Democratic campaign strategists are increasingly worried that Vice President Kamala Harris’s light campaign schedule compared to that of former President Donald Trump could leave her at a disadvantage with a month before Election Day.
Nearly two dozen Democrats, including some within the Harris campaign, spoke with Politico about how Harris may be playing it too safe in the lead-up to what is expected to be a very close election, a risk-averse strategy that could hinder her success.
Harris was in battleground states only three days of the last week in September. But new polling released on Saturday shows Harris leading in only four of the seven key battleground states.
Neither Trump nor Harris is ahead in any of these states by more than 2 percentage points, and in five of those states, the margin for the leading candidate is less than one point.
“There’s a time at which you just have to barnstorm these battlegrounds,” David Axelrod, leader of the 2008 and 2012 campaigns for President Barack Obama, told Politico.
Axelrod described the race for the presidency as a decathlon, with a multitude of events, “and you have to do all of them because people want to test you.”
Insiders say the plan is for Harris to overload her travel schedule in October, but the vice president has spent more than a third of her time since the Democratic National Convention in briefings with staff and internal meetings without scheduled public events.
Many of Harris’s public events were also fundraisers in Democratic strongholds that are already familiar with the vice president’s record, such as the one in San Francisco on September 28.
Strategists supportive of Harris’s style are also quick to note, though, that the Harris campaign needed to recover from the waning fundraising when President Joe Biden was still the leader of the ticket.
They argue that the funds are now being used for high-profile ad buys that will reach more voters in key areas than in-person, off-the-cuff events.
Data from AdImpact indicate that the Harris campaign spent $192 million on advertising in September compared to Trump’s $72 million.
But behind closed doors, some Democrats are comparing the Harris campaign to that of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who infamously led a play-it-safe ground game that some say cost her the 2016 election.
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Trump, by contrast, has taken a more hands-on approach to travel for the campaign, as he did in both 2016 and 2020.
The former president is slated to hold a large rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, at the same site of the attempted assassination against him in July.