https://washingtonsun.com/harris-2024 Harris 2024 en-US Thu, 05 Feb 2026 15:38:51 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/democrats/kamala-harris-campaign-account-rebrand Raymond Fernández The former vice president is rebranding her 2024 social accounts as a "progressive content hub." Thu, 05 Feb 2026 15:38:51 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/democrats/kamala-harris-campaign-account-rebrand Former Vice President Kamala Harris announced on Thursday she’ll rebrand the social media accounts associated with her presidential campaign — which have massive followings — into a broader organizing platform called “Headquarters.”

It’s billed as a “new Gen-Z led progressive content hub.” Politico reported that former campaign staff for Harris’ presidential campaign would advise on the platforms, along with the progressive organizing group People For the American Way. The videos also mark Harris’ most visible reemergence on the national stage since touring the country to promote her book.

“Kamala HQ is turning into Headquarters,” Harris said in a video posted to the account on Thursday. “It’s where you can go online to get basically the latest of what’s going on and also to meet and revisit with some of our great, courageous leaders.”

The move comes after what was previously known as Kamala HQ teased an announcement in an X post late Wednesday.

People For the American Way did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Harris, who Politico reported will be Headquarters’ “chair emerita,” faced challenges connecting with younger, more diverse and less politically engaged voters in her 2024 presidential campaign. Exit polls showed Harris received 54% of the votes from people under 30, a decline compared to recent winning Democratic candidates, who received at least 60% of the youth vote.

The account reboot suggests an effort to reassert her presence online, an area where Democrats have struggled to keep pace with Republicans. Only a handful of party figures, like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, have built a strong following, including by trolling the president and his administration online.

Last year, when Harris announced she would not run for governor of California, she signaled that “for now” she would not seek elected office, but left the door open to continued involvement in national politics. NOTUS previously reported that she’s weighed different paths for her political future and how they may affect the possibility of her running for president again in 2028.

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This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and NewsWell, home of Times of San Diego and Stocktonia.]]> https://washingtonsun.com/harris-2024/kamala-harris-end-campaign Jasmine Wright Campaign leadership installed when Joe Biden was running is facing fierce internal criticism. “I’m amazed that we even got close,” said one official close to the team. Sat, 09 Nov 2024 23:03:49 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/harris-2024/kamala-harris-end-campaign In early October, Kamala Harris was supposed to film fundraising videos for her campaign, which in a month’s time would be defunct and in debt.

Going over the script ahead of time, Harris read, “We missed our fundraising deadline.” Then she stopped and told aides, “We can’t lie to people” by saying they missed their fundraising goals, according to four people with knowledge of the conversation.

One junior level aide later had to tell Harris’ campaign chief of staff, Sheila Nix, the truth: The campaign had missed its fundraising goals.

There had been rumblings about the financial situation since September, said one Democrat. Another said the campaign had missed its fundraising goal in September, after money slowed in August and the boon from the convention wasn’t as high as the campaign expected. Now, the second Democrat said, Harris has begun to ask questions about where the money went.

Some blamed the major hole on TV reservations and consultant contracts that were agreed to while President Joe Biden was still on the ticket and in charge of this behemoth organization that the Harris campaign then fulfilled. Others blamed a fear within the campaign that missed deadlines would go public, so it began spending more on fundraising appeals with a negative return on their investments.

Others say it was a by-product of the disorganization of a campaign that was unable to register voters’ anger, find a persuasive message to answer it or effectively harness the momentum Harris generated until the very end.

“I’m amazed that we even got close,” said one Democratic official close to the campaign. “The campaign has been broken since the beginning.”

Nearly all of the more than a dozen campaign aides, Democratic operatives, strategists and White House officials NOTUS spoke with for this story rested the brunt of the blame on a political climate that punished the Biden administration and all those attached to it. Few, if any, Democrats or campaigns could have overcome that fundamental issue, they said.

They also blamed Biden for staying in the race so long, after he initially billed himself as a transitional candidate, and then, once he decided he would campaign for reelection, for failing to articulate a case against Trump. And they blamed him for building a campaign with inexperienced aides who many who spoke to NOTUS believe weren’t equipped for the Herculean task of getting an unpopular incumbent reelected.

“We dug out of a deep hole, but not enough,” David Plouffe, a senior adviser for Harris, wrote on X. Soon after posting the message, he deleted his account.

But many also directed blame at campaign leaders like Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’ campaign chair, and her deputy, Rob Flaherty. The Democrats who spoke to NOTUS say the campaign leadership failed the vice president by creating a campaign that was over-reliant on analytics. It was so insular and micromanaged, they say, that it required O’Malley Dillon to make all the decisions, with leadership resistant to advice or change from Harris aides. And they ultimately fault the leadership for being financially irresponsible.

Even the best, smoothest campaign operation isn’t enough on its own to win an election. But in tight races, with close margins in the right states, they can make a difference.

“If you believe that campaigns matter — and if you look at Tammy Baldwin, Jacky Rosen, Ruben Gallego and even Bob Casey in many ways — if you believe that campaigns matter and that’s why the results are a little different, then you have to say that she lost because of her campaign,” said an operative close to the campaign.

“The other way to do it is, maybe campaigns don’t matter at all,” they said. “Then why are we even campaigning at all on anything?”

Multiple sources who spoke with NOTUS lamented how difficult it was to hire staff at the inception of Biden’s reelection campaign. Few wanted to work for Biden and even fewer wanted to move to Wilmington, where the campaign was headquartered. One campaign aide said a few of those who were hired for senior roles were, in reality, years too junior for their responsibilities. Even when Biden was still on the ticket, aides who had run national campaigns noticed that the infrastructure was severely lacking. And when the candidate switch occurred, seasoned people who wanted to come on found it difficult to navigate the existing infrastructure. They believed that it was unlikely that Harris understood the teetering giant she inherited. And even if she did, it would have been too costly timewise to rebuild in 100 days.

The Biden campaign was also not ready for the energy and support that rushed in from Democrats when Harris first took over. One operative outside the campaign told NOTUS that during the first hours after Harris got into the race, thousands of donors who contributed to ActBlue were prompted to tip the service after they donated. When asked by Harris aides if a volunteer registration form could replace it to capture the newly interested Democrats, the campaign didn’t have such a form available. (The campaign said the link was added to the site several hours later and able to capture 170,000 volunteers that day.)

“There were things that could not be operationalized because the infrastructure was so limited,” said a second outside ally. Another said it was impossible to scale up at the pace required to keep up with the surge of enthusiastic Democrats wanting to volunteer and give money to Harris, because of the complicated way the campaign was initially stood up by Biden.

In the end, more than 1.3 million donors who signed up to donate to Harris unsubscribed from the messaging program run by Flaherty by Election Day, the first outside operative said. Half of those people lived in battleground states, and were therefore cut off not just from donating money but important information, like how to volunteer.

The campaign said this was a “normal churn” of voters in a list of more than 25 million.

Because of its inability to get a mass amount of people to donate multiple times, the campaign continued to miss and revise its fundraising goals, two operatives told NOTUS. At one point, the campaign even temporarily cut its mail program. (Meanwhile, Black men in Georgia were receiving more than 10 pieces of mail from Trump’s team, per the operative close to the Harris campaign.)

Jen O’Malley Dillon, Dana Remus AP-22169438804951 (5718x3812, AR: 1.50)
When Biden dropped out and endorsed the vice president, multiple people told NOTUS that he asked Harris to “take care of his people.” O’Malley Dillon requested a meeting with Harris and asked to remain on as campaign chair. Fearing critical stories about staffing similar to those that plagued Harris’ first campaign and first years as vice president, Harris relented.

