mr bet How the Presidential Election Got This Close

As Donald Trump turns to obscenity, racial disparagement and sexual innuendo to blunt Kamala Harris’s surge in the polls, he faces a daunting obstacle: the intense hostility among Democrats to all things Republican.

How so?

Harris has consolidated support from key Democratic groups — the young, Black voters, women, Hispanics — who were lukewarm on President Biden.

These voters share with their fellow Democrats a deep animosity toward the Republican Party. They are inherently distrustful of Trump and highly unlikely to switch their allegiance to him.

The same logic works in reverse.

Since Biden’s withdrawal from the race, Trump’s standing in the polls has remained consistently in the range of 45 percent to 48 percent — a bloc of voters seemingly impervious to criticism of their chosen leader.

Just as the overwhelming majority of Harris’s supporters won’t flip to Trump, Trump’s support is entrenched, effectively creating a ceiling on Harris’s ability to extend her current modest lead.

The American electorate, as Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., and her co-authors wrote, has “calcified.” Polarization doesn’t just pull us apart; it holds coalitions together.

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