Harris’s team claims she’s no longer the underdog, but Trump team scoffs

ATLANTA - Vice President Kamala Harris has spent much of the past two months portraying herself as the underdog in the effectively tied race against former president Donald Trump.

In recent days, however, the Democratic presidential nominee and her top aides have struck a somewhat more optimistic tone in public, conveying to supporters and the media that they expect to win the race - albeit by narrow margins.

Trump’s campaign counters that the unusually large numbers of Republicans who have cast ballots early are a sign of the Republican nominee’s strength, and his aides have boasted that they remain on offense, with Trump visiting New Mexico and Virginia, two states that many observers believe are out of reach for Republicans, in the final week of the campaign.

But Harris’s significant financial advantage over Trump has allowed her to hire more staff, spend more on advertising and build a more robust digital and texting operation.

As recently as Wednesday, Future Forward, the top outside group supporting Harris, was privately warning that her chances had eroded. Internal reports dated Oct. 24 and Oct. 30 both said she had only a 37 percent chance of winning, down from 54 percent in early October, The Washington Post reported Saturday night. That chance had risen back to 49 percent on Saturday, according to a person familiar with the data, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

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In the same Oct. 30 memo, however, Future Forward also said its own win probability metric is meaningless, especially in a race this close. Both the Harris campaign and Future Forward said the vice president has been regaining ground in recent days, arguing that late-breaking undecided voters are breaking her way and that she is peaking at the right moment.

Harris’s advisers attribute the recent movement in their direction among late-deciding voters to the divisive tone that Trump’s campaign has struck in the closing days, and especially to remarks by one of his warm-up speakers at a Madison Square Garden rally who described Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage.”

“If you look at the full data, the conclusion is crystal clear: She’s ahead in the states she needs to win to get to 270 and neck-and-neck across the battleground,” Future Forward President Chauncey McLean said in a statement. “The trajectory of the race is increasingly in her favor and she’s on track to win.”

Harris’s numbers have improved slightly in four states over the past week and eroded slightly in two states, according to The Post’s average of high-quality public polls. Harris peaked with a lead of 2.5 percentage points in national polls in the second week of October, but that advantage has narrowed to 2.1 points, according to The Post’s average.

In a striking turn, a new poll published Saturday night by the Des Moines Register showed Harris leading Trump in Iowa by 3 percentage points. Trump won Iowa by more than 8 percentage points in 2020, and Republicans have largely dominated the state over the past decade. Harris has not campaigned at all in the state.

At a rally in Atlanta on Saturday, Harris urged late-deciding voters to consider her pledge to work with people who disagree with her, and contrasted her promise to Trump’s warnings about “the enemy within.”

Interviews in focus groups with undecided voters show that harsh rhetoric at Trump rallies - including the Puerto Rico comment last Sunday - has been the “final straw” for some voters, a senior Harris adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail the campaign’s thinking, said Friday.

“It’s helpful, from experience, to be closing a Presidential campaign with late-deciding voters breaking by double digits to you and the remaining undecideds looking more friendly to you than your opponent,” Harris adviser David Plouffe, who was the campaign manager for Barack Obama’s successful 2008 campaign, wrote on X on Friday. “Close race, turnout and 4 days of hard work will be key. But good mo.”

Trump’s advisers counter that the Harris campaign is simply manufacturing controversies to mask the problems that Democrats face in this final stretch. Trump’s team argues that recent polls show the former president in a stronger position now than he was in 2020.

“They are literally spending their last days doing base plays,” a senior Trump adviser said of the Harris campaign, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss campaign strategy. Although Harris advisers are optimistic about their prospects in part because at least 54 percent of the early ballots returned so far have been cast by women, Harris is still struggling with male voters.

The gender gap between the two candidates remains a defining feature of the race. A Post average of October national polls shows Harris leading by an average of 11 points among women while Trump leads by 10 points among men, a 21-point gap.

Some polls show Harris continuing to lag behind Joe Biden’s 2020 numbers with Black men, which could become a critical vulnerability in a close race.

“Their whole ‘White Dudes for Harris’ effort completely bombed - and not only are White dudes abandoning Kamala Harris, but also African American dudes, Latino dudes. They’re in real trouble,” the Trump adviser said. “A lot of these people that we’re tracking, particularly men that we’ve targeted and are turning out - a lot of these people are new or they’ve been dormant voters who are now showing up for President Trump.”

Trump’s advisers believe that their dominance among men will help them overcome Harris’s strength with women on Election Day. They are counting on younger men, whom they have targeted in innovative ways. Trump has appeared at Ultimate Fighting Championship matches. The campaign has advertised on video game apps, and Trump has given interviews to Joe Rogan, YouTuber Logan Paul and other entertainers who are popular with young men. Earlier this year, Trump advisers said those efforts were designed to target a group of undecided young male voters who make up about 11 percent of the electorate in battleground states.

Tom Bonier, a Democratic data analyst, said Friday that the early-voting data does not yet show a higher-than-usual turnout among younger men. But Trump and his allies are confident they will show up.

