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Here's how top Harris advisers plan to win this thing
David Plouffe was Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and is now a senior adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. He and other Harris advisers talked to CNN about the campaign’s closing strategy. There is a lot there to digest—both in what he says and when reading between the lines. “Historically, it would be unusual to have seven states come down to a point or less,” David told CNN. “But I think at this point, you have to assume that’s a distinct possibility.” As we all know, the polling shows a tight race. Seven battleground states will determine the next president—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. As Plouffe says, the polling margins in all those states are within 1 or 2 percentage points. So how does the Harris campaign see it working out? Turnout will be important CNN: Plouffe and other Harris advisers do not believe [Donald] 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. In states with dead-heat polling, get-out-the-vote operations will make the difference, and we may very well have that in some or all of these battleground states. But GOTV wouldn’t, say, deliver Ohio or Florida to the Dems. This isn’t big news. Harris 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,” CNN notes. Trump has universal name recognition, and people’s impressions of him are largely baked in. Harris is the fresher face, and her rapid rise in the polls since Biden ended his bid point to that. Indeed, the latest poll from the Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that 51% of registered voters have a favorable view of Harris, while 46% have an unfavorable view. Compare that to Trump, whose numbers are 40% favorable and 58% unfavorable. That means that Trump is polling higher than his favorables, garnering support of people who don’t like him. That’s a prime pickup opportunity for Harris, and it’s the reason you see her campaigning with Republicans like former Rep. Liz Cheney. (Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, has a dismal favorability rating of 33-48.) surrogates and celebrity supporters CNN: 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. Rapper Eminem is introducing former President Barack Obama at a Detroit rally on Tuesday night. Rock icon Bruce Springsteen is on tap later this week. And then there are the influencers you and I will never recognize who are promoting Harris on TikTok and other social media. “We’re not throwing spaghetti against the wall. We have literally studied who these voters listen to,” a campaign official told CNN. More CNN: Some will be new announcements: After months of carefully poll-testing well-known nonpoliticians, including entertainers and athletes, the campaign will roll out even more endorsements, interviews and appearances meant to break through to tuned-out voters. Expect more events like the vice president’s interview with Charlamagne tha God and Julia Roberts’ trip to Georgia, both ideas that came right out of the campaign’s research. Communicating beyond TV ads Hundreds of millions are still being spent on saturating broadcast TV with ads, but the campaign seems to see that as mostly irrelevant at this point. CNN: 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. Presumably, that data feeds into both message microtargeting and the robust GOTV operations mentioned above. But the campaign is planning for media-splashy events, like a rally in Houston, Texas, highlighting abortion rights. Texas, home to one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bans, is a great foil for that message, and a massive crowd will only amplify it nationally. (Trump is attempting a similar dynamic with his Madison Square Garden rally in New York City, minus the focused message.) White men White men will overwhelmingly vote Republican this November, but the Harris campaign is working hard to eat into Trump’s margins. This serves two purposes: to cut into Trump’s core base of support, and to possibly flip some women voters along the way. After all, while unmarried women voted for Biden 63-36 in 2020, married women voted for Trump 51-47, not far off married men, at 55-45 Trump. Marital peer pressure is real. The campaign’s weapon of choice for this? Harris running mate Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota. Here’s CNN again: [T]he Minnesota governor [is] expected to be deployed—in rural areas and among men, especially—for the kind of Trump bashing that the campaign finds harder to get across in ads. “Some of these folks say, ‘Eh, we got through one Trump term.’ They rewrite the history of it. They don’t recall that all of our neighbors were dying of Covid because of his idiocy of neglecting science, and telling us to inject bleach didn’t do much good,” Walz said Saturday at a rally in Papillion, Nebraska, previewing the kind of lines he’ll be dropping over the next two weeks. “They tell us we could survive another four years, and I’m an optimist. … But I truly don’t know if the institutions will hold if we get another four years of Donald Trump.” Walz then pointed to erstwhile Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn’s recent response when asked if he would preside over military tribunals if his former boss returns to the White House. “The answer to that is: ‘Are you out of your goddamn mind?’ Mike Flynn’s answer was: ‘We have to win first,’” Walz said. “I’ll be damned if I’ll give the flag to a fascist like these guys, and I’ll be damned if I’ll give them family issues because we know where the family values sat. We’re not going to give them freedom, that’s for damn sure, because we know what freedom looks like. And just for good measures I’m not giving them football—the posers.” The campaign will look to make that argument reverberate, with ads during games, online appeals and digital billboards along Nebraska highways that feature a man saying he’s a two-time Trump voter and a hunter but going with Harris this time. Not counting on a ‘silent majority.’ CNN: Despite lots of chatter that this year may see a flip in the 2016 and 2020 polling trends that underestimated support for Trump, top Harris aides are not counting on their own “silent majority” of women and Republicans in deep-red areas or families who aren’t saying how turned off or exhausted they are by the former president. There are a lot of anecdotes, even acknowledged by these campaign aides, of a shift among some Republicans, particularly women. But the campaign is treating those as nice-to-haves, not a core component of a winning strategy. So when the campaign talks about those 1-point battleground states, they’re assuming zero Republican defections and silent voters. That’s actually a relief, and it does open up the dream scenario: a clear and convincing Harris victory that negates any Republican post-election legal shenanigans. “The independents that I encountered are weighing voting for Harris, which is a good sign to me,” Nancy Quarles, who chairs the Oakland County Democratic Party in Michigan, told CNN last week ahead of an appearance by the vice president in the Detroit suburbs. While a few years ago, those people would have been Republican voters, “there’s a big opening, and they’re paying attention and being willing to listen to the discussions,” Quarles said. Ultimately, the story paints a picture of a campaign that is locked in, focused, executing on a plan months in the making and based on rich data. They are playing for the narrow victory while acknowledging the possibility of more. “I’m confident that we’re being conservative in how we view this race,” Plouffe told CNN, “so that we are more likely to be surprised on the upside by things.” We need your help if we’re going to defeat Trump, Vance, Project 2025, and Republicans up and down the ballot. Click here to volunteer to write letters so we can increase voter turnout.
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