Why the Kamala Harris Campaign Feels ‘Nauseously Optimistic’
First, the West Wing actor Bradley Whitford put it on X. Not long after, New Hampshire congresswoman Annie Kuster was saying it. Soon, with October winding down, Tim Walz was using the phrase with party activists in Wisconsin, off-stage and away from microphones. By late this week, it was being whispered across Kamala Harris campaign headquarters in Delaware. Now, ask any plugged-in Democrat how they’re feeling in the final 100 hours before Election Day, and there’s a good chance they’ll tell you they’re “nauseously optimistic.”
That feeling is largely based on the campaign’s close monitoring of early voting data from the seven battleground states, and its evolving understanding of who has already cast ballots and who’s left to convince. The posture is driven both by reports from the field, especially from canvassers in competitive suburbs, and by senior advisers staring at the analytics in Wilmington. It’s far from a prediction of a win. Instead, it’s a belief that Harris maintains achievable paths to winning a majority or plurality of the vote in the tightly contested states — each of which they see as effectively tied, and almost all of which they see as home to a Democratic advantage in get-out-the-vote operations.
And as multiple high-ranking Harris staffers said this week, they’ll take the queasy confidence to power them through their physical and emotional exhaustion. These, after all, are the closing days of a campaign that began uneasily nearly 20 months ago, with an unpopular and aging president insisting he was up to the job over even his own party’s whispered concerns. At the time, Joe Biden’s top aides warned fellow Democrats that the race would be close, but their early insistence that Biden was still well-positioned to win turned to despair, disbelief, delusion, and finally fury that they had to spin confidence out of a political disaster this summer, with the president’s unraveling at his June debate against Donald Trump. The ensuing months transformed a dreary race into an unprecedented political cyclone, driving Democrats to euphoria by this fall with Harris’s rise before their Trump-based anxiety returned in full force in recent weeks. When, in mid-to-late October, I canvassed a few senior-level strategists to see how they were feeling, one said it changed “hour by hour.” Another said she’d recently decided this was her last campaign, no matter what. A third had become practically obsessed with avoiding the mistakes of 2016, and a fourth reported that he had turned almost Zen after months in the trenches, resigned to the reality that a pure toss-up race is inevitably at the mercy of each and every minute shift in the political winds until the final seconds of Election Day. But then came waves of early voting. And now they have data to underpin their nausea, and their optimism.
The campaign and its allies believe that Harris will have to win by a smaller margin than she and Biden got four years ago. In Pennsylvania, the biggest of the three “blue wall” states that can deliver her victory, strategists and activists have been quietly chattering about a likely margin of victory in the range of 20-to-25,000 votes — about a quarter of the size of Biden’s win. In Nevada, the contest will be “very close, it will be razor thin,” predicts the influential Culinary Union leader Ted Pappageorge. “We think it’s going to be like 2020,” when Biden won by around 140,000 votes, “just closer.” And when the Democratic super-PAC Priorities crunched its numbers at one point last week and projected them to Election Day, it foresaw a Harris win, but that the states would be perilously tight. The group’s leaders cautioned that the numbers were just a projection based on a snapshot of data, and not a prediction. But they showed Harris taking Nevada by fewer than 6,000 votes and losing Georgia by fewer than 1,000. In that analysis, not one battleground would be decided by more than 100,000: It had Trump winning both Arizona and North Carolina by around 40,000 and Harris taking Wisconsin by 52,000, Pennsylvania by 63,000, and Michigan by just over 90,000.
As Harris’s top advisers have dug through the early voting figures, a lot of the new positivity stems from the long-standing assumption that Trump would over-perform among low-propensity voters. Whereas his allies have cheered GOP-registered voters’ significant turnout in many of the swing states, Harris aides point out that these votes are not new ones expanding Trump’s base. Instead, they’re traditional Republicans who would usually vote on Election Day simply switching when they vote now that Trump isn’t demonizing early and mail-in voting. In 2020, Republican votes washed in on Election Day and the Harris side believes that it’s less likely to happen this time, at least so dramatically. “These are people who are going to vote no matter what,” campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said earlier this week. “They’re primary voters who were always going to be voting. In 2020 they voted on Election Day. But we are not seeing signs of people who were not going to vote.”
Priorities, the influential Democratic super-PAC, found last week that as many as 98 percent of the early voters up to that point were people that the Democrats had always expected to vote. Tom Bonier, the prominent Democratic data scientist, said he’d expected to see more of a Republican advantage in early voting among those voters who hadn’t been registered in 2020. And the Harris campaign’s own internal analysis shows that in Michigan, two-thirds of the voters who it believes are Republicans who cast ballots in person over last weekend had voted on Election Day four years earlier. That was true of just one-third of voters they modeled to be Democrats, suggesting there are likely still more reliable blue votes to come in the state and that any Republican surge may run dry.
