ANALYSIS — Democrats are back in the ballgame with Vice President Kamala Harris atop their ticket as she kicks her unexpected campaign into high gear this week.
Although Harris campaign officials, as well as Democratic lawmakers and strategists, are trumpeting a revival of enthusiasm on their side since 81-year-old President Joe Biden stepped aside, victory in November is far from a sure thing.
To be sure, Harris taking over as the party’s expected nominee has basically reset the electoral map. There is no more serious talk that former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, might turn states like Virginia and Minnesota red.
Still, the former California state attorney general hasn’t surged past Trump in polls conducted in recent weeks. His lead in several key swing states, however, has turned the presidential contest into a dead heat with 91 days until Election Day.
Team Harris is hoping for another polling bounce early this week, when she is set to announce her running mate before the duo headline a rally Tuesday evening in Philadelphia. From Pennsylvania, the top Democrats are slated to hit six swing states this week.
Here are three things to watch as Harris revs up her campaign.
‘Entirely different race’
Recent polls show Democratic lawmakers and strategists who called for Biden to stand down were on to something. The president was losing ground to Trump both in key battleground states and nationally, and they felt the 59-year-old Harris would give them a chance that just wasn’t there amid a series of poor moments for Biden that began during two European trips and continued during and beyond a June 27 debate with Trump.
A CBS News poll released Sunday, for instance, put Harris within striking distance of Trump or tied in a handful of swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The same survey had her leading in Nevada. Trump’s biggest advantage in that poll was 3 percentage points, in Georgia and North Carolina, within the poll’s 4-point margin of error.
A University of Massachusetts poll released Monday recorded a 7-point swing since Biden dropped out, giving Harris a 46 percent to 43 percent lead nationally over the twice-impeached and once-convicted Trump. A January version of the same poll had put Trump ahead of Biden, 43 percent to 39 percent.
Jesse Rhodes, a political science professor at UMass Amherst and co-director of the poll, called the Harris-Trump clash an “entirely different race than it was a month ago.” Rhodes attributed the change to “big shifts among young voters, African Americans and Latinx Americans toward Harris,” adding in a statement that “moderates also appear to have shifted dramatically to Harris.”
This week’s battleground barnstorming will be aimed at independent voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.
William Galston, a former Clinton White House aide now with the Brookings Institution, said there are reasons to expect Harris to target male and working-class voters: She is running behind Biden’s 2020 performance among those groups at the ballot box. “She has her work cut out for her,” according to Galston. “She is doing no better among white college-educated voters and Hispanics than Biden did four years ago, and astonishingly, she is doing much worse among African Americans.”
‘VP effect’
Such polls led the prognosticators at SportsHandle.com to update their assessment of the altered race.
The outfit now gives Trump a 57.32 percent chance of winning, with Harris having a 48.97 percent chance of victory. Biden’s best odds were 47.06 percent.
“As the weeks tick by towards the election, the odds keep on swinging in Harris’s favor. [While] there is still just over an 8-point gap, Trump’s odds continue to slide,” SportsHandle said in an analysis of its latest prediction.
Harris and her campaign team are banking that her running mate announcement and swing state tour will keep that polling swing going. Some analysts have said they see her best bet as selecting a white man as her No. 2, likely a young swing-state governor such as 51-year-old Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania or 46-year-old Andy Beshear of Kentucky. But a pair of 60-year-olds — Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former House member, and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly — reportedly also interviewed with Harris over the weekend.
The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, in an Aug. 1 analysis, noted that recent running mate picks didn’t even give a ticket that person’s home state.
“There are many complications in trying to analyze the ‘VP effect.’ But either a Shapiro or Kelly pick would provide an interesting test case in a state that is likely to be hotly contested,” the center’s analysts wrote. “Ratings-wise, we are unsure whether a running mate pick will prompt us to make a rating change in the VP’s home state. Shapiro in Pennsylvania may be the most enticing in that regard, as we did have Pennsylvania in ‘Leans Democratic’ earlier this cycle and Shapiro is a popular governor.”
GOP bickering
The Trump campaign wants to keep the focus on Harris and her record, especially their efforts to paint her as Biden’s “border czar,” a term that Biden’s team has dismissed. They contend it distorts Harris’ actual role, saying the president asked her to examine the “root causes” of illegal migration from Central and South America.
“I think, whoever she chooses, the problem is going to be Kamala Harris’ record and Kamala Harris’ policies,” Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s pick as his own running mate, told Fox Business on Sunday.
“The American people are suffering because Kamala Harris keeps on making bad decisions. I don’t really care who she chooses as a running mate,” said Vance, who is still slated to debate the eventual pick.
“It’s not going to be good for the country. And we’re ready, meaning President Trump and I are ready to take the case to the American people that Donald Trump delivered peace, he delivered prosperity,” he added. “Kamala Harris has delivered an open border and skyrocketing inflation. It’s really just not a hard argument to make, but we’re going to make it as aggressively and persuasively as we can to the American people for about the next 95 or so days.”
Despite Vance’s statement, he and Trump have indeed struggled to make that case.
Trump has stumbled in recent days, questioning whether Harris, whose father is Jamaican and mother is Indian, is Black. That prompted pushback even from some Republicans. Vance has often been put on the defensive to explain past statements, leading to some calls — from Republicans who did not put their names behind them — for Trump to reconsider the choice.
The former president on Saturday, unprompted, opted to revive a feud with popular Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp — even criticizing the Peach State’s first lady in a social media post. As Democrats touted their sudden unity, Republicans were bickering among themselves.
“My focus is on winning this November and saving our country from Kamala Harris and the Democrats — not engaging in petty personal insults, attacking fellow Republicans, or dwelling on the past,” Kemp wrote on X on Saturday, adding this message for Trump: “You should do the same, Mr. President, and leave my family out of it.”
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