A Jittery Harris Campaign Makes Big Plans To Clinch A Narrow Win
With two weeks to go until Election Day, Kamala Harris’ top advisers are staring down numbers that show a wide majority of Americans saying the country is on the wrong track.
They’re also confident that the next two weeks will include Donald Trump dropping more references to the “enemy within” or January 6 as a “day of love” and going off on rambling tangents like his lewd remarks about golf legend Arnold Palmer at a Pennsylvania rally last week. And they expect they’ll be able to trigger him into making more outlandish claims.
Getting Americans to focus on that over the next two weeks, to see a second Trump term as taking the country further off track and to view Harris as an acceptable agent of change is likely to decide the presidency, a dozen top aides and outside allies told CNN.
As Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told top donors in Philadelphia during a retreat last week, they may not believe that the race could still be tied, but in the battleground states where the presidency will be won, it is.
“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.
More targeted messaging
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.
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Source: CNN
