Trump is everywhere. Anxious Dems wonder why Harris isn’t.

 

2024 Elections

Trump is everywhere. Anxious Dems wonder why Harris isn’t.

 

Democrats fear the vice president’s risk-averse approach could hamper her campaign.

 

By Myah Ward, Elena Schneider, Eli Stokols, Jonathan Lemire and Megan Messerly

10/05/2024 07:00 AM EDT

Updated: 10/05/2024 09:21 AM EDT

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/05/harris-30-days-00182592

 

Democratic operatives, including some of Kamala Harris’ own staffers, are growing increasingly concerned about her relatively light campaign schedule, which has her holding fewer events than Donald Trump and avoiding unscripted interactions with voters and the press almost entirely.

 

In interviews with POLITICO, nearly two dozen Democrats described Harris as running a do-no-harm, risk-averse approach to the race they fear could hamper her as the campaign enters its final 30-day stretch.

 

With early voting by mail and in person already underway in more than half of the country, Harris spent just three days of the last week of September in battleground states. On Sept. 28, when Trump gave a speech in Wisconsin before flying to Alabama for the Georgia-Alabama football game, Harris was attending a fundraiser in San Francisco. And beyond concerns about her schedule, Democrats argue that Harris would benefit from venues that allow her to introduce herself to voters in a more authentic way, such as town hall events, more sit-down interviews and unscripted exchanges with voters.

 

“There’s a time at which you just have to barnstorm these battlegrounds,” said David Axelrod, the longtime Democratic operative who helped lead Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and was an early critic of President Joe Biden’s campaigning style. “These races are decathlons, and there are a lot of events, and you have to do all of them because people want to test you.”

 

“It’s the most difficult oral exam on the planet for the most difficult job, and part of that is just that spontaneous — town halls, all kinds of interviews, and not just friendly interviews. OTRs where you interact in a substantive way with people, all of those things are valuable,” he continued. “And I would be doing them if I were her.”

 

“There’s a time at which you just have to barnstorm these battlegrounds,” said David Axelrod, a longtime Democratic operative. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

 

The discussions inside the party speak to the growing anxiety about the state of the race, as polls show Harris and Trump locked in a dead heat across all seven battleground states — and with Democrats haunted by the echoes of Hillary Clinton’s play-it-safe 2016 campaign.

 

“We know this isn’t actually 2016 again, and it’s not like she’s not going to Wisconsin,” said a former Biden staffer, referring to Clinton’s infamous decision to never travel to the state that she eventually lost. “But we can still learn from that. Trump is everywhere again, just like he was then. Our side needs to be, too.”

 

Democrats acknowledged Harris is performing better than Biden and the excitement surrounding her candidacy has increased the party’s cash advantage. She’s also put the Sun Belt swing states back in play. But they’re also growing more distressed that a campaign insisting Harris is the “underdog” is running like she’s protecting a lead.

 

While the plan is for Harris’ travel to ramp up in October, the vice president has spent more than a third of days since the Democratic National Convention receiving briefings from staff and conducting internal meetings, or without any scheduled public events, according to a POLITICO review of her travel. That excludes days with known official side business, like her late September meeting with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the president of the United Arab Emirates, at the White House, last week’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and briefings she received at FEMA’s headquarters in Washington earlier this week.

 

Of the remaining days, the vice president spent just a little more than half of them holding rallies, policy-focused speeches, events with labor unions and other in-person, public-facing events, including stops at small businesses, in swing states. And she has spent nearly half of her post-DNC days in Washington.

 

Comparing Harris’ campaign to other recent Democratic presidential nominees is difficult, as Biden’s 2020 campaign was affected by the restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic. But an analysis of Barack Obama’s first campaign in 2008 and Clinton’s 2016 bid — based on data from Eric Appleman’s Democracy in Action sites — shows that Harris’ schedule more closely reflects the latter than the former.

 

Looking at the same time period in those two elections, Obama had just two days with no public events, and his schedule was packed daily with an array of campaign events, brief appearances at local restaurants, fundraisers, and other events. Clinton, by contrast, had roughly the same number of days with no events that Harris has had, including a brief stint where she was treated for pneumonia.