WASHINGTON — Democrats are notoriously quick to worry and slow to appease.
President Joe Biden spent months trying to assuage the rising panic within his party until it eventually consumed him, and he dropped his re-election bid. The anxiety abated for a bit when Vice President Kamala Harris replaced him on the ticket and her poll numbers spiked.
With Harris’ numbers stagnant now for weeks, many Democrats are once again fretting that the election is slipping away and that Donald Trump may yet regain power.
Harris appears to be OK with the collective jitters, recognizing that if Democrats fear they might lose, they’re more apt to show up at the polls and help her win. She likes to tell her supporters she’s running as if she’s behind.
But she faces a new round of internal criticism as party activists complain that she isn’t doing enough rallies after having objected for weeks that she wasn’t doing enough interviews.
Trump is happy to suggest he’s ahead — proclaiming he can’t lose unless Democrats cheat.
If Harris’ motivations are strategic, Trump’s are personal.
For Trump, the notion that he’s losing at anything is an affront to the image he has cultivated over decades. Success, or at least the appearance of it, is seared into his self-identity. He publicizes his victories in golf tournaments at his club in West Palm Beach, Florida, and celebrates his TV ratings, and in the political sphere, he still insists without evidence that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election.
Voters may appreciate an underdog, but for Trump to portray himself as such would posit that he’s losing to an opponent he has described as mentally impaired. That’s not something he can easily abide.
In reality, no one is winning or losing less than three weeks before the election. Polling shows that neither Harris nor Trump has built a lead outside the margin of error. Harris erased Biden’s deficit in the polls after she became a candidate in July, and, since then, the contest has settled into a dead heat.
“She’s trying to motivate her voters because she’s not performing at the levels that Hillary Clinton performed in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020 among key Democrat groups,” said John McLaughlin, a Trump pollster.
Claims that Harris is an underdog amount to “a liberal plot to get us overconfident on the Trump side,” he added. Previous Democratic campaigns “tried four and eight years ago to convince us we couldn’t win, and we won one and just missed on the other one.”
Useful as it may be for Harris to downplay expectations of victory, Democratic strategists warn that they see flaws in her campaign strategy. Some argue that she needs to step up the pace of her rallies while showing the spontaneity that voters like to see.
Harris has been sitting for vastly more interviews with the news and entertainment media over the past two weeks — amid misgivings inside the party that her campaign was too insular. On Wednesday, she ventured onto unfriendly turf, taking part in a combative interview with Fox News.
She has also engaged in smaller, more intimate events. On Sunday, she spoke at a church in Greenville, North Carolina. And on Tuesday she stopped at two businesses in Detroit to meet voters, the same day she gave an interview to the popular radio talk show host Charlamagne Tha God.
Even so, there’s a formulaic quality to her appearances that she needs to overcome, a Democratic member of Congress said.
“They need to unwrap her,” the lawmaker said. “She needs to show her emotion and show her passion. Donald Trump is crazy, but he’s real. She’s got to show people she’s real, and people need to believe she’s fighting for this job.”
Harris has held two rallies since Sunday — one in Greenville, North Carolina, the other in Erie, Pennsylvania — with many more to come. On Thursday, she is scheduled to hold three campaign events in Wisconsin, part of the trio of “blue wall” states that Democrats believe is the surest path to victory.
The next day, she is expected to hold three more campaign events in Michigan, another plank in the blue wall. After one more event in Michigan on Saturday, she is due to fly to Georgia for a rally in a battleground state that Biden narrowly won in 2020 and Democrats would love to hold.
In the internet era, candidates have any number of ways to reach undecided voters. With $1 billion raised, Harris has ample resources to find them; her campaign, for example, even sank some money into the gaming site IGN in a bid to reach an elusive band of voters who aren’t tuned in to political news.
“You’ve got a bunch of different voters who receive information in a bunch of different types of ways that you’ve got to reach,” David Plouffe, a former senior Barack Obama campaign official who is now advising the Harris campaign, said on a podcast recently. “And you want to be in their communities, you want to be in their social media feeds.
“Kamala Harris and [vice presidential nominee] Tim Walz are going to go everywhere there’s an audience basically of people we think are going to be decisive in this election,” the lawmaker added.
Rallies are old-school, but they tend to get news coverage, and they’re organizing vehicles for campaigns. At the Harris rally in Greenville, Democratic operatives with clipboards in hand strode up and down the line of people waiting to enter, asking for volunteers to knock on doors and make phone calls to targeted voters.
A Democratic strategist was alarmed that Harris hadn’t done more rallies over the past weekend.
“It’s nothing less than a f—— head-scratcher,” the strategist said. “You should be doing four or five events in Pennsylvania in a day. People are sitting there saying: ‘All hands on deck. I’m willing to work as hard as she can.’ But maybe she should start working as hard as she can.”
A look at Obama’s schedule at a similar period during his winning presidential bid in 2008 shows a slew of well-attended rallies.
On Oct. 9, 2008 — 27 days before the election — Obama held three rallies in Ohio, which he won. The next day, he held two more rallies in Ohio. And on Oct. 11, 25 days before the election, he took part in four rallies in Pennsylvania, which he also captured.
By contrast, Hillary Clinton kept a light public schedule at the same point in the calendar in 2016, sitting on a comfortable lead in the polls.
On Oct. 13, 2016 — 27 days before the election — Clinton arrived on set for Ellen DeGeneres’ TV show. The next day, she attended a fundraising event in Seattle. A few days later, she showed up at a Broadway theater for a fundraiser with “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and a host of other A-list celebrities.
She went on to lose in an upset.
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