Saturday marks one month to go until Election Day on November 5.
As the presidential campaign enters the home stretch, it remains a margin-of-error race nationally and in the seven key battleground states likely to determine the winner of the election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump.
Both national party chairs are confident of their chances.
“We’re playing offense right now,” Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley said in a Fox News Digital interview earlier this week. “We feel very, very good about the map.”
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Vice President Kamala Harris, right, and former President Donald Trump during their first and likely only debate, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. (Doug Mills/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
His counterpart, Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison told reporters on Friday that “the enthusiasm is palatable in our party.”
But Harrison emphasized that “we know that this election will come down to the margins, and we’re not taking any vote for granted.”
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Since replacing President Biden atop the Democrats’ 2024 ticket in mid-July, Harris has enjoyed a wave of momentum and enjoyed a surge in fundraising. In the all-important cash dash, Harris and the DNC appear to hold a large advantage over Trump and the RNC.
And that’s helped bolster what was already a very impressive ground game organizational advantage the Democrats held over the Republicans.
Vice President Kamala Harris waves during a campaign event in Madison, Wisconsin, on Friday, Sept. 20, 2024. (Alex Wroblewski/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“We started laying the foundation well before 2024 by investing in our ground game,” Harrison highlighted. “We have been on the ground since the earliest days of this campaign getting our message out.”
The DNC chair touted that there are “more than 312 coordinated offices across the battleground states,” with “over 2,000 coordinated staff…doing the hard work on the ground.”
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But Whatley wasn’t phased.
“The Democrats have a ton of money. The Democrats always have a ton of money,” Whatley said, noting that Trump was outraised in both the 2016 and 2020 elections.
The RNC chair emphasized that “we have the resources we need to get our message out to our voters and to every voter. I feel very, very comfortable about the campaign plan.”
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump departs a campaign event at the Central Wisconsin Airport on September 7, 2024 in Mosinee, Wisconsin. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
And while the Harris campaign and allied groups have outspent Trump and his aligned groups in the ad wars, Whatley pointed to the former president’s ability to capture free media.
“Donald Trump is out there talking every single day to the voters in a way that only he can. He can generate news. He can go out there and generate social media hits. He can communicate directly with the American voters like no other politician of our generation, so it’s a huge advantage for us,” he said.
Veteran Democratic pollster Chris Anderson, who conducted the Fox News Poll along with longtime Republican pollster Daron Shaw, said with four weeks to go, “my expectations of plausible outcomes range from a narrow Electoral College victory for Trump to a modestly more comfortable victory for Harris.”
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But while Harris holds a slight two-point edge in an average of the national surveys, Shaw noted that “the issue profile of this election continues to favor Trump.”
Veteran political scientist and New England College president Wayne Lesperance said that “this presidential contest is shaping up to be one of the closest in history, with the results likely to be slow-coming.”
And longtime Republican consultant Matt Gorman, a veteran of numerous GOP presidential campaigns, highlighted that “we’re slated for the tightest race since 2000.”
“There are no more debates. There’s going to be a vacuum of news,” he said. “It’s integral the Trump campaign fill that vacuum with a message that puts Harris on the defensive.”
Republican Sen. JD Vance of Ohio (left) and Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the two major party running mates, face off in the vice presidential debate, on Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024, at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York City. (Michele Crowe/CBS via Getty Images)
Trump, like Biden, is a well-known commodity.
But Harris, even after being in the spotlight for nearly two months, is still less well-defined.
“The more voters get to know Vice President Harris, the more they like her,” Democratic strategist and communicator Chris Moyer argued.
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“It’s imperative that she continues to get in front of swing state voters, and she could afford to do more in the final weeks,” he offered. “She should barnstorm the key states, filling up her schedule with rallies and local interviews and off-the-record stops that produce shareable clips that bounce around social media. They’ve run a nearly perfect race to this point, but many voters still want to know more about who she is, what she believes, and what she will do as president.”
With one month to go, there’s always the possibility of an October surprise that could rock the White House race.
Dennis Daggett, executive vice president of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), speaks to picketing workers outside of the APM container terminal at the Port of Newark in Newark, New Jersey, on Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. Dockworkers walked out of every major port on the US East and Gulf coasts for the first time in nearly 50 years, before quickly suspending the strike. (Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The dockworkers strike earlier this week – which closed major ports – could have wreaked havoc on the nation’s supply chain. It could have turned into an October surprise, but the strike was suspended after just two days.
Hurricane Helene, which tore a path of destruction through the southeast, also made an impact on the presidential contest – and there were memories of how Superstorm Sandy rocked the 2012 White House race between then-President Obama and GOP nominee Mitt Romney.
And the strife in the Middle East – between Israel, Iran, and Hezbollah, also threatens to upend the election.
It’s important to note that while Election Day is a month away, in over two-dozen states, early in-person voting, absentee balloting, and voting by mail, are already underway.
Paul Steinhauser is a politics reporter based in New Hampshire.
