Opinion | Harris, Trump and the 2024 Election: 9 Trump Voters Discuss

In May, when President Biden was running for re-election, we conducted a focus group with 12 women from swing states who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 to assess how they were feeling about the rematch. They were enthusiastically pro-Trump and confident: Eleven of the 12 said they thought he would win. At the same time, half of them said it was important that America have a female president in the next decade, and a few praised Kamala Harris.

This month, with Ms. Harris now the Democratic nominee, we decided to invite our group from May to reconvene and talk about what difference, if any, having a woman at the top of the ticket made for them. Nine of our participants were game, and the conversation had some surprises: For example, while the group was still mostly pro-Trump, they were now roughly split on whether he would win.

The women who liked Mr. Trump said they trusted him more on the economy and inflation and were skeptical that costs would go down under Ms. Harris because they blamed the Biden-Harris administration for the state of the economy now. Interestingly, four of the women trusted Ms. Harris more on the issue of abortion, but a couple of them made clear they saw abortion not as “a political issue or a voting issue,” as one of them said, but as a “social issue.”

Some of the women had misgivings about Mr. Trump that were more acute than when we spoke in May, noting his support for tax cuts for wealthy Americans, his “terrible bedside manner” and his tendency to say “dumb” things. Several of the women said they were also concerned about political violence from his supporters.

In such a polarized election, we were struck that one woman had switched from Mr. Trump to Ms. Harris and another seemed to be leaning that way. They liked Ms. Harris’s confidence and enthusiasm, and they wanted to see the perspective and leadership that a woman would bring to the presidency. Some of the pro-Trump women also credited Ms. Harris with being vocal, empathetic and courageous, though several were quite critical of her as well, calling her “robotic,” “fake” and “unqualified.” What was unequivocally clear, though, is that for these nine women, Ms. Harris had a fighting chance against Mr. Trump and had earned a measure of grudging respect — something they didn’t feel about the Democrats in May.