Kamala Harris’s final message includes economic policy

Tens of millions of dollars in television advertising have made it clear that Democrats I want their final message to be: Donald Trump will restrict abortion rights, cut taxes for the rich and cut Americans’ health care.

But organizing a 24-hour news cycle to focus on the positions Trump and other Republicans have taken for decades is a difficult task, especially when the media can (rightly!) focus more on warnings coming from Trump’s top aides suggesting he has a love for Adolf Hitler and has fascist tendencies more broadly, or at his final rally in New York. with lots of racist, sexist and generally offensive comments.

Vice President Kamala Harris hopes she can spend the next week linking Trump’s autocratic ambitions to his right-wing views on abortion and the economy in the minds of voters. Georgia on Thursday, when she asked those in attendance to imagine who would be sitting in the Oval Office in a few months.

“It’s either Donald Trump, brooding over his list of enemies, or me, working for you, checking off my to-do list,” Harris said to applause from the crowd.

As the campaign enters its final days, Harris’ success in a tight election may come down to how well she and her allies can weave together these two very different cases against Trump and deliver each message to compelling voters who need to hear it.

Striking the right balance is causing some concern among Harris supporters as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) warning that Democratic campaigns are not focusing enough on the economic struggles of the working class. (Sanders, for what it’s worth, issued similar warnings in 2020 And 2022.)

“She needs to start talking more about the needs of the working class,” Sanders told the Associated Press last week. “I wish this had happened two months ago. It is what it is.”

Harris, speaking to reporters Friday ahead of her rally in Houston, said she was confident her campaign could deliver both messages at once.

“One of the things I love about the American people is that we can think about many things at once,” she said, before listing “lowering costs,” “fighting for our democracy,” and “fighting for people’s freedom to take solutions.” about her own body” as one of her main priorities.

A memo from the FF PAC, the main pro-Harris super PAC sent to Democratic operatives on Friday, warned against focusing too much on Trump’s fascist threat, noting that its internal testing has shown it to be less effective than focusing on Harris’ plans for the economy , including expanding the child tax credit and building hundreds of thousands of new homes to lower housing costs. The note was first reported by The New York Times.

In a statement to the newspaper, the super PAC president, who typically doesn’t comment on his strategy or even alert reporters about the ads he runs, downplayed the memo’s significance and explicitly praised Harris’ rhetoric.

The PAC’s research “shows people that the most effective way to use Trump’s words and behavior is to tie them to consequences in voters’ lives,” Chauncey McLean wrote. “That’s what Kamala Harris does every day, for example, comparing your to-do list with the list of your enemies.”

Harris’ campaign released two ads Thursday night using John Kelly’s audio interview with The New York Times that Trump was a fascist who attacked the former president, although it is unclear how often the ad was aired on television. The campaign has occasionally released commercials in recent months that focus more on Trump as a threat to democracy, but has not aired them widely on television.

And others in the Democratic ecosystem seem more confident in using Kelly as a messenger to attack Trump. Blueprint, the Democratic Party’s centrist voting organization, found in a poll earlier this month that Harris’s most effective closing argument involves mentioning how many members of Trump’s Cabinet and others republicans refused to support the former president.

Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the campaign’s chairwoman, agreed in a television interview Sunday.

“When someone like John Kelly stands up and talks about what it was like to serve under Donald Trumpsays that he clearly wants uncontrolled power, the American people are not happy with this,” she said on MSNBC The show was hosted by former White House press secretary Jen Psaki. “It’s very important when people close to Donald Trump talk about this, and we saw that in all of our data.”

But ultimately, it may not be her own economic plans or Trump’s fascist threat that is Harris’ most powerful final message. Her campaign used Friday night’s rally, where the vice president appeared alongside Beyonce and Willie Nelson, to highlight that the Lone Star State’s abortion ban could soon expand to swing states under Trump’s leadership.

Priorities USA, a digital advertising super PAC, told reporters Friday they are confident the abortion message is successful with persuasive voters and targets that are still available to Harris – people who tend to be younger, female and more likely to black or Hispanic. The number one issue voters have heard advertised in the last few weeks has been abortion rights, according to the group’s polling.

“We’re really pleased to hear messages that people remember because they tend to trust (Democrats) more,” said Nick Ahamed, the group’s deputy executive director.

At the same time, the group also warned Democrats about one particular line of attack, saying that focusing on the idea that Trump is “tired” or acting strange hasn’t helped Democrats much.

“When we talk about Trump, fascism, authoritarianism, as long as we connect it to what it means to voters, we’re in great territory,” Ahamed told reporters. “The concern is that we’re just talking about him not showing up at rallies, canceling press conferences or doing weird dances.”

The Harris campaign has a second major rally planned for Tuesday night on the National Mall in Washington, not far from where Trump spoke to the crowd on Jan. 6, 2021, before they marched to the Capitol. While the passage seemed to indicate Trump’s focus on threats to democracy, O’Malley Dillon delivered a speech that focused heavily on the economy.

“The vice president is going to talk about how this election is not about her or Donald Trump, but about the American people and her to-do list,” O’Malley Dillon said. “She will think about how to lower your family’s costs, how to make housing more affordable, how to protect health care, Social Security and Medicare.”

The campaign’s focus on Tuesday is to continue its more traditional assault on the seven states seen as the core of the election battle: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina. Polls in all seven states show their electoral votes are up for grabs.

Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will perform in every state over the next four days, including a joint appearance in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Monday, and on Wednesday, Harris will visit North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as Nevada and Arizona on Thursday.

Trump took a much more adventurous approach after his rally at Madison Square Garden. While he and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (Ohio), are holding rallies in expected places (Trump will be in Allentown, Pennsylvania, when Harris makes her big speech Tuesday night), they are also planning events in Virginia and New Mexico. , two states where Trump is a significant underdog.