“Kamala did not want to shake things up. She thought that what she could do is install certain people into leadership roles to make sure that she got the campaign that she wanted,” said the operative close to the campaign.

Others say that because of the structure of the complicated campaign, there was no way to turn O’Malley Dillon out. Her critics cite her leadership and the implosion of Beto O’Rourke’s 2020 Democratic primary campaign — which raised $6.1 million on its first day but ended months later due to major financial strain — as a precursor to this campaign.

O’Malley Dillon’s critics say she was insular and wanted to own all the decision-making, creating a bottleneck. In her role, she had centralized a major part of the Democratic Party’s power. She was effectively the head of the White House political arm; was in control of decision making at the DNC, despite Jaime Harrison serving as its official leader, according to two sources familiar; and chaired the campaign’s political operation.

When it was clear Harris’ brother-in-law, Tony West, would be a dominating force on the campaign, O’Malley Dillon was initially welcoming, two people with an understanding of the dynamics said, but then she tried to box him out by picking his chief of staff for him and pushing West to travel the country as a surrogate. (A source familiar said they brought in their own “chief,” who they had a long-standing relationship with, after being provided a senior adviser.)

Before the election, O’Malley Dillon told multiple people that she would not seek another role in government even if Harris won, according to two sources.

Flaherty, who is a major O’Malley Dillon ally, disparaged Harris and her team, three people familiar with his behavior said (though no one wanted to specify what he said). Another campaign aide said the digital team lacked direction. Defending Flaherty, one campaign official said he came into the campaign on “good terms” with Harris aides and another said the digital team lacking direction was “a mischaracterization.”

“We had a pretty clear directive of what needs to get done,” said the aide. “And we did what we could within the context of the confines that we were operating in.”

The morning after the election, department heads met with their teams to prepare them for the reality that they had lost. To open the meeting, Flaherty said, “There were strong headwinds against us and it would have been even worse if it wasn’t for us.” Some perceived the remark as callous and detached from the gravity of the loss.

The culture of the campaign was also a problem, said four Democrats. After melding the Biden loyalists with Harris’ longtime aides and new hires, the group wanted to move on from July’s drama. But campaign aides and outsiders complained to NOTUS for months that there was a lack of a defined leadership structure. Black aides felt routinely mistreated and demoralized, multiple people told NOTUS. Some had even wanted to make formal complaints and refrained for fear of retaliation.

Senior allies to Harris pushed the campaign and the DNC to have a Palestinian speaker onstage at the August convention, trying to further the goodwill Harris had earned from the Arab and Muslim communities furious over Gaza, but they were denied. One person said it was at the behest of the national security team.

The second campaign staffer said aides had “gallows humor,” and some had a nine-to-five work mentality.
24312683259681 (4056x2704, AR: 1.50)Harris hired an onslaught of high-profile operatives from former President Barack Obama’s successful 2008 and 2012 campaigns, hoping they could harness the late summer excitement and turn it into a winning outcome. But many saw the additions of Plouffe and others as just back up for O’Malley Dillon, as they had all come from Obamaworld.

“There was no one who had a different viewpoint. And anybody who had a different viewpoint was always sidelined,” said the operative close to the campaign. In the days since the blowout election, Democrats have criticized Plouffe’s focus on white people in the suburbs and moderates, calling the strategies like small-intimate town halls with former Rep. Liz Cheney, a failure, since Harris did not make significant gains with Republicans or people in the suburbs (though she did increase her numbers with college-educated white women).

“David Plouffe wanted to run a 2008 campaign for a 2024 election,” the operative said. “He wanted to win the middle. He wanted to win white moderates. He wanted to have people vote for Kamala despite what their tendencies would be. [He] wanted to treat Kamala Harris as Barack Obama, and she’s not Barack Obama.”

Harris’ campaign went into election night confident that it had outworked its opponent. It had massive numbers to point to, including 90,000 volunteers over the weekend knocking on 3 million doors.

But four sources who NOTUS spoke with said getting the volunteer program to that capacity was difficult. (Trump’s campaign outsourced much of its door-knocking operation which drew its own headlines. Still, that campaign was successful.)

Sources who spoke with NOTUS say volunteers did not have proper talking points or literature until late into the campaign. More than 1.5 million yard signs weren’t printed until late October. There weren’t basic reporting structures for organizers and volunteers in states until the end. It was not until around five weeks before the election that any of the states hit their voter contact goals, one person familiar with operations told NOTUS. Some volunteers had to organize themselves. And scripts were asinine, with some having to be approved by O’Malley Dillon and asking the voter, “Do you know there’s a presidential election this year?”

An all-staff call on Thursday infuriated dejected staffers, as O’Malley Dillon praised the data team and described the outcome as close, when Harris in reality lost every battleground state. She said that she, too, needed to find a new job, to the dismay of already disgruntled employees. And she defended their strategy with the fact that, because Harris lost more in left-leaning states like New York and New Jersey than in battleground states, it showed that their efforts worked in places where they were focused.

“The fact that she lost more states outside of battleground states is an indictment of every other part of the campaign,” one Democrat who heard her remarks told NOTUS, noting the lack of branding, communication and ability to separate Harris from Biden.

“Until the end they were projecting confidence,” said the operative close to the campaign. “But the data was wrong.”

It’s unclear whether the data and analytics teams were working with incorrect data or if it was misinterpreted. For instance, leadership had privately told other Democrats that Detroit would have the highest turnout based on early voting data. But according to The Detroit News, it fell in expected voter participation.

On a staff call the Friday before the election that was attended by senior leadership, campaign leaders projected confidence they would win based on the early voting models. “When you looked at the results on Tuesday, you quickly found out that they were completely wrong. But once again, the analytics failed, and somehow we still don’t learn from it,” said the operative.

The campaign maintains that leadership always conveyed that the race was within the margin of error.

The data team also worked in an insular fashion, aides complained. Multiple departments whose work would have benefited from it didn’t always have access to the polling information. And when concerns were raised about a negative Trump ad that slammed Harris for her position on taxpayer funds to pay for surgeries for incarcerated transgender people, deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks told people that based on the campaign’s research, “It wasn’t having much effect.”

The campaign clarified that it broadly did not see voters moving over the anti-trans attacks, and Fulks, who runs paid media, said they did not need to go up with an ad to defend it.

It ended up being one of the Trump campaign’s most successful ads to castigate Harris as a “dangerous liberal.”

Harris is not without her own blame, people say. She refused to create distance from Biden, despite voters showing how unhappy they were with the status quo. She failed to provide a clear rationale for why she wanted to be president. But aides hope that, over time, Harris won’t bear the brunt of the blame for this devastating loss.

“She wasn’t handed much of a campaign infrastructure,” one campaign aide. “And it was very difficult for that infrastructure to actually reflect her.”

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Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS.]]> https://washingtonsun.com/harris-2024/rural-leaders-say-the-harris-campaign-was-too-slow-to-reach-their-crucial-voters Katherine Swartz, Ben T.N. Mause Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign emphasized its efforts to reach rural voters. For organizers on the ground, “it just wasn’t enough.” Thu, 07 Nov 2024 01:35:16 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/harris-2024/rural-leaders-say-the-harris-campaign-was-too-slow-to-reach-their-crucial-voters BUCKS COUNTY, Penn. — From the start of this election, Democrats touted their extensive get-out-the-vote and campaign office operation in rural, conservative areas of the seven battleground states. Vice President Kamala Harris, Gov. Tim Walz and campaign surrogates publicly expressed confidence in the campaign’s ability to “lose by less” and to outpace President Joe Biden’s 2020 run in those areas.

