Democratic strategists alarmed by former President Trump’s track record of outperforming the polls are hoping Vice President Harris will benefit from a surge of Democratic “ghost voters,” young women they hope will turn out in large numbers for Election Day but are not being captured by recent polls.
Polls in battlegrounds states such as Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are not promising for Harris when considered in light of Trump’s history of winning more votes in these states on Election Day 2016 and 2020 than the polls indicated beforehand.
Harris held a rally with Beyoncé in Houston on Friday to further emphasize abortion rights in the final days of the campaign, amplifying a national message targeted at women between the ages of 18 and 35 who are “low-propensity” voters.
“You had the ghost voter in 2018 and 2022, because those turnouts were higher — particularly 2022 — higher than the Republicans predicted and it was a surge in young women, pro-choice voters,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said.
She said Harris could benefit substantially from young women who haven’t voted before, only voted occasionally and are not being captured by many polls.
Trump has benefited from ghost voters himself, in 2016 and 2020, when he outperformed the polls because working-class, non-college-educated voters who didn’t have a history of voting turned out in large numbers to support his candidacy.
Some Democrats fear Trump could outperform the polls again next month, which would be bad news for Harris because polls show the two candidates deadlocked in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Political handicappers say Harris must win these three “blue wall” states to secure victory.
“There is a potential for a ghost voter on both sides. The one on the Harris side would be young women,” said Lake, who noted that younger women turned out at a higher rate than any group of men during the Kansas abortion referendum in 2022. Voters in that referendum overwhelmingly rejected an anti-abortion amendment to the state constitution.
The women who could become a surge of “ghost voters” for Harris aren’t usually engaged in politics or don’t follow campaign developments though traditional news outlets.
“Normally, why we miss them is because they are people without vote history, or they have a very irregular vote history,” Lake said, explaining why these voters don’t get measured by pollsters.
“One, they have the wrong turnout estimate, which is the hardest thing to get,” she added. “These people are often registered but with very irregular, if any, vote history.”
She said some states, such as Wisconsin, allow voters to register on Election Day, “which facilitates the ghost voter” phenomenon.
Some Democrats are piling their hopes on the prospect of a “secret surge” of young female voters in the face of dispiriting polls.
The latest blow for Democrats came from the final national poll by The New York Times and Siena College published Friday, showing Harris and Trump deadlocked at 48 percent.
Democrats had hoped Harris would build a strong lead over Trump nationally heading into Election Day, which could carry over to the critical swing states.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) is one of many Democrats hoping the polls are missing wide swaths of younger female voters who don’t have much history of voting but will be motivated by abortion rights and their aversion to Trump’s personality and character to show up to the polls in droves.
“I think we’re going to see a lot of women turn out to vote that have not been counted and may not actually even be registering in the polls. We saw this in 2022. Now, if people say, ‘Well, there’s a Trump undercount,’ I believe women are going to turn out in droves,” Khanna told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo in an interview Thursday night.
“At the end of the day, I do believe that people are going to be concerned that Donald Trump hasn’t taken any gesture … to say, ‘Look, I’m going to govern from the center. I want to try to bring us together,’” he said.
Harris has tried to reach these voters through social media and, earlier this month, joining the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, Spotify’s second-most popular podcast, drawing many younger female listeners.
Strategists say celebrity endorsements from megastars Taylor Swift and Beyoncé may help motivate young women who tend to abstain from politics to vote.
Analysts tracking election data say new voter registrations spiked after Swift endorsed Harris and urged her 272 million followers to “raise your voices.”
Swift’s Instagram endorsement of Harris helped generate nearly half a million new registrants, according to Jessica Herrera, senior director at Supermajority, a group dedicated to building women’s political power.
Supermajority saw a big swell of enthusiasm and hope for the future among young women who vote infrequently after President Biden announced he would not seek a second term, paving the way for Harris to potentially become the first woman to serve as president.
“Presidential elections are surge elections. Whoever can get more voters to show up who don’t normally come to the polls will win. What we have seen in our data, I strongly believe it will be young women, and it will be, in particular, new registrants as well as those who don’t frequently show up to elections,” Herrera said.
She said the “vibes were real bad” earlier this year when Biden was expected to be the Democratic nominee for president, but that changed after Harris entered the race.
“We undertook a new survey in September, and we asked the same questions and the positive responses doubled, almost across the board. Women feel more positively about their own futures, they feel more positively about the future of the country and they feel that although government doesn’t work right now, it could in the future,” she said.
“That hope is crucial to engaging in civic participation,” she added.
The September poll of 1,300 women nationwide ages 18-35 found that 42 percent said they were optimistic about the future of the country, compared to only 25 percent who said so in May.
The poll also found that 86 percent of young women nationwide felt positive about their own futures, compared to 66 percent who said so in May.
The unexpected surge in young women voting in the 2022 midterm election was a big reason why Democrats kept control of the Senate and didn’t lose as many seats in the House as political handicappers had predicted.
That surge in voter turnout was largely driven by the Supreme Court’s bombshell decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the national right to abortion established in 1973 by Roe v. Wade.