As countless analysts often warn, early voting is not a reliable indicator of who will ultimately win — the fact is that we still don’t know what these early voters have actually put on their ballots. O’Malley Dillon has also cautioned reading too much into the numbers in states where votes are reported by party registration, such as Nevada, as the campaign believes Harris is set to over-perform among independents and some registered Republicans like Nikki Haley supporters — a dynamic that wouldn’t be reflected until polls close on Tuesday and vote counts are actually published.
To many of the veterans of Biden’s 2020 campaign who are now working for Harris, the overall feeling is quite different from this time four years ago, when misleading polls showed Biden winning relatively easily. Some believe Harris is in a similar position to where Biden actually was: narrowly leading, but by a small enough gap that any last-second news could still shift statistically important numbers of voters on the margin. That’s one reason Democrats rushed to boost comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s now-infamous joke about Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. The Hinchcliffe affair “makes me pretty optimistic,” says Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who’s worked with the Harris camp. “I think they massively underestimated how many Puerto Rican voters there are in Michigan and Pennsylvania.” But it’s also why campaign aides were dismayed by Biden’s own “garbage” comment in response. Many said they now thought the fallout from Biden’s gaffe was only being felt within Trump’s already highly motivated base and not swing voters. But in a race likely to be decided on the margins, they were unhappy to have the focus taken from Hinchcliffe.
Still, what’s made prognostication difficult is the widespread belief among Democratic campaign officials that there could be yet another systematic error in the public polling and that the pollsters are erring toward caution by weighting their polls to show a tie. No one is confident about the direction of such an error, though some Democrats suspect it might cut in their favor this time if pollsters are artificially overcorrecting in Trump’s favor, looking to avoid the mistake they’ve made in previous cycles of underestimating his support. “In 2022 the final RCP polling averages in the Senate races were consistently off in favor of Republicans,” Geoff Garin, a top Harris campaign and longtime Democratic pollster, posted on Wednesday. “I won’t be surprised if we see a similar understatement of Democratic support this year as well.”
It would be reasonable to read all of this as simply spin. Yet Harris has not retreated behind the blue wall to protect her safest path to 270 electoral votes, as one might expect if the campaign did believe that some combination of North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada were slipping away. A campaign’s most valuable resource, and the biggest tell of its priorities, is the candidate’s time, and Harris is hitting all seven states in the final days while her top aides have repeatedly rejected the idea that the Sun Belt states will be much harder to win than the midwestern ones.
Her advisers have also been increasingly clear on exactly whose support she is still seeking, narrowing their aperture on the few remaining undecided and hard-to-motivate voters. Harris’s speech on the Ellipse near the White House was designed to reach an audience of largely young people who have only now tuned into the race, as well as women who are open to her but need convincing to turn out. Earlier this week, the Democratic messaging strategy group Blueprint circulated findings of a survey that found the remaining available voters in swing states are “left-leaning people in right-leaning environments” — people who agree with Harris on abortion and economic matters, and find Trump to be extreme, but whose family and friends are often Trump supporters.
This group is often very similar demographically to the one that top Democrats believe will ultimately power a Harris victory. No statistic has buoyed Harris’s team more than the gender gap in the early vote, which is large and growing, and noteworthy given the significant lead she has among women voters overall. They are bullish on suburban voters more broadly, believing them to often be moderates — including many former Republicans — who are tired of Trump and simply want to move on from him. So though Democrats are worried to see lower-than-ideal turnout numbers among Black voters in North Carolina, for example, some have been relieved to see higher than expected turnout in the suburbs there. (When I asked David Plouffe, a top Harris adviser who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, about lagging poll numbers among Black and Latino men last month, he predicted that Harris would make up for it by over-performing with women and suburban voters.)
Among the voters who pro-Harris forces are now targeting are older white women without college degrees, which is why some Democratic groups have leaned in on messaging that these women — who, in some cases, are registered Republicans or independents — shouldn’t feel pressure to vote the same way as their husbands. (In one ad, Julia Roberts says, “Remember, what happens in the booth stays in the booth.”) Some liberal operatives believe these theoretical voters are undercounted in public polling, though even these Democrats are unsure how many such voters will turn out. Still, the strategy of relying on suburban disgust with Trump is well worn now after the 2018, 2020, and 2022 election cycles were built largely around it. The strategy is especially prominent in Wisconsin, a state with unreliable presidential polling in recent history. “I’ve heard a lot from women who are marked in our universe as swing voters talking about Trump’s character,” Greta Neubauer, the Democratic minority leader in the Wisconsin statehouse, told me on Thursday while on a break from door-knocking in Sheboygan.
