Harris’s campaign embraces ‘underdog’ label – even as polling shows her beating Trump

Kamala Harris’s campaign is entering September with the mindset of a campaign running from behind – even as polling shows that is not the case.

A memo sent out by the Harris campaign on Sunday morning claimed that the vice president was still the “underdog” in the race and projected “razor-thin” margins for the race in November.

Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’s campaign manager, said in the memo that the reason for this mentality was Donald Trump and his continued dominance over the Republican party — whose core base of supporters is as motivated as ever to support him in 2024.

And she previewed how the Harris campaign looks to make up the ground it supposedly needs to win key battleground states in November.

Polling actually shows that Harris has narrowed the gap to the low single digits in a wide array of battleground states, including some that were seen as clearly becoming out of reach for President Joe Biden, such as North Carolina and Georgia.

O’Malley Dillon said that Harris’s massive fundraising haul — $540m since launching her campaign on July 21 — will be put into a massive battleground states ground operation.

Harris’s “historic sum” will go “directly to a relentless battleground operation, with more than 312 coordinated offices and 2,000 coordinated staff in the states – a reflection of a campaign with presences in every corner of every battleground state and with the communities critical to victory,” she said.

“During a recent Weekend of Action, more than 10,000 volunteers made nearly 900,000 calls and knocked on 150,000 doors, contacting more than 1 million voters,” said O’Malley Dillon.

It’s the kind of investment, if it’s used to boost participation numbers among Harris’s core base of supporters, that could cleanly push this race over the edge in her favor. Trump’s campaign has been unable to match Harris in fundraising numbers, bringing in a much lower $137m in July, and he continues to see his funds sapped by his ongoing legal defenses in several criminal and civil cases.

Harris and her running mate Tim Walz sat down for a CNN interview on Thursday after enduring pressure from both journalists and her Republican rival to do so. The discussion was mostly news-free and largely served to tamp down on criticism while maintaining the race’s current trajectory.

The head of Florida’s chapter of the Democratic Party told The Independent earlier this summer that Republicans have been unable to field the kind of ground game effort which their Democratic rivals have gathered this year, potentially meaning that Harris’s party is on course to make up gains in areas where the party has seen defeat in recent cycles.

“There is no Republican operation here. They have no offices. They have no grassroots door knocking,” Nikki Fried said in a late July interview with The Independent.

“It’s not just Democrats,” she said. “We are hearing anecdotal stories of past Republicans coming to our offices, phone-banking with us. We’re hearing from Republicans saying: ‘Maybe this is the final straw that’s going to break the MAGA base and wipe them out for this election cycle, and finally return the Republican Party back to some sense of normality’.”