Harris faces questions about campaign strategy in final stretch
BY ALEX GANGITANO AND NIALL STANAGE - 10/23/24 5:41 PM ET
Democrats are hoping Vice President Harris can turn her campaign around
amid perceptions — fueled by recent polling — that former President
Trump has the momentum in the final stretch of the race.
Concerns are rising, even among those supportive of Harris, about
elements of her campaign strategy.
Harris held no campaign rallies on either Tuesday or Wednesday, focusing
instead on two sit-down interviews, with NBC News and Telemundo, and a
CNN town hall event.
She will visit Texas on Friday, a red state that she has no realistic chance
of winning. Her campaign has indicated she will use that trip to focus on
the Lone Star State’s restrictive abortion laws, underscoring an issue
where she has a big advantage over Trump.
But a trip to a safe GOP state inside the final two weeks of an
uncomfortably tight election seems a questionable decision to some
skeptics. Trump is forecast to have a 87 percent chance of winning Texas,
according to Decision Desk HQ/The Hill’s prediction model.
On top of all that, Harris began the week with a one-day tour of the “blue
wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin with former GOP
Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.).
Team Harris believes the endorsement of figures like Cheney could help
pull undecided voters into the vice president’s column.
But critics, especially on the left, questioned the wisdom of taking the
hawkish Cheney — the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney —
to Michigan. The Wolverine State is home to more than 200,000 Arab
Americans, many of whom are outraged about the Biden-Harris
administration’s staunch backing of Israel through its assault on Gaza and
invasion of Lebanon.
“If someone would have told me that in 2024 we would be celebrating the
endorsement of a war criminal like Dick Cheney by a Democratic
nominee,” Dearborn, Mich., Mayor Abdullah Hammoud (D), whose city is
majority Arab American, told The Hill TV’s “Rising” on Wednesday.
Hammoud said with evident dismay that the elder Cheney’s endorsement
“does not work in this community.”
Even though he is a Democrat, Hammoud said he was telling people
simply to vote, especially in downballot races, not whom to vote for.
“When you arrive at the top of the ticket … what I endorse is that you vote
your moral conscience,” he said.
The conflict in the Middle East aside, however, there is of course an
argument to be made for the moves Harris is making.
Supportive Democrats believe her appeal to the center ground can help
win over the sliver of undecided voters who could deliver victory — and
avoid a repeat of the party’s 2016 nightmare, when Hillary Clinton lost to
Trump in a shocking outcome.
“The next two weeks is a needle-in-a-haystack hunt for undecided voters.
The airwaves in battleground states are completely cluttered, so the
Harris campaign has to use novel voter turnout innovations like
untraditional campaign surrogates and media platforms, and micro-
persuasion,” said former Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), who ran the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2011 to 2015.
Harris has also been emphasizing Trump’s most controversial or
outlandish comments, playing clips of him during her rallies. She gave
remarks Wednesday to highlight former White House chief of staff John
Kelly’s comments that Trump fits the definition of a “fascist” and that the
former president wanted the military to be like “Hitler’s generals” in terms
of loyalty.
Israel argued that using Trump’s own comments is a strong strategy in the
final days.
“They also have to continue to exploit Trump’s disturbing impulses, like
referring to January 6th as a day of love, to remind moderate voters not to
put him back in the White House. Bottom line, Harris must make this a
referendum on Trump, Trump has to make it a referendum on Harris.
Whoever succeeds at that task, wins,” Israel said.
Harris’s decision to travel to Texas in the final homestretch of the
campaign can also be seen as an effort to bring back the momentum that
resulted in the Democrats having better-than-expected midterm election
results in 2022, just months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v.
Wade.
Suburban women in particular turned out for Democrats that cycle. The
vice president’s campaign hopes using the Texas abortion law — which
effectively bans abortions about six weeks into pregnancy — as a warning
of what could come nationally in a Trump presidency, which in turn could
drive their supporters to the polls.
Jim Messina, former President Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, told The
Hill that Harris’s campaign will focus on key demographics in their final
get-out-the-vote efforts.
“There’s a stupid argument in my party that says you either turn your
voters out or you persuade. The campaigns that win at the presidential
level do both, and that is the campaign that Kamala Harris has built,” he
said.
Messina added, “She has the biggest field operation on the ground that
we’ve ever seen to turn her vote out and to focus on certain groups that
are important for her to win: African Americans, Latinos, young people.
And then she has a persuasion machine to reach and expand certain blocs
like women voters.”
All of those moves, though, are coming at a time when Trump has climbed
in the polls, erasing the battleground-state lead that Harris had enjoyed at
higher points of her campaign, such as during the Democratic National
Convention or in the wake of her sole debate with Trump, which she was
widely perceived to have won.
Now, Trump has the lead in every one of the seven battleground states —
even if sometimes by the tiniest margins — according to the polling
averages maintained by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ.
Harris retains a small lead in national polls, but the situation in the
battlegrounds has led Decision Desk HQ to give Trump a 52 percent
chance of prevailing overall. That’s a sharp change from Harris’s high
point, when she was given a 57 percent chance of victory.
Harris might yet win out in the end.
But if she falls short, there will be a lot of second-guessing of her
campaign and their moves in the final weeks.
|
|