Campaigns seek any edge to sway a tossup election

As Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump begin the final 30-day push for the White House, they are locked in a neck-and-neck race from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt.

With polling averages showing all seven battleground states nearly tied, many Democrats believe their biggest advantage may be an extensive ground game operation that their party has spent more than a year building across the country. Trump’s campaign thinks that recent events — the escalating conflict in the Middle East and hurricanes that have killed more than 200 people across the Southeast — could drive anxious voters into his camp in the final weeks.

In some ways, the two approaches mirror the final days of the 2016 race, when Hillary Clinton’s campaign boasted about a massive, data-driven field organization, while Trump pressed a national message based on stoking anti-immigrant sentiment and improving the economy with a relatively meager staff and almost no field operation in the key states. Trump, of course, prevailed, helped by the FBI director’s reopening of an inquiry into the Democratic nominee’s emails.

This time, Democrats have no such overconfidence. Although Trump and his party have lost or underperformed in every major election since then, many Democrats believe this year is one they could lose.

“Anybody would be a fool to write Trump off,” said Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor who ran for president in 2020. “I think she’s going to win, but am I absolutely sure she’s going to win? No. The 2016 experience taught all of us that you can’t count this guy out.”

Veterans of presidential campaigns say this year’s contest is distinct for how little impact major political events seem to be having on the relative standing of the two candidates. Two assassination attempts on Trump, a presidential and vice presidential debate and the party conventions have brought both him and Harris temporary bumps in support but no enduring shifts in public opinion.

The result is what top officials in both campaigns describe as a grind-it-out race, where movements measured in a few thousand votes could sway the outcome of the entire election.

Ralph Reed, a socially conservative activist in Georgia who is helping turn out voters for the Trump campaign, said he could not recall a presidential race since 2000 in which so many states were effectively tied this late in the campaign.

“In the battleground states, it is like trench warfare during the First World War,” he said. “Everybody is dug in. Everybody is throwing artillery and machine gunfire, and it’s just a no man’s land.”

The tightness of the race has meant an onslaught of spending, especially in those battlegrounds of Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

More than $675 million has been spent to reserve television and digital advertising time since Sept. 1, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. The Harris campaign has outspent the Trump campaign in advertising in each of those seven states. Democratic third-party organizations have also outspent Republican counterparts in all seven states.

But Republicans are sending so much direct mail to so many people that even Democrats in the key states report being inundated with glossy literature slamming Harris and praising Trump as a protector of Social Security benefits.

Mintt, a mail-tracking firm, found that in September, 81% of all direct mail sent was promoting Trump or attacking Harris. In August, the imbalance had been even more severe: 96% of all direct mail relating to the presidential race was sent by Republican groups, the firm found.

“Advertising and ground game operations are inundating all these states to find the thousands of voters who will determine the winners,” said Nick Everhart, a national Republican consultant and ad buyer. “Every week, every day, every minute, every second matters when a campaign is this close without a clear inflection point on the horizon.”

Republicans acknowledge they are being outspent on television and out-organized on the ground in the key states — yet they say Trump’s strength on the economy and immigration may be enough for him to overcome those structural deficits.

Surveys indicate that Republicans still hold an advantage on economic issues, even as inflation slows, gas prices drop, and the Federal Reserve slashes interest rates for the first time in four years. Public opinion on immigration has also swung to the right during the Biden administration, with more Americans saying they support tougher enforcement measures to crack down on illegal immigration.

Former Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican, estimated that there were 10 Harris ads for every Trump ad on television during this past week’s Milwaukee Brewers baseball playoff games. And he admitted that Wisconsin Democrats had built a larger, stronger organization than Republicans.

“You definitely see the financial advantage for them,” Walker said. “The thing that keeps it close, just as it is elsewhere in the country, is that the issue matrix is on the side of Republicans.”

All this money is being spent to attract a tiny slice of the millions of people who are expected to cast ballots. Only 4% of battleground state voters don’t know how or whether they will vote, according to Jim Messina, a Democratic strategist working to support Harris through allied outside groups.

And perhaps the biggest targets of both campaigns are not people who are undecided over which candidate to support, but whether to vote at all.

“Our No. 1 priority should be turning out folks that sometimes are deciding whether to show up or not on Election Day, and that’s going to be a really deciding element to the election,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., after a recent campaign stop in Wisconsin. “It’s about the choice between staying home or participating in our process.”

The Harris campaign believes it has built an organization that can reach those voters with hundreds of organizers and dozens of offices across all seven swing states. Harris campaign aides say there are crucial differences between their operation and the Clinton campaign. While the Clinton operation focused largely on mobilizing the Democratic base, they say, their campaign is working more aggressively to cut into Trump’s margins in rural and more conservative areas.

Their field operation stretches from turning out staunch Democrats to persuading moderate Republicans who supported Trump in previous races but disapprove of his indictments, impeachments and general conduct since leaving office.

In contrast, Trump aides see recent events as reinforcing their central campaign message that Harris is unprepared, weak and incapable of restoring the sense of calm that the Biden administration promised when elected four years ago.

They believe they are competing in a country that has become more conservative over the past four years — pointing to surveys showing that more voters now identify as Republican — and more likely to side with them on the issues.

“New, not-baked-in information can certainly have an impact on moving voters to President Trump or further galvanizing and motivating his supporters,” said James Blair, the Trump campaign’s political director, of the escalation of hostilities abroad and the devastating storms at home. “Those two specific pieces of new information certainly bolster the case we’ve been prosecuting.”

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