But state and national rural organizers who spoke to NOTUS in the wake of Harris’ loss said the campaign often ignored their concerns about the rural strategy. Above all, they said, the campaign and the Democratic National Committee’s rural outreach was too little, too late.

For all the camo hats and pheasant hunting, the barnstorms and roadside shop visits and offices opened where they had never been before, Harris did worse than Biden across the board in rural areas, and Donald Trump performed better in those same areas than he ever had before.

Across the “blue wall” and into other presidential battleground states, campaign staffers and some of their closest allies identified several root causes. Their complaints included an outreach operation that started too late in the cycle and that didn’t prominently include Harris herself.

“We didn’t have time, we didn’t have the ground game we needed. This needed to start the year before,” said Kylie Oversen, a member of the national Rural 4 Harris-Walz organizing team.

The campaign did not hire its rural vote director, Matt Hildreth, or release its two-page plan for rural America until September. Despite the historically short timeline for the Harris campaign, the Biden campaign hadn’t hired rural staff or put out an agenda prior to Biden dropping out of the race.

The communication between the team, composed of 11 rural Democratic strategists, and Hildreth was “a little disjointed,” Oversen said.

“There was really only one person within the campaign solely dedicated to rural. He couldn’t lift all those things by himself,” she said. “We were in constant communication, but how that translated from him to the whole campaign is hard to say.”

The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Hildreth declined to comment. Pennsylvania Democratic activist Carmina Taylor, who organized alongside Hildreth in Pennsylvania in rural areas for Harris, reached out to NOTUS to say that Hildreth was stymied by the Harris campaign.

“Matt was never equipped for success,” Taylor told NOTUS. “He was the only person that was responsive to inquiries in rural spaces. But in terms of resources, he was stifled.”

Matt Barron, another member of Rural 4 Harris-Walz, said his team provided the campaign with a list of rural surrogates. Barron said it was never used.

Staffers in both the local coordinated offices and at the top level lacked rural background and disregarded the team’s advice, Barron said.

Barron communicated with the campaign about state fairs, stressing the importance of Harris making a visit. He provided the campaign with a list of county and state fairs in the battleground states.

“And [a staffer] replied to me back, ‘Oh, my God, this is amazing,’ in all caps. I read that as, this guy’s never set foot on a county fairgrounds and doesn’t even know the importance they hold in rural counties,” Barron said.

Ultimately, Harris never visited a fair, a rural health clinic or a farm while on the campaign trail.

“She had this two-pager, but she didn’t invest herself in selling it,” Barron said.

National and state rural organizers who spoke to NOTUS stressed that the Harris campaign was only part of the problem. The true difficulty, they say, is a yearslong de-emphasis on rural investments from the DNC and state parties. (The DNC did not respond to a request for comment.)

The initiatives the Harris campaign did pursue to reach rural voters didn’t have the same chorus of credible surrogates promoting them that Biden had in 2020, Barron said. The campaign rolled out a Hunters and Anglers for Harris-Walz committee without a single name or organization attached. That’s striking compared to the 2020 Sportsmen for Biden-Harris group, which had several dozen influential names in the hook and bullet community behind it.

In Georgia, the Harris campaign’s strategy to reach rural voters was less tried and failed and more never tried at all.

The campaign directed the vast majority of its resources to the state’s metro areas, trying to drive up voter turnout among educated white women. Its most visible effort to reach country folks was sending former President Bill Clinton to Albany in the final weeks of the campaign — which, at times, seemed to backfire.

Otherwise, state Democrats reverted to their pre-Stacey Abrams patterns of campaigning.

One strategist recalled that Abrams launched her campaign for governor in Albany rather than Atlanta, a choice intended to signal to the rest of the state that they were in the fold. The strategist, who has worked on rural campaigns, said the Harris campaign didn’t spend enough time with rural Black voters, instead focusing on the large metro areas of Atlanta and Savannah.

“Celebrity culture has overtaken large swaths of the Democratic Party,” the strategist said. “We get more excited about rallies with entertainers in the Atlanta metro and don’t understand, you know, rural Black folk don’t care about that.”

In Pennsylvania, Gillian Kratzer, chair of the Pennsylvania Democrats rural caucus, pointed to a lack of investment from the state party in the off years as the reason why rural Democrats underperformed. (The Pennsylvania Democratic Party did not respond to a request for comment.)

But Kratzer acknowledged that the campaign played a role in why Harris lost — she also said it only reached its momentum in the last weeks of the election.

“The ground game that we had over the last two weeks was, to some extent, the ground game that we needed to have from day one,” Kratzer said. The initial focus on setting up shop in new areas didn’t cut it, she said. “Offices are rooms in buildings. That’s not enough.”

Kratzer noted the record enthusiasm for Trump in Pennsylvania’s rural counties where he overperformed compared to 2016 and 2020. Her theory is that the problem for Democrats isn’t lack of enthusiasm, but lack of resources.

“I can’t even count how many Republicans came into our office and said that they can’t deal with another four years of Trump, or that they really felt like Tim Walz is somebody who gets them,” she said. “And it just wasn’t enough.”

James Heckman, who chairs Pennsylvania’s almost entirely rural Northwest Caucus, said Harris had the right policies to appeal to rural voters but said she consistently struggled to get that message across in his region.

“I believe in Kamala’s policies, and the things she wanted to do, but you don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle. And we Democrats have really got to take a look at our messaging because that is where we have screwed up,” Heckman said.

It’s a similar story in the other battlegrounds. Nash County in eastern North Carolina, for example, elected Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, went in Trump’s favor again this year. Sam Lozier, spokesperson for the North Carolina House Democratic Caucus, attributed to a wave of misinformation to rural voters that Democrats failed to overcome.

“A lot of people in these areas just didn’t trust anything that they were seeing about the national race in this cycle, and I don’t know how we earn that trust back,” Lozier told NOTUS. “I feel like it’s just going to get worse.”

And in Wisconsin, every rural county except Door shifted toward Trump.

“I was hoping for better. I think our ground game was good, and we felt momentum,” a Democratic organizer in rural Sauk County, Wisconsin, told NOTUS. “We’re all soul-searching. And rural voters sent a pretty clear message nationally, right? It’s going to take work to figure out what the next steps are.”

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Katherine Swartz and Ben T.N. Mause are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows. Nuha Dolby and Calen Razor contributed reporting.]]> https://washingtonsun.com/2024-election/kamala-harris-suburbs-election-results-trump Alex Roarty, Em Luetkemeyer, Helen Huiskes Democrats widely expected Kamala Harris to beat Joe Biden’s marks in the suburbs. Instead, she collapsed, upturning what had been a core political conviction of the Trump years. Wed, 06 Nov 2024 22:27:01 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/2024-election/kamala-harris-suburbs-election-results-trump From the moment Donald Trump first won the presidency eight years ago, suburban voters have led the political backlash against his contentious brand of politics, shedding their traditional Republican leanings and voting against the GOP in ever-growing numbers. It’s an electoral trend Democrats expected to continue in perpetuity.

And then Tuesday arrived.

In one of the biggest surprises of a gut-punch election for Democrats, Kamala Harris suffered broad and significant setbacks against Trump in suburbs across the country, failing to match — much less exceed — Joe Biden’s 2020 vote totals there.

