2 charts that tell TOTALLY different stories of the 2024 election

Choose your own reality.

Every week, Gallup puts out a newsletter called “Front Page.” It’s got great charts and data. You should get it!

This week’s edition had two charts that struck me — because they tell totally different stories of the 2024 election and who might win it.

Let’s start with this one:

A majority (52%) of voters believe they are worse off today than they were in 2020 — when we were in the teeth of a global pandemic. Like, what??

That is a VERY difficult chart for Kamala Harris. Because she is not only the sitting vice president but she is also running against the guy who just happened to be president four years ago.

That chart is also why Harris is a) trying to sell a message that we need to “turn the page” (even though she is part of the page!) and b) should have started distancing herself from President Joe Biden WAY sooner in the campaign.

People want change. They believe that things were much better four years ago. And they don’t want to keep going down this current track.

All of that should work in Trump’s favor. He is making that argument every single day on the campaign trail. And his entire candidacy is premised on the notion that he had everything going great (debatable!) and that Biden (and Harris) screwed it all up.

That chart suggests that a message like that should resonate with lots of people.

Ok, now I did say there were TWO charts in the Gallup newsletter. And that they told different stories about the election. So, here’s the 2nd chart:

I’d point out two things in the chart above.

The first is that 49% of voters say that “Democracy in the U.S.” is “extremely important” to their vote — trailing only the economy on that measure.

I am, admittedly, somewhat skeptical that lots and lots of people will vote on “Democracy” — if they were, Joe Biden would have been doing a lot better in the race against Trump — but the numbers are the numbers.

And, there’s only one candidate in the race who tried to overturn a free and fair election and then helped to incite a riot at the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of electoral college votes. And it’s that same candidate who has promised he will only be a dictator on the first day of his presidency. And who has, repeatedly, praised authoritarians and dictators for the loyalty they engender from their people.

If “Democracy” is on the minds of voters when they cast their ballot, that seems to me like a good thing for Harris.

The second thing I’d note in that chart is the fact that transgender rights is at the bottom of the list in terms of all of the issues people prioritize in their vote choice.

I spent the weekend in North Carolina — a swing state. And I watched a TON of campaign ads in between some great college football games. (There is NOTHING better than Texas losing at home!).

And the VAST majority of ads paid for by Trump or his aligned super PACs focused on Harris’ alleged support for “taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners.” This, from ABC News, mirrors my TV-watching experience over the weekend:

Former President Donald Trump and some of his Republican allies are aggressively pushing anti-trans messaging in the final stretch of the 2024 election, with Trump in recent months frequenting campaign events involving socially conservative groups like Moms for Liberty, and Trump-aligned political groups flooding the airwaves with ads disparaging policies that support the transgender community.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign and Republican groups have spent more than $21 million on anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ television ads as of Oct. 9, nearly a third of roughly $66 million television ad spending during that time period, media tracking agency AdImpact told ABC News.

Which seemed like an odd closing argument to me — as Chuck Todd and I talked about yesterday. Do swing voters really care more about sex change operations than they do about inflation or immigration or abortion?

The Gallup numbers tell me they don’t. Which makes me wonder why Trump is so focused on it as an issue — and whether the campaign (and the super PACs) have missed the boat.

This campaign — and American politics more generally — have become choose-your-own-reality experiments. These two charts speak to that two-Americas view. Is the first chart the key one to understanding this election? Or is it the 2nd one?

We’ll know in a few weeks.