Democrats think ground game can save Harris, beat Trump

Democrats say they have the secret sauce when it comes to defeating former President Trump: It all comes down to their ground game.

During the final stretch of the campaign, their operation in the seven battleground states will be put to the test, as an army of staff and volunteers are expected to knock on doors, make calls and hold events.

Doubts have crept into the party about Harris’s chances of winning in recent days, but operatives have said their boots on the ground in the battleground states could make the difference.

“So many Democrats I’ve spoken to think the ground operation will be the saving grace, full stop,” one Democratic strategist close to the campaign said. “It’s an operation that’s been built over months, and we’re rooted in communities across all the battlegrounds.”

“What the other side has pales in comparison,” the strategist said.

The Harris campaign touts its robust operation: 2,505 staff and 358 offices across the battleground states, numbers they say far surpass Trump’s operations there.

“Across the battlegrounds, we’re applying an all-of-the-above voter contact strategy, reaching voters on the ground, on the airwaves, on digital and anywhere else voters are,” one Harris campaign aide said. “We know in this fragmented media environment where voters can easily tune political news out, we have to talk to voters as many times and as many ways as we can.”

The Harris aide said they believe their path to victory is in mobilizing significant turnout in not only traditionally blue areas but also cutting into Trump’s margins in rural, traditionally red areas.

About one-third of the campaign’s Pennsylvania offices, for example, are in predominantly rural counties that Trump carried by double-digits during the 2020 presidential race, the aide said.

“In an election this close, closing the margins in these red counties could be the difference maker,” the aide said.

But Republicans say what the Harris campaign is doing is far from effective.

“The Harris campaign is truly circling the drain,” said Anna Kelly, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee (RNC). “We smoked them in voter registration. We are surging in early voting, and they are underperforming. More of our low propensity and new voters are turning out than theirs.”

Neither the RNC nor the Trump campaign offered up details about their ground operations, including the number of staff and offices.

The race is a dead heat with just more than a week to go until Election Day.

A New York Times/Siena College poll released Friday revealed Harris and Trump were tied with 48 percent support apiece among likely voters.

And battleground state polls also show the tightest of races. The Real Clear Politics average of battleground states shows Trump leading across all the states by less than half of a percentage point, with the exception of Georgia where he leads by more than 2 points.

Recent polls have shown the Harris campaign has struggled to reach Black and Latino men.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll Friday showed that Harris leads Trump among Hispanic men by 2 percentage points, after the former president made significant inroads with the voting bloc. The poll revealed 44 percent of Hispanic male voters support Harris while 42 percent back Trump. During the 2020 race, Joe Biden led Trump by 19 percentage points with the same group at this point in the campaign.

But Harris campaign aides maintain the campaign has targeted Black and Latino men in persuasion and get-out-the-vote efforts, campaign officials say.

They have also used paid media efforts to invest more in Black and Hispanic platforms and have tailored them to specific audiences.

In the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where there are significant Puerto Rico and Dominican communities, the campaign is employing Spanish-language online ads that use a narrator who speaks with a Caribbean accent, notes from the campaign show. In Arizona and Nevada, two other battlegrounds, narrators in Spanish-language ads have Mexican accents, to better connect with Latino voters there, according to the campaign’s notes.

Aides on the Harris campaign also say they have 150 full-time staff in battleground states solely dedicated to campus organizing and the youth vote. The campaign says it's targeting 150 campuses across 11 states, moving beyond the key battleground states and into New Hampshire, Virginia and Nebraska.

Outside groups including organized labor have also provided a boost on the ground; unions that endorsed Harris have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on voter registration, education and mobilization efforts, a Harris aide said, In 2022, for example, the AFL-CIO organized more than 100,000 volunteers to reach at least 7.7 million workers, a signal of what was to come in 2024.

Democratic strategist Christy Setzer said Harris’s ground game could put her over the top.

“A stellar ground game can be worth as much as 2-3 points. In a close race like this one, that’s a difference-maker,” Setzer said. “There’s an astonishing difference between the robust, targeted field game Harris’s team has put together, and the anemic, incompetent outsourced-to-Elon Musk one that the Trump team is managing.”

Setzer pointed to the actor Christine Baranski, a surrogate for the Harris campaign who is being deployed to target the 800,000 Polish Americans in Pennsylvania, as detailed in The New York Times this week.

“That’s how granular they’ve gotten and it’s a magnitude more detailed than I've seen in campaigns past,” she said.