That’s a different message than Democrats have been hearing at the doors in Nevada, a state that hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since George W. Bush but where the GOP feels confident they will pick up six electoral votes after the first days of early voting turned out hordes of registered Republicans from rural areas. “It’s pretty clear: The folks who are left out there are the folks who don’t like Trump, but they’re struggling to pay their grocery bills and their rent,” says Pappageorge of the Culinary Union, a well-practiced turnout machine for Democrats. His union is making the case to these voters that, “Yeah, prices were lower when Trump was president because Obama gave him a great economy, and look at what he handed to Joe Biden,” and that Trump is a “Wall Street landlord.” (A potent message in a state experiencing an acute housing crisis.) When matched with reminders that the Democrats support abortion rights, which are also on the ballot in Nevada, it’s a similar message they used to re-elect Senator Catherine Cortez Masto in 2022.
Nevada’s tourism-based economy was hit especially hard by the pandemic and new registrants there have skewed older than in other states, which may bode well for Republicans there. In the last election, Cortez Masto won while Republicans re-took the governorship. Yet Pappageorge says that he believes more Republicans have voted early this time because their party has encouraged them to, unlike in 2020, and because of newly universal mail-in ballot access in the state. “That doesn’t mean they’re additional votes,” he says. Cortez Masto, who is close to Harris, also points out that the state has implemented a new automatic voter-registration system since 2020, meaning that many more voters have registered as non-affiliated than before. “In 2022, I won even though the Republicans had a turnout advantage because it came down to a large group of non-affiliated voters, a party of nonpartisans,” she explains. “It’s going to come down to them now as well. I also know from my race that those nonpartisans lean Democrat.” Ultimately, she says that her experience in 2022 and a groundswell of organizers fanning out across the state made her feel “good, really good” about Harris’s prospects. “The last time I saw energy like this, I can’t even tell you,” she says. “It was like when President Obama was running.”
The senator is not alone. John Anzalone, a top party pollster who has worked with the Harris campaign, wrote on Thursday that he thought not enough attention was being paid to Democratic enthusiasm, which is outrunning Republican interest in the race. A Gallup poll showed Democrats as excited about voting as they had been since 2008, and Anzalone made the comparison between Harris and Obama explicit. Still, this is a level of confidence not many Democrats are reaching for. For one thing, some have been nervous about big early voting numbers in red-leaning rural areas across the country, particularly in Georgia.
Instead, strategists have been more comfortable just looking for reasons that this race is not like 2016. One answer, they say, is that polling in local and House races has not significantly diverged from what one would expect based on the national or statewide figures, revealing no hidden groundswell for either party. And both in Delaware and Harris’s state-level headquarters, advisers keep hearing about unexpectedly positive interactions between door-knockers and voters who they’d expected to be undecided. “I’m not a bed-wetting person, I think it’s all media bullshit and hype based on polls they and donors look at,” says Donna Brazile, the former DNC chair and close Harris ally who’s recently been to all seven swing states. “The algorithm people will always tell you they know more than the people on the ground. I still believe the people on the ground.”
Yet the feeling of hope isn’t exactly comfortable, in part because it’s such an obvious mismatch with the tone of most political coverage and the skew of the betting markets, Republicans’ insistences that they’re “on the verge” of victory in the words of Trump’s pollster, and clear fear among the Democratic rank-and-file in recent weeks. The apprehension among Democrats — especially those not privy to the campaign’s internal analysis — is still widespread. This is based partly on Trump’s professed confidence, but it may have more to do with Democrats’ unease with the idea that they should feel relatively good about a very close race, in the first place. It’s led to quiet second-guessing of Harris’s closing message in the professional Democratic class. One top strategist who’s worked with the Harris campaign, for example, told me she was “pretty nervous” because of the lack of populist specifics Harris cites when she juxtaposes Trump’s “enemies list” with her own “to-do list” on the stump.
Even within the Harris campaign, two different theories about Trump’s proclamations of confidence have taken hold. One camp believes strongly that the ex-president is simply laying the groundwork to claim the election was stolen from him — that he could not possibly lose. Others, though, have argued since he scheduled his Madison Square Garden event that he is in a bubble of his own making, and that he is listening only to his own instincts and advisers focused on satisfying and revving his base — not reaching persuadable voters.
Of course, these explanations are not mutually exclusive. And the latter, at least, has given many Democrats yet another reason to feel somewhat bullish on their own chances to win over the few remaining people who aren’t sure what to do with their vote.
Still, when I asked one very senior Democratic operative this week why she wouldn’t put her confidence on the record, she hardly let me finish the question. First, she said, the race is still basically a genuine tossup. Second, she said, for her party, “it’s going to take a generation to get over 2016” psychologically. And third, “there’s an element of superstition to it. You don’t want to be the person to say, ‘Yeah, we’ve got this in the bag.’”
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