Nearly two dozen Democrats warned Vice President Kamala Harris in a Politico article over the weekend her relaxed campaign strategy could hurt her chances of defeating former President Donald Trump.
With few days left on the 2024 campaign trail, Harris has opted to spend time rubbing shoulders with California elites and traveling for friendly interviews in Manhattan instead of focusing her time in swing states. Harris has not sat for many local interviews in battleground states, and she has mostly avoided the national press and conducted zero press conferences.
Democrat operatives, which include some of Harris’s own staffers, told Politico they are worried about Harris’s “relatively light campaign schedule,” compared to Trump’s aggressive strategy of focusing on winning support in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and other swing states.
Politico detailed the Democrats’ fears:
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.
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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.
“There’s a time at which you just have to barnstorm these battlegrounds,” David Axelrod, the longtime Democrat Obama-era operative, told Politico.
Harris will sit for softball interviews with Democrat-allied Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert, and the hosts of The View, the New York Times’s Reid J. Epstein reported Sunday. Over the weekend, she gave an interview to “Call Her Daddy” podcast and spoke with 60 Minutes.
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Kamala Harris via Storyful
“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,” Axelrod continued. “And I would be doing them if I were her.”
Jim Messina, who ran Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, also said Harris is not using her time on the campaign trail efficiently. “It’s not just about packing her schedule with public events — it’s about making efficient use of every second to make sure undecided voters see her being able to lead, meeting voters where they are across media, and fundraising strategically,” Messina told Politico.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