“No candidate in modern history has animated low-propensity voters like President Trump and Republicans are confident in his ability to continue that streak this cycle,” Republican strategist John Ashbrook said.

Harris advisers and allies still believe their most promising path to victory runs through the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. But they say they are still targeting all seven battleground states - a group that also includes Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada - creating multiple pathways to 270 electoral votes if one of the blue-wall states were to fall to Republicans. As part of its final push, the Harris campaign is leaning on several of the popular governors of those states, featuring them in its closing advertisements.

Harris’s spending advantage has also allowed her to build an expansive get-out-the-vote effort that her aides hope will pull her over the finish line. The Harris campaign says it had knocked on 13 million doors as of Friday, and that over the course of October, the campaign and its volunteers made 100 million calls to voters in battleground states. The Trump campaign, which has made the risky decision to outsource much of its get-out-the-vote efforts to outside groups, declined to make similar metrics public.

“This is a very tight race and it is going to come down to who votes and we are making sure we turn out every one of our votes,” Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Michigan) said.

But Dingell said she is seeing positive indicators for Harris in the final days.

“The union halls are stronger than they were in 2016 and African American men are coming back and young people are energized,” she said.

Members of Harris’s party appear to be especially eager to vote this year, with 77 percent of Democrats in a recent Gallup survey of registered voters saying they are more enthusiastic about casting their ballots than in previous elections. Only 67 percent of Republicans said the same.

Several new polls released Sunday showed Harris and Trump in a dead heat. A national poll of likely voters from ABC News-Ipsos found Harris slightly leading Trump, 49 percent to 46 percent - outside the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points - while a national poll of registered voters from NBC found the two candidates tied at 49 percent.

Polls of likely voters in battleground states from the New York Times and Siena College similarly showed a tight race. Harris and Trump were tied at 48 percent in Pennsylvania; in Michigan, they were both at 47 percent, though Trump led by one point when accounting for decimals. Harris held narrow leads in Nevada (49 percent to 46 percent), North Carolina (48 percent to 46 percent), Wisconsin (49 percent to 47 percent) and Georgia (48 percent to 47 percent). Trump led Harris in Arizona by a wider margin (49 to 45 percent). All seven states’ results were in the polls’ margins of error.

After multiple stops in Wisconsin on Friday, Harris made a final swing through Georgia and North Carolina on Saturday and was scheduled to head to Michigan on Sunday. She will close out the campaign with multiple stops in Pennsylvania, which has long been viewed as the Democrats’ linchpin. Her campaign is running a new ad featuring comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s “island of garbage” joke about Puerto Rico on Spanish-language stations in Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina.

Early voting data on college campuses across Wisconsin is encouraging for Democrats, said Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party.

“Everywhere we go we find more former Trump supporters saying that they’re going to vote for Harris than former Democrats saying they’re going to vote for Trump - and it’s not close,” Wikler said.

Trump’s most viable path to 270 electoral voters relies on winning North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Georgia. He lost Georgia by less than 12,000 votes in 2020, then pressured the Republican secretary of state to “find” enough votes to reverse his defeat. But, like Harris’s team, his advisers say they are pushing ahead in all seven battleground states. They are also eyeing potential pickups, including New Mexico and Virginia.

In the final two weeks of the race, the two candidates are spending the most money on ads in Pennsylvania, followed by Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada, according to the analytics firm Ad Impact.

A Trump adviser recently speculated on social media that the Harris campaign was “giving up on North Carolina” - an assertion her campaign denied - because she had shuffled her ad buys in some of the state’s major markets. But Trump is clearly aiming to solidify his own support with multiple stops in the Tar Heel State this weekend.

The former president campaigned in Salem, Virginia; and Gastonia and Greensboro, North Carolina, on Saturday. He was expected to make a third North Carolina stop in Kinston on Sunday before capping the weekend with a rally in Macon, Georgia.

Despite Harris’s ad-spending advantage over Trump over the past few months, she has not been able to build a significant polling lead over the former president in the key battleground states. Data from Ad Impact shows that Harris and her allies have spent more than three times more than Trump and his allies on Facebook and Google ads since Harris entered the race.

Last week, Harris advisers said they added more money to their advertising buys in North Carolina - airing a new ad that features the state’s popular governor, Roy Cooper. The campaign is also airing a new spot in Pennsylvania featuring Harris appearing alongside Gov. Josh Shapiro, who has shown broad crossover appeal to voters in his own state.

Malcolm Kenyatta, who is running to be Pennsylvania auditor general, said that in Harris’s closing argument she has successfully tailored her economic message to tout the successes of the Biden administration while also showing her empathy for people’s ongoing struggles with inflation. Several polls have suggested that Harris has narrowed Trump’s advantage on economic issues.

Kenyatta also lauded her campaign’s expansive organization throughout Pennsylvania, and her decision to make multiple stops across the state on Monday.

“Pennsylvania is the center of the political universe,” he said. “We birthed American democracy and we are going to save it.”

Marianne LeVine, Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer contributed to this report.