Sununu: Harris ‘honeymoon period’ energizes Democrats

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) warned Sunday that rising enthusiasm for Vice President Harris among Democrats should worry the Trump campaign, urging the former president to focus on policy over personal attacks.

Sununu, a moderate who previously backed Nikki Haley’s primary campaign against former President Trump, told ABC News’s Martha Raddatz on “This Week” that the rise of Harris changes the race.

“This is the honeymoon period,” Sununu said of the race. “The media is fawning. Everyone’s excited. It’s a whole new race. That’s all very true. And that’s going to last for about 30 days.”

The governor predicted that the race would really come into focus just after Labor Day, after the “honeymoon” is over.

“It’s going to come back to issues,” he said. “The border issue, the inflation issue, these are very real issues. It isn’t going to be about, ‘Well, we need to vote for Vice President Harris because she’s a woman.’”

When the race normalizes, he predicted, polling will likely return to its predebate average, with a small lead for former President Trump.

Sununu also added the Trump campaign should stick to the issues and “stay away from the insults” when discussing Harris. 

He said Trump missed an opportunity to do that in recent campaign events, but “hopefully they can get back on track. I think he was on track for a couple months there. I think that the change in the campaign has kind of fired him up to go against her, personally.”

But the governor also acknowledged that “nobody can get Donald Trump to do anything. But hopefully the numbers, the polls, will get Donald Trump to realize what was working and what didn’t.”

Democrats have quickly coalesced around Harris, with her campaign already gathering enough committed delegates to effectively lock up the party’s nomination. No other candidate has challenged Harris for the nomination, and her campaign has broken numerous fundraising records as it attempts to make up for a late start.

“The momentum and energy for Vice President Harris is real — and so are the fundamentals of this race: this election will be very close and decided by a small number of voters in just a few states,” Harris spokesperson Michael Tyler wrote in a memo reported by The Associated Press.