Democrats hold palpable concerns about whether Vice President Harris can appeal to voters in key battleground states, even as they have united behind her candidacy in the six days since President Biden’s exit from the race.
The worries have been hard to see amid the party’s elation with Harris, who is widely seen as a huge improvement over Biden.
Democrat after Democrat has come out to endorse Harris, and polls showing a jump in enthusiasm, along with a surge in political donations, have left the party hopeful its base will come out and that young voters will return.
At the same time, Democrats are worried about how strong Harris will be in the key northern states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Without winning those three states, it will be very hard for her to prevail in the Electoral College.
“She’s done an amazing job not only uniting the base but exciting the base, but the key question right now is, can she appeal to the voters Democrats have always needed to put us over the top?” said one Democratic strategist. “I think there is still some concern that she can do this.”
Polling released Thursday by Emerson College Polling and The Hill found Harris trailing former President Trump in both Pennsylvania and Michigan, but tied with him in Wisconsin.
There was no guarantee Biden would have won those three states, as Trump had pulled ahead of the president in polling before his decision to drop out of the contest.
But the demographic makeup of the states has long left some in the party worried about Harris’s strength there. It’s one reason Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) is considered a favorite to be Harris’s vice presidential pick.
“We need to keep that exuberance going, particularly among young people, but we can never forget we don’t win the presidency without probably Pennsylvania, and you don’t win Pennsylvania without doing okay in western Pennsylvania,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) said Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“We also need to appeal to that guy who’s a hunter in west Pennsylvania who doesn’t like Donald Trump and just be conscious of that fact that our job is to expand the coalition, not to do and say things which will turn off, by and large, and I hate to stay this your union-oriented blue collar folks in the Midwest.”
A New York Times/Siena poll released Thursday provided a bunch of good news for Harris. It showed her dramatically closing the gap with Trump and surging in terms of enthusiasm among voters.
The question is where those voters are and how that translates to the Electoral College. Democrats have lost two presidential elections since 2000 in which they won the popular vote, and the Times questioned in its political newsletter whether Harris could win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College.
GOP strategists think Harris will have a tougher time appealing to the swing voters of the “blue wall” states.
“There’s a pretty big divide between the Joe from Scranton and the Kamala from San Francisco brand profiles,” said Kevin Madden, a longtime Republican strategist who served as a senior adviser on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.
Key Democratic donors have acknowledged concerns about Harris’s ability to win over blue-collar white voters. It was one reason some were pushing for an open convention in the weeks before Biden dropped out.
At the same time, these donors also saw Biden as facing an unenthusiastic base, and declining support among Black and Hispanic men.
“Now we have a new problem: She got what Biden was missing in terms of exciting the base, but now she has to get what Biden had,” said one Democratic donor. “Biden was popular among old white men and she isn’t. So we have a lot of work to do. This is going to be a fight for the moderates and independents, the Nikki Haley voters.”
The donor acknowledged Harris has had “a tremendous rollout.”
“We were in hell and now we’ve made a complete rebound,” the donor said. “But so far I don’t know what her narrative is and how she attracts those voters.”
Matt Gorman, a Republican operative who is a veteran of three presidential campaigns, said Harris “needs to prove she can win Biden’s share of white men.”
“She’ll counter and say she thinks she can win minority voters at a higher rate but it’s like a see-saw,” Gorman said. “You need to keep Biden’s balance.”
In the next 100 days — an incredibly tight time — Harris will have to lure these voters by making her story known and solidifying her message. Democrats say if she does that effectively, she’ll be able to lure enough of the voters she needs to secure a win in November.
“Even in this short period, the vice president still has time to reintroduce herself to voters and to redefine what people think of her,” said Democratic strategist Rodell Mollineau. “As she talks more about her vision and her record of accomplishment as attorney general, senator and as VP, some of these voters will come towards her.
“Remember, this is not a referendum on the VP,” Mollineau said. “This is a compare and contrast.”
In the coming days, Harris—along with the campaign’s surrogates— plans to spend more time in the key battleground states. On Saturday, second gentleman Doug Emhoff will travel to Wisconsin for a canvas launch.
Those close to the campaign say they expect Harris to spend a good amount of time in the coming weeks ramping up visits to key Rust Belt states.
On Wednesday for example, Harris appeared in Milwaukee, her fifth visit to the state, in front of a crowd of more than 3,500 people, the largest campaign event to date.
Campaign aides tout Harris’s long history of working with labor during her time in California. They also say reproductive rights, an issue Harris has championed in recent months, will be a salient issue in those key states.
“In the days and weeks and weeks to come, she’ll take that message across the battlegrounds, capitalizing on the historic infrastructure the campaign has spent the last year building to reach voters where they are to ensure they understand the choice in this election,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, the chair of Harris for President, said in a Wednesday memo. “While the vice president is poised to build on the 2020 Biden-Harris coalition, Trump on the other hand, has not expanded his support.”
Quietly, even amid so much excitement from the base around Harris, Democrats have drawn parallels to another woman who found herself in a similar situation against Trump: Hillary Clinton.
In 2016, Clinton ended up losing the race in part because she was unable to lock up voters in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
But this time, Democrats say they have learned those lessons.
“I don’t think anyone took seriously the disconnect between those voters and the candidate,” Mollineau said. “In 2016, neither the party, nor the media understood the breadth of the discontent many voters were feeling about the state of politics that led us to underestimating the pull of Donald Trump.
“I think that’s the difference between 2016 and 2024,” he added. “And I fully expect the vice president to do that work in the next 100 days to make sure the voters are with her on Election Day. … She doesn’t have to get all of them. She has to get most of them.”