full Send" podcast.

Both campaigns see a group that is younger, with a disproportionate share of Black and Latino voters as major opportunities for gains ahead of November.

But the Harris campaign considers its audience of winnable swing voters to be up to 10% of voters in battleground states, slightly larger than what the Trump campaign sees for itself. This is because the Harris campaign includes a large number of Republican women who it believes dislike Trump, particularly on abortion policy, but want to hear Harris' message on the economy and the border before they are persuaded.

On the other hand, the Trump campaign sees up-for-grabs voters are about six times as likely as other battleground-state voters to be motivated by their views of Israel's war in Gaza. The campaign also found that undecided voters were less likely to be white than those in the battlegrounds overall and more likely to be Black. About 25% of undecided voters are black, The New York Times reports.

"The fact that they don't have younger Black men locked in with less than three weeks to Election Day is a big problem," said James Blair, the political director of the Trump campaign about the Harris-Walz ticket. "Historically, that would be part of their base."

The updated strategies come as Harris and Trump face a dead-locked race. For instance, The New York Times' national polling average shows Harris up by one percentage point. Similarly, FiveThirtyEight's polling average shows the Vice President with a lead of 1.7 percentage points.