In recent weeks, I’ve been curious to see what the Harris-Walz campaign’s internal numbers look like. The campaign is doing two things simultaneously: projecting calm, steady confidence in the closing days AND talking about how everything will come down to the wire. I get it – they don’t want to walk around like they’ve got this thing won, even if that’s what their internals say. They’ve still got to get people out to vote, they’ve got to keep the heightened urgency, because the last thing anyone wants is a bunch of Harris voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia skipping out because they think she’s got in the bag. Speaking of, CNN had this interesting interview with David Plouffe (former Obama campaign manager and Harris’s senior advisor):
“Historically, it would be unusual to have seven states come down to a point or less,” David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager who now serves as a senior adviser to Harris, said of the battleground landscape. “But I think at this point, you have to assume that’s a distinct possibility.”
Plouffe and other Harris advisers do not believe Trump’s largely outsourced door-knocking and other on-the-ground outreach operations can match what the national Democrats and the Harris campaign – which inherited some of the same team from President Joe Biden – spent a year putting together. But they believe this advantage can only take them so far.
“Democrats wish Donald Trump wouldn’t get more than 46% of the vote,” Plouffe said, referring to the national popular vote percentage the former president secured in his previous campaigns. But in the battleground states, “that’s not reality. He’s going to get up to 48% in all of these states. And so we just have to make sure we’re hitting our win number, which depending on the state, could be 50, could be 49.5.”
Plouffe and other Harris aides, though, believe that the vice president still has room to grow. To get there, the campaign is finalizing marquee, attention-grabbing events showcasing Harris, with symbolic backdrops aimed at driving home the message.
“The goal is to make sure that you’re motivating your operation, that you’re being felt in all these places,” said Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Harris campaign co-chair. With Harris aides still on a frantic chase to find disengaged voters, much of that outreach will come in the form of campaign tactics that are new to presidential campaigns – some that rely on new technology. Campaign aides believe they can make the difference via the surrogates they have lined up, whether those are celebrities making targeted social media appearances or community members sending direct texts like the attendees at a Doug Emhoff event in Southfield, Michigan, with Jewish voters, who were asked to send messages encouraging people to host “Kamala Shabbat” dinners.
The Harris aides CNN spoke to expressed a jittery self-confidence, but they also kept using phrases such as“jump ball” and “down to the wire” and the occasional emoji with nauseous green cheeks.
While several top Democratic operatives said they worry Harris may be losing the traditional TV ad wars in the face of Republicans’ extensive and intense attacks on transgender issues, the Harris aides disagreed. Most of the up-for-grabs voters aren’t paying attention to those ads if they’re watching TV at all, the aides contended. And the campaign believes it has the edge over Trump’s operation, thanks to months of precinct-by-precinct organizing and planning that is constantly being adjusted based on early vote and online data. All through “brat summer” and the tent revival-like atmosphere of the Democratic convention, aides said, this was what they were planning for: a stable race that will be won on the margins and that will require a few big swings that some political insiders may see as desperate Hail Mary moves.
I realize that I’m unusual in how I consume media, but I’ve barely seen any political commercials on TV in recent months because I’ve barely watched network television since the Olympics, which was where VP Harris bought a lot of ad time. It makes sense that the Trump campaign’s calculations are old-school like that – ad buys and staged stunts at McDonald’s, plus some sleepy town halls. There are several things which worry me about the Trump campaign’s operations though: the disappearance of JD Vance (the most unpopular running mate in history) and Trump leaning into the bro podcasts, with a heavy emphasis on misogyny. But yeah… the Harris-Walz campaign is acting like they know exactly what they’re doing.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.