A jittery Harris campaign makes big plans to clinch a narrow win

By Edward-Isaac Dovere, CNN

(CNN) — With two weeks to go until Election Day, Kamala Harris’ top advisers are staring down numbers that show a wide majority of Americans saying the country is on the wrong track.

They’re also confident that the next two weeks will include Donald Trump dropping more references to the “enemy within” or January 6 as a “day of love” and going off on rambling tangents like his lewd remarks about golf legend Arnold Palmer at a Pennsylvania rally last week. And they expect they’ll be able to trigger him into making more outlandish claims.

Getting Americans to focus on that over the next two weeks, to see a second Trump term as taking the country further off track and to view Harris as an acceptable agent of change is likely to decide the presidency, a dozen top aides and outside allies told CNN. As Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told top donors in Philadelphia during a retreat last week, they may not believe that the race could still be tied, but in the battleground states where the presidency will be won, it is.

“Historically, it would be unusual to have seven states come down to a point or less,”  David Plouffe,  Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager who now serves as a senior adviser to Harris, said of the battleground landscape. “But I think at this point, you have to assume that’s a distinct possibility.”

Plouffe and other Harris advisers do not believe Trump’s largely outsourced door-knocking and other on-the-ground outreach operations can match what the national Democrats and the Harris campaign – which inherited some of the same team from President Joe Biden – spent a year putting together. But they believe this advantage can only take them so far.

“Democrats wish Donald Trump wouldn’t get more than 46% of the vote,” Plouffe said, referring to the national popular vote percentage the former president secured in his previous campaigns. But in the battleground states, “that’s not reality. He’s going to get up to 48% in all of these states. And so we just have to make sure we’re hitting our win number, which depending on the state, could be 50, could be 49.5.”

Plouffe and other Harris aides, though, believe that the vice president still has room to grow.

To get there, the campaign is finalizing marquee, attention-grabbing events showcasing Harris, with symbolic backdrops aimed at driving home the message.

“The goal is to make sure that you’re motivating your operation, that you’re being felt in all these places,” said Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Harris campaign co-chair.

More targeted messaging

With Harris aides still on a frantic chase to find disengaged voters, much of that outreach will come in the form of campaign tactics that are new to presidential campaigns – some that rely on new technology.

Campaign aides believe they can make the difference via the surrogates they have lined up, whether those are celebrities making targeted social media appearances or community members sending direct texts like the attendees at a Doug Emhoff event in Southfield, Michigan, with Jewish voters, who were asked to send messages encouraging people to host “Kamala Shabbat” dinners.

The Harris aides CNN spoke to expressed a jittery self-confidence, but they also kept using phrases such as“jump ball” and “down to the wire” and the occasional emoji with nauseous green cheeks.

While several top Democratic operatives said they worry Harris may be losing the traditional TV ad wars in the face of Republicans’ extensive and intense attacks on transgender issues, the Harris aides disagreed. Most of the up-for-grabs voters aren’t paying attention to those ads if they’re watching TV at all, the aides contended. And the campaign believes it has the edge over Trump’s operation, thanks to months of precinct-by-precinct organizing and planning that is constantly being adjusted based on early vote and online data.

All through “brat summer” and the tent revival-like atmosphere of the Democratic convention, aides said, this was what they were planning for: a stable race that will be won on the margins and that will require a few big swings that some political insiders may see as desperate Hail Mary moves.

Some will be new announcements: After months of carefully poll-testing well-known nonpoliticians, including entertainers and athletes, the campaign will roll out even more endorsements, interviews and appearances meant to break through to tuned-out voters. Expect more events like the vice president’s interview with Charlamagne tha God and Julia Roberts’ trip to Georgia, both ideas that came right out of the campaign’s research.

“We’re not throwing spaghetti against the wall. We have literally studied who these voters listen to,” said a campaign official.

Some of the outreach will include reviving Biden-style themes around Trump’s unfitness for office, trying to make the argument for a stable commander in chief while convincing wavering voters to make the leap toward electing the first Black female president. But rather than moralistic and abstract messaging, Harris and her ads will focus on how much worse they believe a second Trump presidency would be. And in a way Biden never could, this would include more hammering of Trump as unfit for the presidency, specifically because of their claims that he is in mental and physical decline.

Reproductive rights will remain central, but the outreach will also keep pressing Harris’ biography and economic plans, convinced her campaign has real room to grow with non-college-educated White women repelled by Trump, who aides believe she can win if they feel she’s more middle class than radical left. The team also expects to build on its efforts among seniors and maximize the enthusiasm for Harris among Black women, while pushing to grow support among Black men and Latinos.

“At some level, you just want to be the one to make the last argument to them as loudly as you possibly can,” one top Democratic operative helping to get Harris elected wrote in a text. “But this thing is going to be decided in the last week, I am SURE of it.”

Extensive plans for the final two weeks

At least one closing event is expected to bring Harris and running mate Tim Walz back together, with the Minnesota governor expected to be deployed – in rural areas and among men, especially – for the kind of Trump bashing that the campaign finds harder to get across in ads.

