Who will win the presidential race? For our latest Times Opinion focus group on the 2024 election, we spoke to late-deciding voters — Americans who recently wavered between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and made a last-minute decision. With Harris and Trump supporters so energized and the polls showing a very close race, we wanted to examine the events, issues and sentiments that could influence these voters in one way or another.

All of our 15 late voters came from swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, and many of them voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. No wonder, most of them had reservations and reservations about both candidates, but it quickly became clear that Mr. Trump in particular was doing himself a disservice with these voters.

While some of them balked at his rally at Madison Square Garden, his bigger problem was that he still seemed to those voters to be business as usual, with no new or clear solutions to their problems and his well-known grievances about the 2020 election.

As for Ms. Harris, most of those voters thought she would be “more of the same” as president rather than a leader seeking change, and considered her less authentic than Mr. Trump. Many of them compared her less favorably to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But in the end, years of concerns and doubts about Mr. Trump outweighed uncertainty about Ms. Harris for several participants, and more of them saw her win than Mr. Trump.