Harris faces questions about campaign strategy in final stretch

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.