“Some of these folks say, ‘Eh, we got through one Trump term.’ They rewrite the history of it. They don’t recall that all of our neighbors were dying of Covid because of his idiocy of neglecting science, and telling us to inject bleach didn’t do much good,” Walz said Saturday at a rally in Papillion, Nebraska, previewing the kind of lines he’ll be dropping over the next two weeks. “They tell us we could survive another four years, and I’m an optimist. … But I truly don’t know if the institutions will hold if we get another four years of Donald Trump.”

Walz then pointed to erstwhile Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn’s recent response when asked if he would preside over military tribunals if his former boss returns to the White House.

“The answer to that is: ‘Are you out of your goddamn mind?’ Mike Flynn’s answer was: ‘We have to win first,’” Walz said. “I’ll be damned if I’ll give the flag to a fascist like these guys, and I’ll be damned if I’ll give them family issues because we know where the family values sat. We’re not going to give them freedom, that’s for damn sure, because we know what freedom looks like. And just for good measures I’m not giving them football – the posers.”

The campaign will look to make that argument reverberate, with ads during games, online appeals and digital billboards along Nebraska highways that feature a man saying he’s a two-time Trump voter and a hunter but going with Harris this time.

Advisers know that part of this outreach is tending to nervy Democratic insiders, who never really considered that Trump could win at this point in 2016, then always assumed he would lose in 2020 and now have been sitting for weeks with the real prospect that the former president could win again.

Usually big Democratic donors are eager to voice their doubts. But leaving last week’s Philadelphia retreat, after briefings on the campaign mechanics and the legal preparations, many of the top donors felt confident that Harris can get there.

Several left buzzing with Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison’s speech at a thank-you dinner at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Imagine, he said, it’s Inauguration Day, and it’s also Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and everyone is bundled up in the cold on the steps of a Capitol built by the hands of slaves.

Focus on two people, Harrison said, according to two people in the room: first, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her black robe, holding Frederick Douglass’ Bible; and then Harris, in white or maybe a tan suit, walking out to put her hand on that Bible to swear the oath.

“Doesn’t have to be a fairy tale,” Harrison told them. “It can be our reality if all do something.”

Not counting on a ‘silent majority’

The Harris campaign is not behind the signs that have started popping up in women’s bathrooms in North Carolina, Georgia and other states, saying things like “Your vote is secret” and “Your husband can’t know what you do in the voting booth.”

They don’t mind those signs, though. The message is right in line with what Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming said Monday at a stop with Harris in Michigan: “If you’re at all concerned, you can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody.”

Despite lots of chatter that this year may see a flip in the 2016 and 2020 polling trends that underestimated support for Trump, top Harris aides are not counting on their own “silent majority” of women and Republicans in deep-red areas or families who aren’t saying how turned off or exhausted they are by the former president.

But some Harris voters and even some on-the-ground operatives and volunteers are. They pass around anecdotes of women in suburban neighborhoods telling door-knockers that they’re voting for Harris, even though none of their friends or neighbors are; or Republicans gathering at official events who seem relieved to be in rooms where they’re not the only conservatives who’ve turned on Trump.

“The independents that I encountered are weighing voting for Harris, which is a good sign to me,” Nancy Quarles, who chairs the Oakland County Democratic Party in Michigan, told CNN last week ahead of an appearance by the vice president in the Detroit suburbs. While a few years ago, those people would have been Republican voters, “there’s a big opening, and they’re paying attention and being willing to listen to the discussions,” Quarles said.

Jennifer Norris, a health care analyst from rural Wahoo, Nebraska, and a former chair of the Saunders County Democrats, told CNN ahead of the Walz rally on Saturday that she has had her car vandalized by Trump supporters in the past. But at this point, “I know too many Republicans who will not say it, but they are ‘blue dot,’” she said, using the nickname for the Democratic concentration in the Omaha area, where one of Nebraska’s electoral votes is in play.

Blaine McKillip, a retired customer care executive who now restores properties in Omaha, said in his speech introducing Walz that, until this year, he had voted for Republicans in every presidential election since Ronald Reagan. But he doubts many will join him this year.

“For most of them, I don’t think they can. They’ve bought in the Kool-Aid so much that they’re just not movable,” McKillip told CNN in the parking lot afterward, a newly bought Harris-Walz camouflage hat in his hand. “And also, they’re afraid to change because it would tell them, ‘I was wrong.’”

Then again, McKillip said, “I’m just talking to the guys.”

In Pennsylvania, where the Harris campaign’s focus on Republicans has been highest, Pittsburgh-area US Rep. Chris Deluzio told CNN after rallying veterans at a campaign office that he believes these voters will be won over in the end.

“What we’re going to see in November is some traditional Republicans, independents, who might lean that way,” Deluzio said. “They’re not willing to embrace a guy like Trump who calls these January 6 people who were convicted ‘political prisoners.’ They are willing to do the patriotic thing and keep our government together and strong, even if there are some policy differences.”

Harris advisers are not counting on any such silent-majority voters coming over to the vice president without more efforts to convince them. The campaign’s numbers showing paths to victory, Plouffe said, do not rely on these voters, though he left open the possibility that they could help deliver a bigger win than public or internal campaign polls are showing so far.

“I’m confident that we’re being conservative in how we view this race,” Plouffe said, “so that we are more likely to be surprised on the upside by things.”

CNN’s Alison Main contributed to this report.

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