When Barack Obama ran for president of the United States sixteen years ago, he snipped at his staff that they were pretending he was not black.  Of course this is an issue, he apparently said.

Sixteen years later, the first African-American woman is running for president, and again, of course, this is an issue.

I remember a Republican pollster from the Trafalgar Group famously saying: “People lie to their spouse, to their accountant, and to their doctor.  Why would they tell in all honesty to a stranger over the phone who they are going to vote for?”

For several election cycles in a row, polls in the U.S. have been skewed, largely because the vote for Trump was underestimated.  People didn’t want to admit that they are indeed voting for a guy who, in the media, is branded as a sexist and a racist.

For much of this year, I have been suspecting that Trump was polling so well because the focus was on incumbent Joe Biden and because pollsters have finally stopped underestimating Trump.  Now, with Kamala Harris in the picture, we have a new challenge.  With the current media hype about her, and all pundits agreeing that she had a great campaign start, are voters really willing to admit that they are not voting for the first African-American woman for president?

We shouldn’t forget that herding among pundits, journalists, and pollsters has been a major challenge in the recent past.  When everybody on TV says that Hillary Clinton will win (2016), that there will be a huge electoral repudiation of Trump (2018), that the presidential election won't be close (2020), or that Democrats have no chance to hold on to the House (2022), it takes courage to go against the mainstream or even raise an issue.

Some of the recent published polling showed numbers for Harris among white voters that made even Democrat pundits suspicious.  I’m not saying the vice president can’t win.  I actually tend to think she’s the slight favorite at the time of writing.  But as for her getting 42% of the white vote, I’ll believe it when I see it in November.

It reminds me of the 2018 Florida gubernatorial election, when Democrat Andrew Gillum showed off against Ron DeSantis.  During the campaign, there was barely a public poll that did not show Gillum in the lead.  On Election Day, he narrowly lost to DeSantis.

So far, Harris and her team are handling the situation better than, say, Hillary Clinton in 2016.  At the time, it seemed to me that Clinton made an explicit effort to ignore white, non-college-educated men, which happens to still be the biggest voting bloc.  There is no such overconfidence with Harris, with the vice president making a strong appeal to the middle class in her acceptance speech and with the nomination of Tim Walz as her running mate.  The “white dudes for Harris” movement is another component in the effort to take the bull by its horns.

It’s not only white voters who might not tell pollsters the truth, but also black voters, and in particular black men.  Donald Trump is not particularly good at outreach.  In fact, I think he has spent much of his four years at the White House explicitly trying to turn off the majority of voters who did not vote for him.  But if he did any meaningful outreach into the Democrat coalition, it was with black men.  In addition to endorsers, he also used criminal justice reform to do that, and it worked surprisingly well.

Let’s also not forget that a U.S. presidential election is de facto a governor election in a handful of states.  Last time, Joe Biden led Donald Trump substantially in nationwide in polls, and when it was all said and done, fewer than 50,000 voters in three states decided the election.  This time again, this is a race that will be decided in the final sprint.

Louis Perron, Ph.D. is a political consultant based in Switzerland.  He has orchestrated successful election campaigns around the globe and is the author of the new book Beat the Incumbent: Proven Strategies and Tactics to Win Elections.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.