Harris team telegraphs three moves it is making to win ‘hard-fought’ contest with Trump

After receiving the support of the majority of delegates, Vice President Kamala Harris is likely to become the Democratic nominee for president, and her campaign team is laying out how it plans to defeat former President Donald Trump on Election Day.

Mobilizing key voting blocs to head to polls in November

The Harris campaign team said the vice president is leading Trump among black, Latino, Asian, and young voters — which, historically, have been key voter blocs for Democratic politicians. However, President Joe Biden saw a growing apathy among minority voters, with many black voters saying in May that they were uncertain if they were even going to vote. 

The Harris campaign said the vice president would focus her efforts on appealing to minority voters who are unpopular with Trump and grew indifferent to Biden.

After Biden endorsed Harris, Win With Black Women raised $1.5 million for the vice president. 

Harris is leading Trump by 25 points, according to a YouGov poll, and a survey found that 83% of students indicated they would now be voting following Biden’s endorsement of Harris. 

“We continue to focus on the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — and the Sun Belt states of North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, where the Vice President’s advantages with young voters, Black voters, and Latino voters will be important to our multiple pathways to 270 electoral votes,” the Harris campaign said.

Home in on concerns about abortion rights and Trump’s criminal conviction 

The Harris campaign plans to entice more centrist voters who have been turned off by Trump because of his criminal conviction, other legal battles, and role in overturning Roe v. Wade. 

While Trump stated he would not enact a national abortion ban and watered down anti-abortion language in the Republican Party’s 2024 platform, Harris has made abortion rights a top issue for this campaign. At a rally in Milwaukee on Tuesday, Harris pledged to sign legislation that would “restore reproductive rights.”

“We who believe in reproductive freedom will stop Donald Trump’s extreme abortion bans because we trust women to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do,” Harris said at her first campaign rally on Tuesday. “And when Congress passes a law to restore reproductive freedoms, as president of the United States, I will sign it into law.”

The campaign is homing in on the abortion issue because a poll found that 76% of voters identified abortion as important in this election, and nearly half of voters ranked it as very important. Fifty-seven percent of young people ages 18 to 29 identify abortion as a “major” factor in their vote, as do 55% of women.

“Trump’s, and now Vance’s, far-right positions on women’s reproductive rights and democracy put these key voters even further out of reach,” the campaign said in a statement.

While Trump’s criminal conviction may have emboldened greater support from Republicans and his base, 32% of independents said the conviction made them less likely to support Trump, and 21% said this would be an important factor in their vote.

Harris has touted her record as a criminal prosecutor in the handful of appearances she has made since becoming a candidate.

“I was elected attorney general of California, and I was a courtroom prosecutor,” Harris said. “In these roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, and cheaters who broke the rules of their own game. So hear me when I say, ‘I know Donald Trump’s type.’”

Grassroots support paired with strong campaign infrastructure 

In the first 24 hours after Biden’s endorsement, Harris’s campaign raised more than $81 million — a record-breaking fundraising in the history of presidential campaigns. More than 1.4 million grassroots donors have made donations since Sunday, and 64% of them made their first contribution for the 2024 election cycle. 

In addition to seeing an unprecedented cash flow, the Harris campaign saw 100,000 volunteers sign up to join the campaign. 

With an army of support from everyday citizens, the Harris campaign will use their help in more than 250 coordinated offices across the country, with one of the goals being to knock on 3 million doors across the rest of July and August.

“Since last fall, we have been building deep relationships in communities across the battlegrounds, creating a blended organizing model designed to register, persuade, mobilize and turn out voters when it matters most,” the Harris campaign said in a statement. “Using both in-person events and activities as well as engaging voters online, we are having conversations with voters to cut through media silos and political narratives.”