The reversal came despite Democrats’ strongly held belief that the vice president was poised to do better in the suburbs than Biden and that she’d expand the party’s gains thanks primarily to growing support among the mostly white and well-off voters who populate the area.

“It’s a huge surprise,” said Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy, education and politics at the centrist Democratic group Third Way. “We made a play that we were going to counteract his gains with non-college men, with men of color by leaning into the suburbs, by getting those college-educated voters. And it just didn’t work.”

Democrats, Erickson added, might have hit a high-water mark in the suburbs in 2020 aided by the pandemic, raising doubts about whether the party can count on increasing support in the area in future elections.

Democratic strategists say they are only starting to understand why the party performed so poorly in those areas, amid a broader set of questions about why they suffered across-the-board losses with every demographic in every part of the country. But even as party operatives worried ahead of Tuesday about continued losses in rural areas and sinking support among Black and Latino voters, they hardly ever expressed concern that Harris’ support in the suburbs was also in danger.

Tuesday’s results show how misplaced their confidence was.

Exit polls of the race found Harris losing the suburbs by 2 percentage points to Trump, 50% to 48%. Four years ago, exit polls found that Biden had won suburbs nationally by 2 percentage points, 50% to 48%.

In the crucial Philadelphia suburb of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Democrats expected Harris to perform better than Biden, Democrats lost the county for the first time since 1988. Trump squeaked a 0.1 percentage point lead, about a 4-point gain from 2020.

Harris also lost about 3 points of support compared to Biden in the Philadelphia suburb of Montgomery County and the Detroit suburb of Oakland County.

The vice president didn’t backslide that badly in every suburb: In the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha County and in the Charlotte suburb of Cabarrus County, she received slightly more votes than Biden did in 2020.

But in one of the larger suburban backslides, Harris’ margin dipped 8 points in Loudoun County, Virginia — she won by just 16 points compared to Biden’s 24-point victory.

Harris’ performance in Loudoun County was particularly alarming to some Democrats and a sign of just how unexpected this week’s setback was. A suburb of Washington, D.C., in northern Virginia, it was seen during Barack Obama’s presidential runs of 2008 and 2012 as a bellwether for Democratic performance in once-Republican-leaning suburbs. Obama won it by more than 4 percentage points in 2012; four years later, Hillary Clinton won it by 17 points against Trump.

Trump’s first term in office appeared to supercharge the suburban shift away from Republicans, starting with a 2017 special House election in suburban Atlanta that saw Democratic nominee Jon Ossoff nearly win a district that Republicans had won by more than 20 percentage points less than a year earlier. (Ossoff would later bank on growing suburban support to win a Senate seat in Georgia in 2021.)

The pivot in suburban Atlanta toward Democrats was powered by many onetime Republicans, including former supporters of former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Democrats fear that in 2024, however, many of those former Republican voters were turned off by the party’s leftward lurch on some cultural issues.

“When you allow some of your party’s loudest voices who are saying very unpopular things to go largely unrebutted for years, it adds up and allows Republicans to define you on unfavorable terms,” said Jeff Smith, a former Democratic state lawmaker from Missouri, who cited 2020’s calls to “defund the police” as continuing to damage the party.

“If the Democratic Party doesn’t reckon with the ways in which excesses of the activist left have damaged the party’s brand with massive swaths of the country, it’ll be tough to recover,” he added.

Other Democrats expressed concern that the party’s focus on abortion rights didn’t resonate in the suburbs the way the party had hoped. Even if voters wanted more abortion access, Erickson said, some of them might have concluded that there wasn’t much Democrats would do to make that happen.

“We assumed that people thought abortion access equals Democrats, and no abortion access equals Republicans,” she said. “And I don’t think it was that simple.”

Party strategists said that, regardless, the suburbs will be a subject of intense postelection analysis. For now, many of them said they simply don’t know what happened.

“I have no idea what to do next or what went wrong,” one Democratic strategist said. “But something went badly, horribly wrong.”

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Alex Roarty is a reporter at NOTUS. Em Luetkemeyer and Helen Huiskes are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.]]> https://washingtonsun.com/2024-election/kamala-harris-concession-speech-trump Jasmine Wright, Calen Razor With blame for her loss already swirling in her camp, the vice president gave a speech pushing for a more optimistic future. Wed, 06 Nov 2024 21:59:19 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/2024-election/kamala-harris-concession-speech-trump Vice President Kamala Harris made the final speech of her campaign on Wednesday, after a devastating loss to her rival, Donald Trump, which will have heavy implications for both the country and her own political future.

“The outcome is not what we wanted, what we fought for, what we voted for,” Harris told the audience. “Hear me when I say the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up, as long as we keep fighting.”

Harris mentioned that she called Trump on Wednesday morning to boos from the crowd made up of her supporters, family members and staffers. Harris said she congratulated him on his victory and discussed the peaceful transfer of power.

“I know folks are experiencing a range of emotions, but we must accept the results of this election,” Harris added. “While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign.”

Aides and supporters held each other in Washington’s 80-degree heat. Some wiped their eyes as Harris called on them to not despair.

Harris and her team wrote most of the speech on Wednesday, a senior adviser told NOTUS. Neither a victory nor concession speech was fully written out earlier, as the campaign had really only focused on a “hold on, we don’t know the results yet, but we’re doing good” message.

To that point, campaign aides had been told that they would be employed until at least Nov. 15, with the campaign anticipating days of vote counting and a potential legal fight afterward, a Harris aide told NOTUS.

Almost immediately after Trump began his march through the Electoral College, pundits began dissecting how the campaign ended up in such a precarious place that would lead Harris to losing all of the battleground states and Trump shattering their “blue wall” strategy.

Democratic operatives, campaign aides, strategists and White House officials NOTUS spoke with said they rested a sizable amount of blame for the loss with President Joe Biden for staying in the race so long when it was clear he was not equipped to do it.

Others blamed the Harris campaign’s risk-averse strategy or a gaffe made during an appearance on “The View” where Harris didn’t put distance between herself and Biden.

“That was a tactical error,” one senior aide told NOTUS Wednesday, tossing aside the pundit accusations that the campaign itself was flawed, and not that the American electorate issued a rejection of an incumbent administration. They added, “I don’t think New Jersey was so close because of her answer on ‘The View.’”

Either way, campaign aides from the Wilmington headquarters were told to plan to be in Washington by Wednesday afternoon, no matter the outcome. While campaign leadership coordinated travel for aides in the morning, no all-staff calls had been planned until the afternoon. Instead, they wanted aides to hear from Harris directly first.

In her speech, Harris vowed to continue the fight for democracy and the rule of law, admitting that without holding the seat of power, the task is that much harder now.

“But we like hard work,” Harris said. “Hard work is good work, and the fight for our country is always worth it. … This is a time to roll up our sleeves. This is a time to organize, to mobilize for the sake of freedom.”

“Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars,” Harris concluded. “Let us fill the sky with the light of a billion stars, the light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service.”

—
Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS. Calen Razor is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.]]> https://washingtonsun.com/2024-election/democrats-mourn-kamala-harris-loss Jasmine Wright, Calen Razor The vice president’s defeat places her party back in Donald Trump’s reality, with no clear way out. Wed, 06 Nov 2024 10:42:39 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/2024-election/democrats-mourn-kamala-harris-loss After months of upheaval, plenty of despair and some joyful optimism, Democrats will soon be out of the White House and a second era of Donald Trump will begin.

