Anxious Democratic strategists are quietly trying to douse the euphoria engulfing Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign by warning that her surge in popularity masks an election contest that is on a knife-edge and could easily be lost.
As the vice-president basks in adulation and optimism at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, key supporters are cautioning that more trying times lie ahead after an extended honeymoon period following her ascent to the top of the ticket in place of Joe Biden.
Fuelling the Democrats’ feelgood mood have been a spate of opinion polls showing Harris with a national lead over Donald Trump while also leading or newly competitive in battleground states, including southern Sun belt states where Biden had been struggling badly before his withdrawal from the race last month.
A recent compilation of national polls by 538, a polling website, showed Harris leading Trump by 46.6% to 43.8%.
But Chauncey McLean, the president of Super Forward, a pro-Harris Super Pac that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for Harris’s campaign, suggested that the poll figures concealed sobering realities.
“Our numbers are much less rosy than what you’re seeing in public,” he told an event hosted by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics on the convention’s opening day on Monday.
He described Pennsylvania, which he identified as the most critical of seven battleground states, as a “coin flip” between Harris and Trump.
And despite the apparent resurrection in the Democrats’ prospects, the race overall remains as close as ever.
“We have it tight as a tick, and pretty much across the board,” Reuters quoted McLean as saying. To win, he said, Harris must capture one of three states – Pennsylvania, North Carolina or Georgia. Recent surveys in the first two have recorded her with a narrow lead or neck-and-neck with Trump, while Trump leads by a wider margin in Georgia, a southern state that Biden won narrowly in 2020.
McLean said Harris’s momentum stemmed from an early enthusiasm among young voters of colour in the Sun belt states of North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona.
But she had yet to reassemble the coalition of Black, Hispanic and young voters that underpinned Biden’s victory four years ago. Internal polling shows that voters want more detail on policy.
The cautionary theme was amplified by David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, who told the Guardian this week that the Harris campaign must guard against complacency.
“I think that if the Harris campaign has one message it will try to get across during this convention, it’s that there is no room for complacency in this election,” he said.
The vice-president has already faced scrutiny over her recent disavowal of liberal policy positions she assumed during her ill-fated campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2020, when she publicly opposed fracking and advocated a single-payer health insurance system that would ultimately have ended private health insurance.
While subtly trying to stake out differences from Biden’s position on economic policy – a vulnerable area for Democrats – she has so far avoided one-on-one media interviews since being confirmed as the Democratic nominee, an approach that will need to be jettisoned as the campaign proceeds, thereby ushering in the dangers of public misstatements or policy pronouncements that prove unpopular.
But in comments to the New York Times, Chris Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, said embracing ideas of economic populism that are controversial because they run counter to the prevailing free-market neoliberal orthodoxy might be necessary to win precisely because they are attractive to Trump supporters.
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“I think that our coalition is bound to lose if we don’t find a way to reach out to some element of the folks who have been hoodwinked by Donald Trump,” he said. “We don’t have to win over 25% of his voters. We have to win 5 or 10% of his voters.”
Fernand Amandi, a Democratic strategist who worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential election campaigns told the Hill that Harris’s campaign needs to weather a storm at some point.
“Every presidential campaign in modern history has had to go through an unanticipated scandal, crisis or world event, and at some point, that political law is going to happen to Kamala Harris’s campaign,” he said. “Until she passes that stress test – and I’m confident she will – this election is still wide open. Anyone who is measuring the drapes at the White House needs a serious reality check.”
Another strategist, Tim Hogan, told the same outlet: “Democrats are rightfully elated with the trajectory of the Harris-Walz campaign. But anyone politically conscious over the last decade – especially Democrats – knows that terrain can shift and events beyond our control can quickly change the nature of elections.”
He added: “This is going to be a nail-biter.”
Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, told Fox News that the election outcome would be determined by undecided voters, which he estimated to be about 5% of the electorate. “And the question is, are some of those voters going to get out and actually vote,” he said.
James Carville, the architect of Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 election campaign and a vocal advocate of Biden’s withdrawal after his flunked debate performance in June, cautioned about the dangers of over-optimism immediately after Harris emerged as his successor nominee last month.
“I have to be the skunk at the garden party. This is too triumphalist,” Carville told MSNBC five days after Biden stepped aside on 21 July.
“I think the vice-president, to put it in athletic terms, needs a really good cut man in the corner, because she’s getting ready to get cut. All I’m doing is saying, ‘Watch out people, don’t get too far out there.’ If we don’t win this, all this good feeling is going to evaporate and be all for naught, and that’s what I kinda think my role is right now.”