With less than a week before Americans head to the polls on Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is feeling the wind at their backs after a series of unforced errors by Donald Trump may have helped push undecided voters her way.
According to senior Harris campaign officials, undecided voters are casting their ballots for the vice president by a significant margin and have been driven by Trump’s extreme rhetoric and offensive remarks made by his surrogates, including at his Madison Square Garden rally last weekend.
One official told reporters on Friday that voters in a focus group held in a swing state this week were turned off by the hateful remarks directed at Puerto Rico by a pro-Trump comedian during the rally.
The comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, compared the US territory — with residents who are American citizens who can vote if they reside in the United States — to a “floating island of garbage.”
The official said those remarks, plus “dark, divisive language” from Trump, appear to have made a difference in the last few days.
“We don’t always see... them kind of finalize their point of view or finalize their opinion. But we definitely saw and are seeing in these groups that was sort of like the last straw for these folks,” the official said. “They clearly did not like what they were seeing from Donald Trump... and they like what they were seeing from the vice president.”
The senior campaign official also said the data they have shows swing voters coming around to Harris as the election approaches.
“Our internal data is telling us and showing us that we are winning battleground voters who have made up their minds in the last week, and we’re winning them by double digit margin,” they said.
“So we have believed all along that there were still undecided voters here, and that the close of this race was really, really important, and we are seeing that to be the case as we are closing out in the last week. Everyone that is breaking, is breaking in heavy margin to us, and ... we are still seeing that people are undecided, but those folks are more open to supporting us than Trump.”
As Election Day approaches, the Harris campaign is also leaning on a ground game operation that dates back to the operation built up for President Joe Biden when he was assumed to be the Democratic Party’s choice for this year’s election.
In Pennsylvania — a key swing state that Harris must win to have a path to the 270 electoral votes she needs to defeat Trump — Harris’s campaign is understood to be on a path to have knocked on at least five million doors and reached one million voters for face-to-face conversations during this election season.
A campaign official also said volunteers have made one hundred million calls to battleground state voters and stressed that those engagement efforts would continue through Election Day.
“We are seeing undecided and battleground state voters care deeply about they are seeing the choice and they are seeing the close, and we are getting more votes as we close this out, and we have the organization to ensure we capitalize on every single person that we can in these battleground states and feel very good about the momentum the organization and the strength of our close as we head into this final weekend,” the official said.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has been ratcheting up efforts to lay the groundwork for another attempt to overturn a potential loss to the vice president.
Trump-aligned groups such as longtime aide Stephen Miller's America First Legal and various Republican Party organs — as well as the ex-president’s campaign — have filed lawsuits in courts across the US alleging various degrees of irregularities or violations of election law, with the apparent aim of creating an aura of scandal around the 2024 presidential race.
Another senior Harris campaign official familiar with the Democratic campaign's own legal efforts told reporters that the vice president and her brain trust “fully expect” Trump to falsely claim victory on election night, long before all the votes are counted.
“This should be no surprise, because he lies all the time, and he wants to sow doubt about a loss that he anticipates is coming,” said the official, who stressed that the Harris campaign is confident that Trump's legal gambits will be as unsuccessful as his prior effort to overturn his 2020 election loss.
“He did this before, it failed. If he does it again, it will fail,” the official said.
“Meanwhile, we are focused on making sure that all of our voters have the information to get out and vote, and that they feel confident doing it safely and securely, and that they know that we're going to protect that vote and that we are going to ensure that it counts no matter what Trump and his campaign are doing.”