Vice President Kamala Harris fell short. President Joe Biden, the furtive leader of the party, will be gone. And after one of the most high-intensity campaigns in modern U.S. political history, there are no obvious answers for how Democrats can find their way back from the political wilderness.

On Tuesday night, Howard University’s Yard was supposed to be filled with proverbial glass, shattered from the highest ceiling in politics. Instead, it was filled with despondent Democrats, pacing around as they confronted the harsh reality that Harris would likely not be successful in her historic bid for the White House.

The vice president didn’t address the crowd at her alma mater. Her supporters waited for hours on an unseasonably warm night in D.C. as the results turned Trump’s way. A little after 12:40 a.m., Harris’ campaign co-chair, Cedric Richmond, spoke to the shrunken crowd, as audience members at one point chanted “KAMALA” thinking it would be her to show up behind the vice presidential seal and not Richmond.

"Thank you for believing in the promise of America,” Richmond told the crowd, before clarifying that Harris wouldn’t be making an appearance.

But not long after Richmond delivered his message did the worst news come: Harris had lost Pennsylvania, effectively crushing her pathway to 270 electoral votes through the “Blue Wall.”

Howard’s press filing area — a place that would have been filled with campaign aides if Harris were winning — was barren with the exception of some reporters. One senior adviser, who said they had just flown in from Atlanta, continued to say “they weren’t plugged in” once the vote started to turn.

As results from crucial states started to finalize, the loss began to settle in for Democrats and the Harris allies.

“I was very shocked about the call in North Carolina,” Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who has been campaigning for Harris in the battlegrounds, told NOTUS.

“I expected more out of Georgia,” said Steven Benjamin, Biden’s Director of Public Engagement.

One aide, who had been hopeful through most of the night that Harris could overcome the headwinds, had a simple text message for NOTUS: “I’m sick.”

Questions will swirl in the coming days if Tuesday's results are the result of a poorly run campaign or something much larger, like a country reluctant to ever elect a woman to the White House.

Democrats had entered Election Day more optimistic than they’d been in previous weeks, not quite a whiplash but a marked shift in energy, as Harris went all out in the battleground states and Trump struggled to stay on message.

Recent events like the former president’s Madison Square Garden rally, featuring racist comments about Black voters and Puerto Rico, provided Democrats a windfall of focus group data that suggested late deciders would break their way. Americans had finally started paying attention, aides believed, and were forced to look at “Trumpism” up close.

But the new vibe shift didn’t hold for long. Democrats weren’t successful. Harris won’t be president. And the worst fears for Democrats have finally come to pass: four more years of Trump.

“This president essentially said he doesn’t want people to be able to challenge him,” said Rep. Troy Carter, second vice chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. “A presidency like that will be the absolute demise of what America has built.”

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver said the worst is yet to come. “I don’t think many people who are supporting him have thought about all the consequences of his presidency,” he said. “But they will — they will see it.”

Democrats will now have to reckon with life as a Trump opposition party, with the former president no longer unaccustomed to Washington and his own power. A newly flipped Senate majority for Republicans, with their majority growing by the hour as more returns come in, was also a blow. In the final days of the election, Democrats were projecting confidence that the chamber might not flip.

For Harris’ supporters, it was a sad ending to an unparalleled election, which her aides routinely described as a toss-up. In the final days of the race, Harris’ team doubled down on their efforts to shore up the “Blue Wall” route, with Harris spending the three days leading up to Election Day in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Blame is already ricocheting around Democratic circles. Harris shedding voters of color, including Black and Latino men, was a clear let down. Her messaging, tacking to the middle to appeal to a more moderate base, instead of focusing on turning out the progressive vote, failed on all accounts. Harris not breaking with Biden significantly or early enough also seemed to be a mistake. Her continued support for the administration’s stance on Gaza didn’t help. And her choice of a vice presidential candidate, who apparently didn’t help her win anywhere or improve her standing with rural voters, will be a source of second- and third- and fourth-guessing.

Other Democrats say the fundamentals of this election were too steep for any Democrat, after years of high inflation.

“Maybe Democrats were always going to fucking lose, and she did great by keeping us alive, because if Joe Biden was still on the ticket, it would haven been over weeks ago,” said one senior Democrat in Pennsylvania.

Hanging over everything is Biden’s decision to run for reelection to begin with. Biden clung to his office despite persistent concerns that he would be too old to successfully campaign — to say nothing of serving as president well into his 80s. His party failed to spur an open primary at the start of this year, which could have produced a different candidate and at least would have given the Democratic candidate more time to prepare a general election campaign.

But ultimately, what is clear to most in the party is that with this setback, Democrats will have to dig deep and do some soul searching.

“We really have to do some internal kind of sitting around and reckoning with ourselves,” said Crockett, who was a surrogate for Harris during her three-month campaign. She said Democrats would have discussions about “what does it look like to engage in organizing consistently, instead of just waking up once every four years and trying to do something.”

The vice president’s loss is a 180-degree turn from the height of her campaign soon after Biden stepped down from the ticket in late July.

Harris quickly shored up support for her presidential bid, and she injected some much needed energy and hope into the race for Democrats.

Harris’ ascension largely closed the gaps in the race, particularly in battleground states like North Carolina, where Democrats saw renewed momentum after a narrow loss in 2020. Harris also inherited a robust campaign infrastructure that Biden’s aides had laid out for a rematch against Trump.

But all that early momentum wasn’t enough. After Harris excelled in an early September debate against Trump, Trump refused to debate again and Harris failed to find a new windfall of momentum until the very end. At least, it looked like Harris had some momentum at the end.

The vice president struggled to recreate the coalition that sent Barack Obama to the White House, and she saw declines with nearly every demographic compared to Biden.

For Craig Snyder, a former GOP nominee for Congress in Pennsylvania who campaigned and voted for Harris, there were always signs that her strategy might not be enough.

“We’ve had, from the beginning of this race, a majority of Americans saying the country is on the wrong track. That amount of people is very predictive of what’s going to happen to the incumbent party,” he said.

Harris also wrestled with how to telegraph the differences between Biden’s presidency and her would-be administration.

Asked in an interview with The View in early October if she would have done something differently than Biden as president, her answer became famous: “there is not a thing that comes to mind.”

The Trump campaign amplified the quote for weeks, as Harris tried to tweak her answer later when asked similar questions by other journalists.

Santiago Mayer, the executive director of Voters of Tomorrow — which focuses on Gen Z voters — said her loss signals the “anti-incumbent wave” pulling voters away from familiar campaigns.

Harris also received consistent pressure from the progressive wing of her party to break away from Biden’s stance on the Israel-Gaza war. While demanding that critical aid be delivered to Palestinians facing a humanitarian crisis in the region, Harris kept returning to the declaration that “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

The path that Harris took to Election Day wasn’t smooth. Her unsuccessful bid for president in 2019 ended in disarray, and Harris not only struggled to capture a strong coalition of voters during the Democratic primary, her campaign also faced financial pressure.

Harris’ campaign was plagued with internal fighting in its final days. Although she enjoyed early momentum, she didn’t even make it to Iowa. She ultimately left the race weeks before any votes were cast.

Harris’ first two years as vice president were fraught, as she waded through a deluge of damaging stories about staff mismanagement and tensions with the West Wing left her sidelined.

Vice Presidential historian Joel Goldstein said Harris came in where there wasn’t “sort of a natural role for her” in the same way that there was for other recent vice presidents.

