With two weeks until Election Day, Kamala Harris’ senior aides are staring at polls that show a large majority of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track.
They are also convinced that the next two weeks will see Donald Trump making more references to the “enemy within” or January 6 as a “day of love” and going off on meandering tangents, like as his filthy remarks about golf star Arnold Palmer at a Pennsylvania rally last week. And they believe they will be able to provoke him into making even more outrageous allegations.
A dozen key aides and outside allies told AWN that getting Americans to focus on that over the next two weeks, to see a second Trump term as moving the country farther off track, and to see Harris as an acceptable agent of change, will likely determine the president. Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told senior fundraisers at a summit in Philadelphia last week that while they may not feel the race is still deadlocked, it is in the battleground states where the president will be won.
“Historically, it would be unusual to have seven states come down to a point or less,” said David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager who is now a senior adviser to Harris, about the battleground environment. “But I think at this point, you have to assume that’s a distinct possibility.”
Plouffe and other Harris advisors feel Trump’s mainly outsourced door-to-door and other on-the-ground contact efforts cannot compete with what the national Democrats and the Harris campaign – which inherited some of President Joe Biden’s team – spent a year assembling. However, they believe that this edge will only take them so far.
“Democrats wish Donald Trump wouldn’t get more than 46% of the vote,” Plouffe stated, alluding to the former president’s prior national popular vote percentage. But in the battleground states, “it is not reality. He’ll get up to 48% in each of these states. So all we have to do is make sure we meet our win total, which may be 50 or 49.5 depending on the state.
Plouffe and other Harris advisers, however, believe the vice president still has potential for improvement.
To get there, the campaign is completing big, attention-grabbing events featuring Harris, complete with symbolic backdrops designed to drive home the message.
“The goal is to make sure that you’re motivating your operation, that you’re being felt in all of these places,” said Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Harris’ co-chairman.
More focused messages
With Harris aides still on a frenzied search for disengaged voters, much of that outreach will take the form of new presidential campaign strategies, some of which will rely on new technology.
Campaign aides believe the surrogates they have lined up will make a difference, whether they are celebrities making targeted social media appearances or community members sending direct texts, such as attendees at a Doug Emhoff event in Southfield, Michigan, who were asked to send messages encouraging people to host “Kamala Shabbat” dinners.
The Harris aides AWN spoke with indicated jittery confidence, but they also continued to use words like “jump ball” and “down to the wire,” as well as the rare emoji with queasy green cheeks.
Several prominent Democratic operatives expressed concern that Harris may be losing the traditional TV ad wars in the face of Republicans’ wide and persistent attacks on transgender issues, but Harris aides disagreed. The majority of the up-for-grabs voters aren’t paying attention to such ads, if they’re watching TV at all, the aides claimed. And the campaign believes it has an advantage over Trump’s organization, thanks to months of precinct-by-precinct organizing and planning that is regularly updated based on early voting and web data.
Throughout “brat summer” and the tent revival-like atmosphere of the Democratic convention, advisers indicated they were prepping for a stable contest that would be won on the margins and would necessitate a few huge swings that some political experts may regard as desperate Hail Mary maneuvers.
There will be new announcements: After months of carefully polling well-known nonpoliticians like as musicians and athletes, the campaign will release even more endorsements, interviews, and appearances in an effort to reach out to disengaged voters. Expect more events like the vice president’s interview with Charlamagne Tha God and Julia Roberts’ trip to Georgia, both of which stemmed directly from the campaign’s research.
“We aren’t throwing spaghetti at the wall. “We literally researched who these voters listen to,” stated a campaign official.
Some of the outreach will include revisiting Biden-style themes about Trump’s unfitness for office, attempting to make the case for a steady commander in chief while persuading hesitant Americans to support the first Black female president. However, rather than moralistic and abstract messaging, Harris and her advertisements will emphasize how much worse they feel a second Trump presidency would be. And, in ways Biden never could, this would involve further pounding of Trump as unsuitable for the presidency, based on their accusations that he is in mental and physical decline.
Reproductive rights will remain central, but the outreach will also focus on Harris’ biography and economic plans, as aides believe her campaign has real room to grow with non-college-educated White women turned off by Trump, whom they believe she can win if they perceive her to be more middle class than radical left. The team also plans to expand its efforts among seniors and maximize enthusiasm for Harris among Black women, while also working to increase support among Black males and Latinos.
“At some point, you just want to be the one to make the last argument to them as loudly as you possibly can,” one top Democratic operative working to support Harris stated in a text message. “But this thing is going to be decided in the last week, I am SURE of it.”
