Democrats quietly panic over Harris campaign strategy as ‘Blue Wall’ crumbles: ‘They are just not thinking’
With two weeks left before the last votes of the 2024 presidential election are cast, some Democrats are beside themselves over Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign strategy, sources tell The Post.
The last straw for some came Tuesday morning, when the Harris-Walz team announced that rather than hit up any of seven key swing states — which most polls show moving away from the Democratic ticket — Harris would travel to deep-red Texas to give a speech on abortion rights and stump with the party’s Senate candidate, Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas).
“They are not thinking ‘Blue Wall’ at all. They are just not thinking,” one Democrat vented to The Post about the Texas trip.
“Her press operation is that of a first-time congressional candidate running as a sacrificial lamb,” this person added.
The “Blue Wall” refers to the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all three of which have gone Democrat in every election between 1992 and 2020, with the exception of 2016, when Republican Donald Trump swept the board against Hillary Clinton.
“I think her press team actually works for Trump,” the disgruntled Democrat added, noting that in their opinion the 45th president has “made a better case for himself than her.”
While Michigan has been one of the best-polling states for Harris, according to public surveys, NBC News reported Tuesday that anxiety is growing inside the Democratic camp that the veep could lose the state’s 15 electoral votes — in part due to backlash over the Israel-Hamas war among one of the largest Arab American populations in the US.
Just last month, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who is locked in a tight race for Senate, was recorded telling donors that Harris, 60, was “underwater” in the Wolverine State.
According to the Detroit Free Press, Trump has made 13 visits to Michigan so far this year, while Harris has made just nine since President Biden ended his re-election bid in July.
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Most of Harris’ events have taken place in Detroit and the surrounding Democratic stronghold of Wayne County, leaving voters elsewhere in Michigan feeling left out.
“I tell you what, Trump is here like every weekend,” one voter, Stephanie Smith, told The Post last week at a Harris event in Grand Rapids. “I’m getting sick of it, frankly. I wish he’d stop.”
“This is [Harris’] first stop in Grand Rapids, and we’re just two weeks away,” Smith added. “We’re the second-largest city in the state of Michigan.”
The bad news may not end there for the veep.
NBC News quoted a senior Harris campaign source as saying Tuesday that “[t]here has been a thought that maybe Michigan or Wisconsin will fall off” the map for the Democrat, with that person and two others stressing that Michigan was the more pressing concern.
Fear that Trump, 78, has the late momentum is even more pronounced in the biggest prize of the three “Blue Wall” states: Pennsylvania, with its 19 electoral votes.
“It’s Pennsylvania, I think it has always been Pennsylvania,” mused a second Democratic source, contending that the Keystone State is the biggest nail-biter of the three.
This week, Democrats were dealt a blow when the non-partisan Cook Political Report shifted its rating of Pennsylvania’s Senate race to a “toss-up” from “lean Democrat” bolstering Republican hopes of taking down three-term incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.)
Trump also leads all three “Blue Wall” states in the latest RealClearPolitics polling average with head-to-head cushions of 0.4% in Wisconsin, 0.8% in Pennsylvania and 1.2% in Michigan.
Harris has long branded herself as the “underdog” in the 2024 race, despite vastly outraising Trump and enjoying largely favorable media coverage.
Democratic ‘bed-wetting’
Some Democrats were willing to put on a brave face despite feeling uneasy about the state of the race.
“I think it’s smart to set expectations for a worst-case scenario. I genuinely think no one knows what is going to happen in either camp. This is what Dems do — we freak out,” a source close to the Harris-Walz campaign told The Post.
“Dems could see the same poll as Republicans and Dems act like the sky is falling and we are losing. Republicans say, ‘We won!'”
“Democrats are good at a lot of things, chief among them bed-wetting. We always knew this would be a close race and that hasn’t changed,” a third Democratic source told The Post.
Some allies of the Harris-Walz campaign have also been frustrated by the rhetoric directed towards her team from other Democrats.
“You see these campaign people on TV and they look absolutely exhausted,” Obama 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina told MSNBC on Sunday, “because everyone is telling them they’re a band of idiots, and they should do it their way, and they have to make really, really difficult decisions,”
Wilting in the Sun Belt?
Biden won six of the seven key battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — four years ago. The one that Trump won, North Carolina, may not be in play for Democrats this time around either.
“Of all of the seven [states], that one seems to be a little bit slipping away,” one campaign official told NBC.
In the past four decades, North Carolina has only gone Democrat once — in 2008, for Barack Obama.
The Harris campaign had hoped Trump would be dragged down by scandal-hit GOP gubernatorial hopeful Mark Robinson, the Tar Heel State’s lieutenant governor.
Trump, meanwhile, is relying on rural voters turning out in areas devastated by Hurricane Helene last month.
“Trump is the one in NC again, if anything internals show he is in trouble,” the second Democratic source texted The Post, disputing the assessment to NBC News. “If we were in trouble in our must-wins, we would not be expending valuable time [and] resources on Texas.”
The Harris-Walz campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.