Her aides spent years trying to rehabilitate her image, focusing on reconnecting with Harris’ longtime advocates and finding new ones in an attempt to build a firewall of support for when the detractors got too loud. She seemed to find her voice after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, establishing a platform on reproductive rights that foreshadowed her campaign as the nominee.

And yet, despite her loss, many Democrats agree that Harris performed as well as she could have under the circumstances.

“She should have no regrets, because the nature of this campaign was so unique and so unprecedented that even if she ran as close to a flawless campaign as possible, the dynamics were just too tough for her to overcome,” said Brian Brokaw, who ran Harris’ campaigns for attorney general and the Senate. “In fact, she, up until that point, had been all but written off by the political chattering class, and people were calling her a liability on the ticket. And then everything we know happened happened, and she got to stand in her own right, in her own shoes, and she shined.”

Her devastating loss, however, raises doubt about the future of her political career. Privately, people close to Harris have questioned whether she could run again in 2028, in what is likely to be a fierce open primary that pits successful Democratic governors and other party leaders against each other.

Others have defended her, saying Harris’ options should be wide open for whatever she wants to do.

“We need her. We need a champion,” said Lateefah Simon, a mentee and surrogate of Harris who has known her since 2003. “Kamala’s not going anywhere.”

As for the party itself, Democrats say they’ll have to mourn this loss and settle on a plan to push back against the former president. Trump has vowed to use the federal government to attack his enemies and break down fundamental parts of the government.

“I am from a generation of activists that say, you dust yourself up and you fight — fight the next fight. Yeah, you grieve and you fight the next fight,” said Sen. Laphonza Butler, an ally of the vice president. “We can’t give up on the experiment of this country. It’s our future generations who deserve to have it as well.”

Harris, who had spent part of her Tuesday drafting election night remarks with aides at the vice presidential residence, will likely echo that sentiment.

But the question in the early morning hours of Wednesday, when reporters were told to take all their belongings from the filing center, was when?

“So you won't hear from the vice president tonight, but you will hear from her tomorrow,” Richmond said. “She will be back here tomorrow.”

—

Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS.

Calen Razor is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
]]> https://washingtonsun.com/harris-2024/democratic-celebration-pennsylvania-devastation Katherine Swartz In Bucks County, Democrats expected to do better than Joe Biden’s margin in 2020. Instead, they’re on track to lose the county for the first time since 1988. Wed, 06 Nov 2024 07:39:58 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/harris-2024/democratic-celebration-pennsylvania-devastation BUCKS COUNTY, PA — At 9 p.m., the wine was flowing and the spirits were high for the hundreds of Democrats who had gathered for a watch party at a farmhouse inn. Cable news maps were projected on the big screen. The crowd rose to their feet any time Pennsylvania appeared. People were here for a celebration.

Two hours later, the wine was still flowing, but for different reasons. The mood had changed. The crowd had dwindled. Those left in the room were huddled together, scrolling on their phones or wiping away tears.

Kamala Harris’ pathway to the presidency always seemed to run through Pennsylvania, and winning Pennsylvania relied on meeting or increasing turnout in the Philadelphia suburbs, turning out women over abortion and flipping independent voters who had soured on Trump.

Instead, Trump looks like he may win Bucks County outright, becoming the first Republican to do so since 1988, on his way to winning Pennsylvania and the presidency.

Steve Santarsiero, the state senator representing Bucks County and chair of the county Democratic Party, told the crowd early in the night that he was confident Harris would perform ahead of Joe Biden in the county.

By 11:30 p.m., Santarsiero still felt Harris would win Pennsylvania and Bucks County.

“We don’t know by what margins yet, it may not be the margins that Joe Biden got four years ago,” Santarsiero said.

But he was only speaking to a couple dozen people by that point in the night.

“I think we’re going to wrap it up here shortly,” he added.

While ballots continue to be counted in Bucks and other Pennsylvania counties, the Associated Press has already called the state for Trump. What remains is only sorting out how badly Harris underperformed here compared to Biden in 2020.

Maureen Brill, judge of elections in Buckingham Township, had been up since 3 a.m. and made it to the election party after 10:30 p.m., once results in the township had been sent to the county’s board of elections.

By the time she made it to the party, it wasn’t a party at all.

“I noticed immediately that the people here weren’t happy at all,” she said.

Brill noted that in her relatively conservative area, the number of voters on Tuesday was the biggest she’d ever seen, and that many of those voters were people she’d never seen at the polls before.

“I'm not happy to see how well Trump is doing, but I'm also not surprised,” Brill said.

An hour before polls closed in the borough of Newtown, Joel Raab started to pack up signs at the local precinct. Once concern remained at the top of his mind.

“Absolutely I’m concerned about how the economy is playing with voters,” Raab told NOTUS.

“People here aren't looking to get $25,000 for a home loan. There aren't that many renters around here, most people are homeowners, and so it really didn't resonate here,” he said.

Pat and Peggy Walsh sat in the back of the room as results trickled in that continued to narrow Harris’ chances to win Pennsylvania. Even as local leader after local leader went onstage, projecting their optimism that mail-in votes would give Harris the narrow lead after lagging all night, they felt resigned.

“Watching this makes me depressed, very depressed, on the verge of tears,” Pat said. “I don't know where we got all our optimism, but I guess we thought it was going to be blue,”

“A blue tsunami,” Peggy said, finishing her husband’s sentence.

“What I feel in my heart is, we will move, we will move to Ireland,” Pat said. “I'm not going to go through another four years of watching people around me just get hurt.”

—

Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.]]> https://washingtonsun.com/2024-election/election-results-trump-harris Alex Roarty, Reese Gorman The vice president will not speak to supporters until later Wednesday morning. Tue, 05 Nov 2024 23:03:04 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/2024-election/election-results-trump-harris Just after 2:30 on Wednesday morning, the Associated Press declared that Donald Trump had won Pennsylvania. And Donald Trump emerged at the West Palm Beach County Convention Center to declare victory.

"Frankly, this was I believe the greatest political movement of all time," Trump told the crowd at his election night party. "And now it's going to reach a new level of importance, because we're going to help our country heal."

The race has not officially been called, but Kamala Harris' path to victory is now virtually closed off. Better-than-expected support for Trump in deep red rural areas has pushed the GOP to projected victories in North Carolina and Georgia.

Addressing a crowd gathered at Howard University for Harris’ election night party, campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond said the campaign was still waiting for all the votes to be tabulated. Harris, he added, would not make a public comment until later on Wednesday.

“We still have votes to count,” Richmond said. “We still have states that have not been called yet. We will continue overnight to fight to make sure that every vote is counted.”

In a memo to Harris campaign staff obtained by NOTUS, campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said she still saw a path to victory for the vice president through those states, but that was before Pennsylvania was projected for Trump. 

“We’ve been saying for weeks that this race might not be called tonight,” O’Malley Dillon wrote. “Those of you who were around in 2020 know this well: It takes time for all the votes to be counted — and all the votes will be counted. That’s how our system works. What we do know is this race is not going to come into focus until the early morning hours.”

Shortly after O’Malley Dillon sent the memo, the Associated Press called North Carolina for Trump, a blow to Harris’ chances in a state her campaign had aggressively targeted.

Trump's allies paraded around the Palm Beach County Convention Center as Tuesday became Wednesday. The mood was pure exhilaration. The crowd celebrated every race call in exaggerated fashion, and the lines at the multiple bars at the watch party were getting longer and longer.

