Who Has a Policy that Would Benefit You? More Voters Say Trump.

This article was originally published at Good Authority

Just days before Nov. 5, the 2024 election increasingly appears to be a historically close race. Recent polling indicates that any advantage either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump may have in any of the swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – is well within the polling margin of error, setting the stage for either a squeaker of an election or an electoral college blowout.

Kamala Harris’ campaign has been remarkable for its short duration. That late entrance also means her campaign had very little time to develop policy positions and communicate them to voters. After becoming the Democratic candidate in mid-July, Harris’ earliest proposals – released in mid-August – received a lukewarm reception. These were followed in early September by her first official campaign policies and, by late September, a more comprehensive policy platform. 

Will this lightness and lateness on policy matter for Kamala Harris? While some have argued that a detailed policy platform may hurt Harris more than it would help, others argue that “vibes and values” may matter more electorally. However, there is also a long literature in American politics suggesting that people vote for candidates they agree with on the issues. In the current election identitarian battlelines have long been drawn and, with the exception of occasional shocks, have remained relatively stable. In such a context, clear policy positions may be influential.

For the past eight years, we have been collecting nationally representative survey data to look at one related question in particular: Can voters name a policy from the presidential candidates that would make their life better? More specifically, respondents were presented with the following prompt: 

“Name a policy [CANDIDATE] supports that would make your life better if it becomes law.”

As we describe below, on this measure Harris is running ahead of Hillary Clinton in 2016, but behind Joe Biden in 2020, as well as behind Trump in 2024.

In 2016, more voters could name a Trump policy than a Clinton policy that would make their life better

Our research, published earlier this week, shows that Donald Trump had a decisive advantage over Clinton in this regard in 2016. Overall, 44% of respondents were able to identify a Trump policy area they believed would make their life better, compared to 34% for a Clinton policy. This suggests that the success of his campaign might be partially attributed to its ability to communicate memorable information.

Being able to identify something a candidate would do that would improve your life is strongly related to vote choice. For example, in 2016, Clinton won nearly all votes (98.8%) from Democrats who could name a policy of hers that would make their life better but not a corresponding policy of Trump’s. However, her support dropped significantly among other Democrats; at the extreme end, a full 62% of the (small number of) Democrats who could name a policy they liked of Trump but not Clinton broke the party line and voted for Trump. 

We recently received a fresh wave of data, collected by YouGov in August, and conducted an updated analysis comparing the responses to this question across the 2024, 2020, and 2016 election cycles. In the recently released paper, we used human coders to classify responses. But for the latest round of data, we used large language models to complete the same task. We then re-ran the 2016 analysis using LLMs to ensure we were making an apples to apples comparison.

With this updated methodology, we corroborated the conclusions of our paper. We found that yes, Donald Trump maintained a distinct advantage against Hillary Clinton. Using this new LLM-based coding, we found that 28.5% of respondents were able to identify a specific Trump policy that they believed would make their lives better, compared to 17.5% for a Clinton policy.

Biden reversed this “beneficial policy recall” gap

But Trump had no such advantage in 2020. In our analysis, Biden beat out Trump, 37% to 34% on the naming a policy that could make your life better question. While no causal association can be claimed, it is intuitive that the candidate for which more people can identify a policy that would make their lives better has a better chance of winning. Indeed, this is what we see.

Comparing the 2016 and 2020 data, Biden was able to make significant gains over Clinton across all political affiliations. In 2016, 28% of Democrats, 5% of Republicans, and 16% of independents were able to identify a policy of Clinton’s that would make them better off. But in 2020, Biden’s campaign was able to pull these numbers up to 54%, 14%, and 36%, respectively.

Harris is doing better than Clinton – but not as well as Trump

So what do these data say about Kamala Harris and the 2024 election? Overall, 34% of survey respondents in this latest wave say that Trump has a policy that would make their lives better, compared to 28% who say that about Harris. Almost half (45%) of Democrats, 9% of Republicans, and 27% of independents are able to name a Harris policy that would make their lives better off. These numbers are all better than Clinton’s, but trail the results for Biden in 2020. 

One important caveat is that our data come from August 2024, barely a month into Harris’ campaign. It is of course possible that the number of people who can name a Harris policy that will make their life better will have increased substantially by Election Day, especially given the timing of her policy rollouts in September.

Time to talk policy?

With the current election balanced on the tip of a pin, it isn’t clear whether the Harris campaign’s initial decision to lean more on hope and vibes than policy will make a difference. For an election for which more than 4 in 10 Americans expressed dread, Kamala Harris’ nomination breathed new life into the Democratic campaign and replaced anxiety with joy – at least for a moment. Moreover, Harris has subsequently released several detailed policy plans, even if the media narrative has remained focused on the original sentiments of hopes and vibes.

Nevertheless, as the pivotal moment approaches, potential supporters of both candidates may be asking themselves: If I can’t think of a reason why this candidate would make my life better, should I really vote for them?

Jan Zilinsky is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Munich School of Politics and Public Policy at the Technical University of Munich.

Christopher Schwarz is a research data scientist at the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics and an adjunct assistant professor in the Management and Organizations Department of the NYU Stern School of Business.

Jonathan Nagler is professor of politics, and co-director of the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University.

Joshua Tucker is professor of politics, director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, and co-director of the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University.