Harris’s Final Challenge: Restore a Splintering Democratic Coalition

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In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris is contending with erosion within the Democratic coalition that put Barack Obama and Joe Biden in the White House, and growing more dependent on white voters who historically aligned more with Republicans.

Black and Latino voters, two essential pillars of that coalition, have drifted away from Democrats in striking numbers, according to New York Times/Siena College polling.

The defections, if they hold to Election Day, would make Ms. Harris’s path to victory far more difficult, complicating her efforts both in big cities like Philadelphia and Detroit and across Sun Belt battlegrounds such as Georgia and Arizona.

A Harris win would also be reliant on support and high turnout from college-educated white voters and suburbanites, including voters who traditionally leaned Republican until the Trump era.

“She’s doing very well in suburban areas that went blue after Donald Trump came into office,” Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, said. “That’s what’s keeping her in the race right now, while she’s losing a point or two because of the less enthusiastic support among urban men.”

Ms. Harris’s predicament is the clearest display yet of the ways former President Donald J. Trump is creating new political alliances that could fundamentally alter the makeup of the two major parties.

Since Mr. Trump’s ascent nearly a decade ago, Republicans have made inroads with working-class voters across races and ethnicities while Democrats have increasingly become the party of college-educated, upper-income voters.

It’s a potential realignment that many Democrats did not see coming. When Mr. Obama became the first Black president in 2009, his party embraced the assumption that a more diverse electorate would make the party dominant in presidential politics.

And many believed that the rise of Mr. Trump, who enthusiastically stokes racial grievances, would only hasten the arrival of a durable Democratic majority in the electoral college.

Instead, the opposite has happened. Capitalizing on disaffection with Democrats, Mr. Trump has drawn in Hispanic voters and significantly improved his standing among Black voters.

While a majority of Latino voters — and a vast share of Black voters — still say they support Ms. Harris, even modest erosion in their support could be consequential in a race that is effectively tied.

And such erosion is especially notable for Ms. Harris, who is running to be the nation’s first Black female and first Asian American president in a party that has long argued that a more diverse slate of candidates will inspire loyalty and enthusiasm.

Some Democrats have questioned the recent polling and said that they expected many Black and Latino voters to “come home” to the party by Election Day.

The Times/Siena poll found that roughly one quarter of Black and Latino voters are undecided or not fully decided.

The Harris campaign insists that it is competing hard to engage and turn out those voters, and allies warn against ceding any ground to Mr. Trump.

“The Harris campaign has to fight for these votes,” said Tory Gavito, the president of Way to Win, a liberal political group that has long warned that Democrats are not doing enough to address working-class voters’ concerns. “Particularly those who already have more economic precarity in their lives, they are frustrated.”