Actor Jon Voight was taking pictures with Trump supporters. Billionaire David Sacks told NOTUS he was feeling “good” about the state of the race. And Roger Stone told reporters that Trump’s performance was “the greatest comeback in American political history.”

Trump had been huddled with a small group of senior staff in his office at Mar-a-Lago analyzing the results, per a source familiar with the situation. The former president has been with members of his club and guests in the grand ballroom, chatting with supporters like Elon Musk, Dana White, Steve Witkoff and Steve Wynn, according to the source.

House Speaker Mike Johnson came from his district in Shreveport, Louisiana, and joined Trump and many others on stage Wednesday morning.

Harris and Trump have battled each other for months against a backdrop of high inflation that has left many Americans sour about the economy and widespread anger at a Supreme Court decision revoking the constitutional right to an abortion, both of which have weighed heavily on voters’ minds. The vice president has accused Trump of embracing an authoritarian agenda — including his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election — that favors wealthy billionaires. Trump has tried to tie Harris to an unpopular sitting president in Joe Biden, while accusing her of mismanaging the southern border and allowing transgender athletes to play in women’s sports.

Polls have indicated that the race is one of the most unpredictable in recent American history, with both candidates within just a few percentage points of each other in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia.

If Trump wins, he’d be the first former president to win reelection in more than a century, proving his remarkable political resilience and positioning himself to leave a lasting mark on the country. He would also be the first convicted felon to win the presidency, following his May conviction that he illegally paid hush money to a former porn star.

If Harris is still able to win, the vice president would be the first woman and first Indian American to claim the presidency, justifying the Democratic Party’s decision to back her as its nominee after Biden stepped down. Harris would also be the country’s second Black president, after Barack Obama.

For most of the election cycle, the 2024 race was expected to be a rematch of the 2020 contest, pitting Trump against Biden. But the president’s halting performance in June during a debate with Trump caused panic among Democrats and ignited a monthlong effort — egged on by party leaders like Nancy Pelosi — to persuade the president to drop out of the race.

When Biden did step aside in July, the party coalesced behind Harris, backing the vice president to unite Democrats and take on Trump in what became an unprecedented three-month campaign for the White House.

After claiming the nomination, polls showed Harris jumping out to a small but significant lead against Trump, boosted by Democratic enthusiasm. But Trump appeared to gain ground on Harris through much of the fall, as he made the case that the vice president would be nothing more than a continuation of Biden’s unpopular policies, and Harris at times struggled to separate herself from the president.

Democrats, however, were hopeful that they had gained momentum in the race’s final weeks, buoyed by a firestorm of criticism over Trump’s New York City rally in October, during which a speaker called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”

This story will be updated as results come in Tuesday night.]]> https://washingtonsun.com/harris-2024/kamala-harris-election-day-campaign Jasmine Wright She’s “nervous,” one person close to her says. Another says she’s not. After a final sprint, Kamala Harris believes she will win, with her team more optimistic than they’ve been in weeks — even knowing how much is uncertain. Tue, 05 Nov 2024 11:00:00 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/harris-2024/kamala-harris-election-day-campaign PHILADELPHIA, PA — Vice President Kamala Harris knows the race is tight. She knows there’s a chance she’s about to do what no woman, certainly no Black woman, has ever done before. And she’s deeply fearful for the future of the country under her rival. Donald Trump, should she fail.

“She’s nervous,” said one operative close to her, who has witnessed her in similar moments — though nothing she’s faced before has felt quite like this. Harris is someone who typically projects confidence and holds her emotions close to the chest, but in recent days, she’s had moments where her guard came down.

“I wouldn’t call it nervous,” said one friend who has spoken with her in the last few days. “I think she doesn’t overstate her vision, in terms of winning. She doesn’t take herself there. She takes herself where she can feel the energy and she can feel the love, but I don’t think she’s embracing winning until it’s over.”

Others who have been around Harris either on the trail or in quiet moments at the end of a frenetic campaign say it’s not a nervousness based on fear or worry. But more of a clear-eyed recognition that she’s done all she can and her fate is now up to America.

“She’s tired, but she’s convicted, she is determined, she’s a smidge confident — not overly so,” a senior Democrat who saw her this week told NOTUS.

“The race ain’t over yet,” she said at her closing rally in Philadelphia just before midnight. “This could be one of the close races in history.“

While the vice president understands the work is not truly over until the polls close, she is certain that her team’s job is done — and she does believe she will win.

Democrats enter Election Day more optimistic than they’ve been in weeks, not quite a whiplash but a marked shift in energy as Harris has gone all out in the battleground states in the final days.

“We have momentum on our side,” Harris said to a packed crowd in Allentown on Monday. “Can you feel it?”

Eighteen-year-old Jake Restivo, a freshman at Muhlenberg College who is voting for the first time, said even he feels it.

“I do see the shift,” he told NOTUS after Harris’ short but lively rally. “I think that people are becoming a lot more open about voting, I think people are starting to see and realize that Kamala, she seems [to] really know what’s best for this country.”

Part of that movement, Harris campaign aides say, comes from Trump’s unforced errors, starting with the Madison Square Garden rally where a comedian called Puerto Rico “floating island of garbage.”

“The rhetoric spewed out of his mouth doesn’t help,” said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, who attended one of Harris’ last rallies in Allentown.

The backlash provided Democrats with a windfall of focus group data that suggested late deciders were breaking their way. That’s borne out in recent polling. Americans had finally started paying attention, Harris’ team believed, and are looking at Trumpism up close after months of Democrats waiting for them to do so.

The Harris campaign also feels certain that they’ve outworked their opponents, with Herculean numbers of 90,000 volunteers over the weekend knocking on 3 million doors, alongside endless phone banking.

“What you all are signed up to do today, and what you have been doing,” Harris told door-knockers Monday during a canvass kickoff in Scranton. “Let’s enjoy it.”

The campaign ramped up dramatically over the last two weeks. Harris has increased her travel, hitting five states in one day the weekend before the election. On Monday, she went door knocking in Reading after the sun set. She’s done a rotation of backstage — somewhat newsless — interviews with cable news networks, after an initial resistance to the media. More surrogates have hit the trail. More money has left the door, according to two Democrats familiar with the spending. To some, even the slow and deliberate Harris team’s decision-making seemed to grow more efficient, according to two operatives familiar with the campaign.

One clear example of that change is the sudden outpouring of yard signs, which for months had been hard to come by for campaign offices across the country. The campaign had told supporters to purchase signs online for $25 if they wanted to display their Harris pride. Campaign leadership stalled on deciding which vendor to use, delaying the printing of signs. In the last three weeks, the campaign printed more than 1.5 million, according to a source familiar with the planning.
Harris Philadelphia Museum of Art AP-24310170812641 (5842x3895, AR: 1.50)The campaign also spent the final days shoring up the Democratic base. The sit-down events with Liz Cheney disappeared, replaced by rallies at colleges, in inner cities and across the ever-important suburbs.

After months of risk aversion, Harris gambled more at the end. On Sunday night in East Lansing, Michigan, the vice president faced a threat hanging over her run: that voters furious with the Biden administration’s actions on the Gaza conflict — and her refusal to break from it — could erupt and derail her.

Harris and her team sought to meet it head-on at the Michigan State University campus, one aide said, and address the issue that’s top of mind for the community, which may decide whether she’s successful in the state.

“There are Arab community members here tonight,” she said at the start of her remarks, just days after Trump had a flashy stop in Dearborn. “This year has been difficult,” calling the carnage in Gaza “devastating.“ “As president, I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza.”

