With the bravado and swagger Joe Biden lacked in his abandoned reelection bid, Vice President Kamala Harris’s team on Wednesday shared its playbook to defeat former President Donald Trump.
In a memo sent to reporters Wednesday morning from Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Biden-turned-Harris campaign chair said Harris will rely first and foremost on her strength among key Democratic-leaning groups such as Black, Latino and Asian American voters, as well as young people and women. When President Biden was Democrats’ presumptive nominee, Trump was targeting these groups and seemingly making inroads.
But the vice president’s team promised Harris wouldn’t stop there, noting that she was well-positioned to win white, college-educated voters who hadn’t backed Biden in 2020 but had been turned off by Republicans’ extremism come 2022.
“The Vice President has been at the forefront on the very issues that are most important to these voters,” O’Malley Dillon wrote.
In particular, she homed in on Harris’ support for reproductive freedom, a cause which carried many Democrats to victory in the midterms after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Where Biden, who is Catholic, had been uncomfortable discussing abortion at times, Harris has been the administration’s leading spokesperson on the issue.
Playing up the cop-versus-crook theme that has dominated the early days of the Harris campaign, the second plank of the campaign’s roadmap to victory highlighted Trump’s criminal convictions, and Harris’ experience putting lawbreakers in jail.
“As a former prosecutor who has never shied away from taking on those who harm the American people, Vice President Harris is uniquely positioned to hold him accountable over the course of the campaign,” O’Malley Dillon wrote.
Thirdly, she promised Harris would work to win over undecided voters, who amount to 7 percent of the electorate, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll.
“While we know that we cannot take these voters for granted, we have a significant opportunity to consolidate their support once they hear from our campaign,” O’Malley Dillon wrote.
Lastly, the plan emphasized how Harris will focus on the “Blue Wall” states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, followed by the Sun Belt states: North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. In other words, Harris won’t repeat the campaign sins of Hillary Clinton.
In 2016, Clinton suffered a stunning loss in Wisconsin after failing to campaign there during the general election. The Harris team’s memo pointed out that Harris’ visit to Milwaukee on Tuesday, during which she drew a crowd of more than 3,500, marked her fifth trip this year to the state.
Since Sunday afternoon, O’Malley Dillon said, 100,000 volunteers had signed up to work on the campaign and 2,000 people had applied for jobs on it. That was in addition to the Harris campaign’s history-making haul of $81 million in one day, which helped boost other Democrats’ fundraising.
Harris is also inheriting Biden’s campaign infrastructure, and her campaign chair promised it would only grow.
“We are presently at over 1,300 coordinated staff in battlegrounds, will be over 1,500 by the end of the month, and well over 2,000 before the summer is out,” O’Malley Dillon wrote. “They are building an army of tens of thousands of volunteers who will talk to millions of voters. And all of this comes alongside an organizing program that will hit more than 3 million doors across the months of July and August.”
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