In 2016 and 2020, Trump helped solidify a relatively new trend in American politics: Cities, suburbs and more-urban states became increasingly blue, while rural areas and largely rural states became more solidly red. Trump inspired higher turnout and secured larger victories in rural areas in both elections, improving on 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney's performance in those areas. When Biden won in 2020, it was largely because he did even better in urban areas than Hillary Clinton had four years before.

This year, the Harris campaign has tried to lure some of those rural voters away, especially with its vice-presidential choice. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz hails from small-town Nebraska, and has presented a folksy Midwestern, neighbors-helping-neighbors view of rural life — and played up his record supporting farmers in Congress and as governor of Minnesota, a relatively rural state with a major agriculture industry. Walz has talked about being a hunter and gun owner, and a picture of him holding a piglet went viral soon after he was picked for the VP slot. (Not without criticism from progressives over his support of factory farms: Minnesota is a hog farming state.)

Of course, the Harris campaign isn't just deploying Walz. They're reaching out to voters in rural swing states like Wisconsin and North Carolina. In Pennsylvania, they're trying to learn from Sen. John Fetterman's strategy of mobilizing college students to vote to shore up support in rural counties. One study from the University of New Hampshire found that Democrats could tip northern swing states by winning just 3% more of the vote in rural communities.

Walz has at times contrasted his rural, small town background directly with that of Sen. JD Vance, Trump's running mate, who is often mistakenly thought of as being from Appalachia because of his book, Hillbilly Elegy. Vance's hometown, Middletown, Ohio, is in fact a small city of about 50,000 in the Cincinnati metropolitan area, which is not considered part of the region. His connection to Appalachia is more cultural: His grandparents were from Eastern Kentucky, and his book recounts his family's struggles with poverty and drug addiction. Vance represents a different kind of swing-state voter, those from the Rust Belt Midwest, and the Trump campaign has deployed him in similar fashion to Walz in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania — though he spent much of his adult career, after Yale Law School, in Silicon Valley. In early polling, Vance wasn't a popular pick with many voters wherever they lived, and his elevation to VP candidate even prompted a spate of think pieces calling his Appalachian and rural credentials into question — though his relatively solid debate performance may have redeemed him in some eyes.

Rural voters make up only 14% of the electorate. And voters aren't typically swayed by vice-presidential candidates. But in such a tight race, small shifts in any group of voters might be enough to make a difference, and the choices of Walz and Vance show how much these voters still matter to both parties.

In the 2016 presidential race, Trump won 52% of men but just 39% of women, a 13-point gender gap, according to Pew's analysis of validated voters from their American Trends Panel. (Meanwhile, Clinton won just 41% of men but 54% of women, a 13-point gap in the opposite direction.) In 2020, that gap was smaller, largely because Biden did better with men than Clinton, winning 48% of men and 55% of women.

In every presidential election since 1980, women as a bloc have been more likely than men to vote for the Democratic candidate. They've also been more likely to turn out to vote than men, making them decisive. But as 2016 proved, winning women isn't enough to win the presidency.

This fact may explain why so much media attention has been paid to Trump's potential gains among young men this cycle. Young voters typically favor Democrats by wide margins, but several pre-election polls showed a gender gap among 18- to 29-year-olds that was much larger than gender gaps within other age cohorts. These and other polls suggest that Democrats' lock on young men is uncertain; a Data for Progress poll from early October showed a presidential tie (48% each) among men under 30. On the other side of that gap, what is near-certain is young women's support for Harris. In October, a Harvard Youth Poll showed Harris up 30 points among women under 30, and a SurveyMonkey/NBCNews poll showed Harris up 33 points.

Encouragingly for Harris, this group is also motivated to vote. According to a recent Pew survey, among voters ages 18 to 29 who plan to support Harris, 50% are extremely motivated to vote, compared to just 34% of young voters who say they support Trump. And this cycle, the abortion issue may further spur young women. According to a KFF panel, as of September, abortion is the top election issue for women under age 30. The same poll found that Democratic women are now more motivated to vote with Harris at the top of the ticket, compared to their responses in June, while Republican women are less motivated.

Like so many things in elections, whether a big gender gap in 2024 would be a major problem for Harris will come down to turnout: If high turnout among these Democratic-leaning female voters under 30 materializes and men make up a smaller portion of the overall vote share, even a larger-than-average gender gap might not spell doom.

By jumping into the race 107 days before election day, Harris had to define her platform quickly. A major concern for Harris was to separate herself from the Biden campaign and make inroads on economic messaging. One month after launching her bid for the presidency, 45% of likely voters said Harris would do a better job at handling the economy than Trump, while 51% said Trump would do a better job, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll.

As far as where she has an advantage, Democrats and the Harris campaign see abortion as a winning issue, and she's made reproductive rights a core focus of her campaign. Revisit our poll quiz on Harris' policies to see what else Americans think of her platform.

The 538 Politics podcast recently posed this question to a group of experienced pollsters and analysts in an attempt to sift through the data on this upcoming election. From swing voters to economic sentiment, everyone's got their eyes on a different metric that could be key to understanding where things are headed.

Republican pollster Adam Geller is watching "Trump bros," a notable portion of the swing group of young men drawing both candidates to popular podcasts. The New York Times Polling Editor Ruth Igielnik is focused on whether voters feel that Trump or Harris' economic policies "help or hurt people like you." Lenny Bronner, senior data scientist at The Washington Post, is curious about the gap between presidential and Senate polling this cycle and what that could tell us about voters in key swing states. And J. Ann Selzer, known for her Iowa polling expertise, is wondering whether the low-propensity voters that helped Trump win back in 2016 will turn out this time around.

To hear more of the data points that seasoned election-watchers are following to unpack the 2024 election, check out this podcast.