Vice President Kamala Harris has been told she risks losing her core supporter base unless she changes her campaign’s closing message — and its messengers — without delay to focus on bread-and-butter issues not feel-good “kumbaya optics.”
An AP report by Steve Peoples reveals the Democratic nominee has been told she is too bound up in winning over Republicans at the expense of her own party’s supporters and leaving those Democratic voters behind puts her entire campaign outcome at risk.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (D) warned the time has come for a change of course, speed and direction in event strategy beginning with a focus on the needs that dominate around the family kitchen table.
“The truth of the matter is that there are a hell of a lot more working-class people who could vote for Kamala Harris than there are conservative Republicans,” Sanders told the Associated Press reporter in an interview Thursday.
He claimed he’s been doing whatever he’s asked to help Harris win. Sanders has participated in two dozen Harris campaign related-events this month alone, although they’re largely in rural areas. None have been with the nominee herself.
“She has to start talking more to the needs of working-class people,” Sanders said in the AP interview. “I wish this had taken place two months ago. It is what it is.”
Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, praised Harris’ advertising team for “smartly” investing hundreds of millions of dollars behind ads focusing on grocery prices, taxing billionaires and Social Security — “things that both win swing voters and pump up the base.”
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But, Green cautioned, “there’s been an odd disconnect between the campaign’s economic populist ad strategy and the event strategy that focuses almost exclusively on Liz Cheney kumbaya optics that depress the base right as voting begins and don’t provably win more swing voters than bread-and-butter issues.”
As Harris struggles for direction, former President Donald Trump marches on.
The Republican nominee is set to outline his formal closing message Sunday at Madison Square Garden in New York City that’s expected to focus on average Americans’ displeasure with the direction of the country, as Breitbart News reported.
He begins virtually every rally with a variation of: Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Trump’s crowds roar their response in an affirmation his messaging is engaging the Republican base.
“Kamala Harris broke the economy. She broke the border. President Trump very clearly is going to fix the economy and fix the border,” said Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller as quoted by the AP report, who argued Harris, with her focus on Trump, wasn’t talking about how she will make life better for the vast majority of everyday Americans.
Put simply, nobody knows exactly what Kamala Harris stands for.
