How The Enemies List And The To-Do List Fit Into Kamala Harris’ Closing Message
Tens of millions of dollars in television ads have made it clear what Democrats want their closing message to be: Donald Trump will restrict abortion rights, cut taxes for the rich and slash away at Americans’ health care.
But getting a 24/7 news cycle to focus on positions Trump and other Republicans have held for decades is a tough sell, particularly when the news media can (rightly!) focus more on warnings coming from Trump’s top aides suggesting he has a fondness for Adolf Hitler and has fascist tendencies more broadly, or on his end-stage rally in New York City featuring a bevy of racist, sexist and generally offensive commentary.
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Vice President Kamala Harris hopes she can spend the next week linking Trump’s autocratic ambitions to his right-wing views on abortion and economics in the minds of voters, a process her campaign said could be summed up with a simple line she deployed during a rally in Georgia on Thursday, when she asked attendees to imagine who would be sitting in the Oval Office in a few months.
“It’s either Donald Trump in there, stewing over his enemies list, or me, working for you, checking off my to-do list,” Harris said to cheers from the crowd.
As the campaign enters its final days, Harris’ success in a nail-biter of an election may come down to how well she and her allies can combine these two very different cases against Trump, and deliver each message to the persuadable voters who need to hear it.
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Striking the right balance is causing some anxiety among Harris supporters, with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) warning about Democratic campaigns not focusing enough on the economic struggles of the working class. (Sanders, for what it’s worth, delivered similar warnings in 2020 and 2022.)
“She has to start talking more to the needs of working-class people,” Sanders told The Associated Press last week. “I wish this had taken place two months ago. It is what it is.”
Harris, talking to reporters on Friday before her rally in Houston, indicated she was confident her campaign could deliver both messages at once.
“One of the things that I love about the American people is we can hold many thoughts at once,” she said, before listing “bringing down costs,” “fighting for our democracy” and “fighting for the freedom of people to make decisions about their own body” as among her top priorities.
Andrew Harnik via Getty Images
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A memo from FF PAC, the main super PAC backing Harris, sent to Democratic operatives on Friday warned against focusing too much on Trump’s fascist threat, noting its internal testing has found it less effective than focusing on Harris’ plans for the economy, including expanding the child tax credit and building hundreds of thousands more homes to lower housing costs. The memo was first reported by The New York Times.
In a statement to the paper, the president of the super PAC — which typically does not comment on its strategy or even alert reporters to ads it is putting out — downplayed the memo and explicitly complimented Harris’ rhetoric.
The PAC’s research “shows people that the most effective way of using Trump’s words and behavior is tying them to consequences in voters’ lives,” Chauncey McLean wrote. “That’s what Kamala Harris does every day by comparing her to-do list with his enemies list, for example.”
The Harris campaign released two ads on Thursday night using the audio of John Kelly’s interviews with The New York Times about Trump being a fascist to attack the former president, though it’s unclear how often either ad has run on television. In recent months, the campaign has occasionally released ads more focused on Trump as a threat to democracy without running them extensively on television.
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And other members of the Democratic ecosystem seem to have more faith in using Kelly as a messenger to attack Trump. Blueprint, a centrist Democratic polling outfit, found in a survey earlier this month that Harris’ most effective closing argument involves citing how many of Trump’s Cabinet members and other Republicans have refused to endorse the former president.
Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the campaign’s chair, agreed in a television interview on Sunday.
“When someone like John Kelly stands up and speaks about what it was like to serve under Donald Trump, speaks about how he clearly wants unchecked power, the American people are not comfortable with that,” she said on the MSNBC show hosted by former White House press secretary Jen Psaki. “It’s really important when people who are close to Donald Trump speak out about it, and we’ve seen that across all of our data.”
But ultimately it may not be her own economic plans or Trump’s fascist threat that provides Harris’ most potent closing message. Her campaign used the Friday night rally, where the vice president appeared alongside Beyoncé and Willie Nelson, to highlight how the Lone Star State’s ban on abortion could soon come to swing states under a Trump presidency.
Priorities USA, a super PAC focused on digital advertising, told reporters on Friday they were confident abortion messaging was breaking through with the persuadable voters and get-out-the-vote targets still available to Harris — people who tend to be younger, female and more likely to be Black or Latino. In the group’s polling, the number one issue voters said they had heard about in advertising in the past few weeks was abortion rights.
“We feel really good about the messages that people can recall hearing, because they are messages that they tend to trust [Democrats] more on,” said Nick Ahamed, the group’s deputy executive director.
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At the same time, the group also warned Democrats of one particular line of attack, saying focus on the idea Trump is “exhausted” or acting strangely has not helped Democrats much.
“When we talk about Trump and fascism, authoritarianism, as long as we’re connecting that to what it means for voters, we’re in fine territory,” Ahamed told reporters. “The concern is more that we’re just talking about him not showing up at rallies or canceling press conferences or doing weird dancing.”
The Harris campaign has a second major rally planned on Tuesday night on the National Mall in Washington, not far from where Trump spoke to a crowd on Jan. 6, 2021, before they marched to the Capitol. While the location would seem to indicate a focus on Trump’s threats to democracy, O’Malley Dillon previewed a speech with a distinct focus on economics.
“The vice president is going to talk about how this election is not about her or Donald Trump, it’s about the American people, and about her to-do list,” O’Malley Dillon said. “She’s going to be thinking about how she can bring costs down for your family, how she can make housing more affordable, how she’s going to protect health care and Social Security and Medicare.”
Surrounding the Tuesday address, the campaign is mostly set to pursue a more traditional barnstorming of the seven states considered the core of the electoral battleground: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina. Polling in all seven states indicates their electoral votes are up for grabs.
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Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will hit all of the states over the next four days, including a joint appearance in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Monday, with Harris hitting North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Wednesday, and Nevada and Arizona on Thursday.
Trump is taking what appears to be a far more adventurous approach following his rally at Madison Square Garden. While he and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), do have rallies in expected places — Trump will be in Allentown, Pennsylvania, when Harris delivers her big speech on Tuesday night — they are also planning events in Virginia and New Mexico, two states where Trump is a significant underdog.
