Good on her. Harris Campaign Doubles Down on PA, despite taking the lead

This is how you run a campaign

Never leave anything on the table. Ever.

That was the one campaign lesson I learned watching the Hillary Clinton campaign hit the self-destruct button in the final stretch. Granted, FBI Director James Comey disrupted the trendline, but Trump’s margin of victory in the Midwest and Pennsylvania—less than 80,000 votes—proves there were stones left unturned. Maybe if a few more doors had been knocked on in Michigan, instead of wasting time in Iowa, things could have been different.

She might have won despite the left wing pulling the rug out from under her. But the lesson was clear: never take battleground states for granted until the last vote is cast.

I have a long list of complaints against the Harris campaign.

1. I never liked their “semi-circle” strategy, which implicitly admitted their weakness with Latino voters. I really wanted them to push back hard against Trump’s tactical encroachment on their turf.

2. I still don’t understand why the Harris campaign hasn’t emphasized the threat that Trump and MAGA billionaires pose to Social Security, Medicare, and other social welfare programs designed to protect average Americans. The Harris campaign missed a major opportunity to address this demographic. They should have clarified how Trump plans to fulfill his promise to cut the corporate tax rate from 21% to 15%. To achieve this, he would need to raid Social Security and Medicare funds—and even that may not suffice—leaving him no choice but to drive up the deficit. Senior voters should understand that a vote for Trump effectively signals support for dismantling their safety nets, while delivering a financial windfall to wealthy MAGA campaign donors.

3. I completely disagree with the Harris Campaign approach in Arizona—I think they should have invested far more in that state. Allowing Trump to win Arizona risks letting it drift further red, rather than moving it toward blue.

So, yes, there are grievances.

But I have to give her campaign credit for not taking their eyes off the ball. They are hitting Pennsylvania and the Midwest as hard as they can, despite early voting giving them some cushion.

In Pennsylvania, nearly 1.7 million early votes have already been cast, a strong turnout for a state that saw 2.6 million early and mail-in votes in 2020. Democrats are leading with a margin close to half a million votes.

Politico reported some really bad news for the Trump campaign: “In Pennsylvania, where voters over the age of 65 have cast nearly half of the early ballots, registered Democrats account for about 58 percent of votes cast by seniors, compared to 35 percent for Republicans, despite both parties having roughly equal numbers of registered voters aged 65 and older.”

But that isn’t even the main concern. The real issue is that Pennsylvania is showing strong signs of GOP defections.

According to a Fox News poll of Pennsylvania, Trump is running 5 percentage points behind Harris among voters ages 65 and over, slipping back from the previous month, when he and Harris were tied with that demographic. It’s a major shift from 2020, when Trump carried 53 percent of the senior vote in Pennsylvania in a losing effort in the state.

In 2020, the over-65 age group accounted for nearly a third of Pennsylvania’s final vote count. A five-point lead among them could easily deliver the state’s 19 electoral votes to Kamala Harris. Democratic Senator Casey’s lead was so robust that, after spending hundreds of millions in the state, the GOP shifted its focus to Wisconsin and Nevada in October.

With the wind at her back and early votes coming in at a rapid pace, one would have thought the Harris campaign might ease off the pedal.

But nope. That did not happen.

NBC’s political reporter Allen Smith, citing a Harris campaign official, reported that the Harris campaign is still knocking on 2,000 doors per minute across the state. My own sources in Pennsylvania say they are continuing to phone bank and knock on doors every day.

So what is the Harris campaign doing? Why are they refusing to ease off in Pennsylvania and concentrate on the Sunbelt?

This does make winning Wisconsin a high priority for them. However, if they are still knocking on that many doors in Pennsylvania, I am 100% confident that they will be doing the same in Wisconsin and Michigan.

There is one more thing to remember: when strategizing, you also need to consider what the other side is doing. Donald Trump and the GOP do not have an organized ground game—nothing at all.

The Guardian reported this last week:

Donald Trump’s ground game in Arizona and Nevada may be undermined by canvassers working for America Pac using GPS spoofing to pretend they have knocked on doors when they haven’t, according to multiple people familiar with the practice and a leaked how-to-fake-location video.

The ramifications for Trump may be far reaching, given America Pac has taken on the bulk of the Trump campaign’s ground game in the battleground states, and the election increasingly appears set to be decided by turnout.

A bootleg how-to-spoof video, made by an America Pac canvasser in Nevada and obtained by the Guardian, shows the apparent ease with which locations can be changed to fake door knocks, calling into question how many Trump voters have actually been reached by the field operation.

Trump’s ground game in the Sunbelt is hardly worth mentioning. The Sunbelt is a must-win for him. The Trump campaign's strategy was to win both the Sunbelt and Pennsylvania. If their ground game is this weak in must-win states, it’s likely to be even worse in Wisconsin and Michigan.

This situation allows Kamala Harris's campaign to continue investing in ground resources in the Midwest and Pennsylvania while also allocating funds for ad campaigns in the Sunbelt. Of course, there will be a mix, but the distribution of investments will skew in the direction I’m suggesting.

I still don’t understand why the billion-dollar Trump campaign didn’t recognize the importance of a ground game. It makes no sense whatsoever. The demographic of men without college degrees, which is key to their success, has lower turnout rates than women and college-educated voters.

The demographic Democrats are after have a higher propensity to vote, and with a strong ground game, they can reach bring in low-propensity voters and add it to their pile. This should have given the Trump campaign even more reason to prioritize their ground game.

If they had mounted such an operation, they could have won. But they did not invest, and they did not think it was important—one of the worst campaign mistakes of this election cycle.

When Trump loses, there will be only one area where I point my finger: their ground game. Everything else will come after that.

The Kamala Harris campaign refuses to change its strategy. For once, I grudgingly agree that it is a good strategy. I just wish they would take more risks with Latino voters—they should. But sometimes, winning does supersede certain long-term goals. I hope they do not continue this approach after winning the race.

I also strongly believe that the polls have severely undercounted GOP defections. This will become evident when the ballots are counted. The Liz Cheney, Nikki Haley, and Mitt Romney voters are out there, but pollsters keep claiming that Trump has expanded his GOP support this year compared to 2020. Internal polling would show the Kamala Harris campaign a completely different picture. Therefore, the decision to stay focused on their base strategy is a good one: secure the 270 electoral votes and let the wind carry them in the Sunbelt.