Looking out at the crowd on the ground and up in the stands, one senior Democrat told NOTUS that they had never seen that type of coalition at a closing rally for a Democrat — pointing to young and diverse people standing alongside white men who they said were clearly not Democrats. And Harris’ allies said the momentum in Michigan had swung in her favor.

“They think they’re going to win — Detroit early votes are high,” said an operative close to the campaign.

But one high-profile surrogate ended a short run of campaign stops with darker warnings, saying what someone running for office couldn’t say herself.

If Trump wins, Michelle Obama said in Norristown, Pennsylvania, this past weekend, it will “infect all of our lives.”

“Once you wink at hate and make it normal to call somebody a ‘bimbo’ or ‘low IQ’ or ‘human scum,’ look, you cannot control how fast and far that fire of hate will spread,” she said. “Destruction is swift and it is merciless. And no one knows where it will stop,” she said to gasps.

Voters felt that warning in the packed high school gymnasium where she spoke on Saturday. “I just feel as though they don’t want us here. Like we’re not part of anything,” said Tamera Rivers, from Delaware County, Pennsylvania. “If Trump wins, I would feel like I’m unwanted here.”

Earlier that day, in the predominantly working-class Latino neighborhood of Kensington, a trio of canvassers well into and beyond their 60s sporting “the day to take out the garbage is November 5th” shirts went door-to-door trying to ask for the neighborhood’s support after the MSG rally.

All the women the crew managed to speak with, if they could vote, were pro-Harris. But the men were harder to gauge, a direct example of the gender gap that could bring Harris success or failure.

Magali Larson, an Italian Argentinian woman in her 80s who the Philadelphia Democrats have deployed in Puerto Rican neighborhoods since the Obama years, stopped every person in the street to ask if they were voting. Running into a self-proclaimed undecided man on the corner, she said in Spanish, “Why are you undecided! She doesn’t call us garbage!”

One woman, feeding the pigeons, told her, “Kamala es mi mamita.” One man Larson spoke with said he heard the comedian’s comments but he didn’t live in Puerto Rico anymore, instead, he lived in the states. He said that there were no wars when Trump was in charge. And that life had been better. He then ripped up one of the flyers with the vice president’s face on it.

And another woman, Nancy, said she was bringing her mom, brother, uncle, cousin, sister and nephew to the polls with her to cast their ballots for Harris.

“You guys are going to run into a lot of ignorant people out here,” she said while holding a warm mug of coffee. “Ignore them, or send them a blessing with God and just keep going.”

In Philadelphia at her closing rally — in front of the Rocky steps, “a tribute to those who start as the underdog and climb to victory” — Harris embodied that same optimism.

“So America, it comes down to this — one more day, just one more day in the most consequential election of our lifetime. And the momentum is on our side.”

She didn’t say Trump’s name.

—
Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS.]]> https://washingtonsun.com/trump-2024/rfk-trump-abortion-policy Margaret Manto The prospect of RFK Jr. in a Trump administration has Democrats on edge, but they’re keeping their focus on his squishy positions on abortion. Fri, 01 Nov 2024 17:06:38 GMT https://washingtonsun.com/trump-2024/rfk-trump-abortion-policy Robert F. Kennedy Jr. swears he’ll have a prominent role in a new Trump administration, as he stumps around the country promising to end the “FDA’s war on public health” with sweeping policy changes. But Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party are trying to keep attacks on him simple — sidestepping his claims about the dangers of vaccines or pledges to remake the U.S. agriculture system in favor of a tight focus on abortion policy.

“Putting an anti-abortion conspiracy theorist in charge of our public health agencies says everything you need to know about how Donald Trump would govern,” Harris wrote on X on Wednesday.

Harris’ message came in response to a video of Kennedy saying that Trump “promised” him “control of the public health agencies,” including “HHS and its subagencies, CDC, FDA, NIH and a few others, and then also the USDA.”

Harris also responded on Thursday to a video of Trump saying that Kennedy would work on “women’s health,” writing simply, “No,” along with a heart emoji.

While Kennedy has been best known in the past for his anti-vaccine advocacy, including during the pandemic, COVID-19 and vaccines have not played a large role on the 2024 campaign trail. In a September poll by KFF, both Republican and Democratic voters who were asked what health care issues they would most like to hear the candidates discuss named abortion as a key issue — and neither group named COVID-19 or vaccines.

An adviser to the Democratic National Committee told NOTUS that the DNC’s content testing had shown that targeting Kennedy’s multiple positions on abortion was one of the most, if not the most, potent attacks on Kennedy available to Democrats. That’s both because abortion is a central topic for many voters in this election and because Kennedy’s contradictory statements about abortion sometimes sounded like he was minimizing its importance.

Kennedy, who has proposed a range of health-oriented policies for a future Trump administration, has given mixed messages on abortion — sometimes warm, sometimes cold and sometimes absent.

While still running his own presidential campaign, he stated that he was against any government limits on abortion throughout the gestation period, then walked back those statements, saying that abortion should be allowed for a certain number of weeks but then restricted “in the final months of pregnancy.” In June, he posted on X that “abortion should be legal up until a certain number of weeks, and restricted thereafter” but added that “every abortion is a tragedy.”

Since joining the Trump team in August, Kennedy has not been publicly vocal about abortion. He recently starred in a pro-Trump ad targeting Catholic voters in Pennsylvania, but the ad didn’t include any mention of abortion. The president of CatholicVote, the conservative organization that paid for the ad, told Semafor that Kennedy was conflicted when it came to the “bodily autonomy” aspect of abortion.

Kennedy’s longtime anti-vaccine advocacy centered around preserving bodily autonomy when it came to mandatory vaccinations. He has maintained his stance in his new role supporting Trump, reportedly telling the co-chair of the Trump-Vance transition team that he would like to obtain federal data to prove vaccines are unsafe and remove them from the market. Kennedy’s other policy proposals for improving public health have focused on improving food quality and nutritional value by limiting ultra-processed foods and food additives, which he and experts say can contribute to chronic diseases.

Neither the Trump campaign nor the Kennedy team responded to requests for comment on Kennedy’s possible role in shaping abortion policy. The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment about their strategy on Kennedy.

Other Democratic organizations echoed Harris’ abortion-forward language on Kennedy, tying it to his unfounded claims about the dangers of vaccines.

“The truth is that whether it is spreading dangerous conspiracies about vaccinations or supporting a national abortion ban, RFK Jr. is an extremist when it comes to public health across the board,” a spokesperson for the Democratic opposition research group American Bridge said in an email to NOTUS.

Kennedy has made his wish to run a public health-related agency in a new Trump administration clear. During a rally in Nevada on Thursday, Trump said that he would allow Kennedy to “do anything he wants” with regard to health care policy, adding that Kennedy wants to “look at the vaccines” as well as pesticides.

Others in the Trump campaign have denied that Trump would nominate Kennedy for a cabinet post, and any potential Kennedy cabinet appointment would likely face a difficult Senate confirmation battle.

Regardless, the prospect of Kennedy in a public health leadership role puts many Democrats on edge — and leaves Trump open to attacks on a number of health-related fronts.

Jerome Adams, who was surgeon general under Trump, shared some of that anxiety this week.

“If RFK has a significant influence on the next administration, that could further erode people’s willingness to get up to date with recommended vaccines, and I am worried about the impact that could have on our nation’s health, on our nation’s economy, on our global security,” he said.

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Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.]]>