Democrats are excited, but can Harris win?

Since replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris has quickly consolidated her power and reinvigorated a campaign that had many Democratic leaders worried.

Facing no significant opposition from other Democrats, Harris secured votes from 4,567 delegates (99% of participating delegates) during a virtual call earlier this month.

The campaign, along with the Democratic National Committee and other joint fundraising committees, raised a historic $310 million in July, surpassing the total for the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, in the same month. More than $200 million of Harris’ haul came in her first week as a candidate.

“We’ve seen a groundswell of support. The kind of grassroots support — organizing and fundraising — that wins elections,” said Kevin Munoz, a spokesman for the Harris campaign.

The campaign’s optimism is reflected in the polls. After another round of very strong polls in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Harris now has a 55% chance of winning, according to election data analyst Nate Silver.

Silver gave Biden a 27% chance of winning when he was the Democratic nominee.

However, Trump’s campaign insists that the fundamentals of the race have not changed.

“The fact that Democrats are dropping one candidate for another does NOT change voters’ dissatisfaction with the economy, inflation, crime, open borders, housing prices, not to mention concerns about two foreign wars,” Tony Fabrizio, a Trump campaign pollster, said in a memo.

Harris’ “honeymoon” will soon be over, he said. “While the public polls may change in the short term and she may consolidate some more of the Democratic base, Harris cannot change who she is or what she has done.”

While the basic principles have not changed, they have been “hampered by concerns about Biden’s age and cognitive abilities,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

“Donald Trump is as unpopular as ever, and now he has an opponent who is much more attractive,” he told VOA. “Democrats are back in the game.”

Battlefield States

In the United States, elections are not decided by winning the popular vote, but by winning the Electoral College votes, which are allocated to each state in proportion to its population. In all but two states, the candidate who receives the most votes in a state gets all the Electoral College votes.

Harris’ team has invested heavily in campaign infrastructure, opening offices, recruiting new staff and enlisting tens of thousands of volunteers in states considered pivotal and that could determine the 2024 election victory: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia.

In 2020, those seven states were won by margins of 3 percentage points or less. Harris currently has a slight lead in the polls, but still within the margin of error in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump has leads in Michigan, Nevada, Arizona and North Carolina. In Georgia, he has a lead by more than the margin of error.

Both Trump and Harris will have a hard time winning without Pennsylvania, Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky said. Pennsylvania has 19 electoral votes, the most of any swing state.

“They can both afford to lose, but they would have to dominate in most, if not all, of the other swing states, including Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina,” Roginsky told VOA.

A candidate must win at least 270 of the 538 electoral votes to win. Ultimately, no matter how you do the math, it comes down to winning more electoral votes than your opponent, said Kelly Dittmar, an associate professor of political science at Rutgers University-Camden.

“Winning swing states with high electoral votes, like Michigan and Pennsylvania — both states where Democrats recently won at the state level and where Biden won in 2020 — is a solid path to (Harris’) success,” Dittmar told VOA.

In Michigan, a state with a large Arab-American population, Harris will have to convince the more than 100,000 people angry about the Biden administration’s staunch support for Israel who wrote “uncommitted” on their ballots. Thirty members of the so-called Uncommitted National Movement have earned a spot as delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next week.

Harris also faces opposition from the “Abandon Biden” movement over the same issue.

“We are saying that you should not vote for those who support or endorse what is happening in Gaza right now,” Hudhayfah Ahmad, the campaign’s media representative, told VOA. “Quite frankly, that goes for both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.”

Inflation and immigration

While enthusiasm among Democrats has grown, Harris must deal with voter frustration over high inflation, a problem Republicans blame on the Biden-Harris administration.

Trump previously held a wide lead among voters on key economic issues. Several polls show that Americans believe they will be better off financially under Trump than under Biden.

From a study conducted for the Financial Times and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business released a report this week showing that 41% trust Trump to be better at handling the economy, while 42% believe Harris would be better — a figure seven points higher than Biden’s numbers in July.

Immigration is another weak point for Biden, and by extension Harris. The Trump campaign has tried to portray her as the country’s “Border Czar,” responsible for the “invasion” of Central American migrants entering the United States through the Mexican border.

Her campaign now focuses on portraying her candidate as someone who is pro-immigration but tough on the law, emphasizing Harris’s life story as the daughter of immigrants and her experience as the former attorney general of California, the state with the largest immigrant population.

“I was attorney general of a border state,” Harris said recently at a rally in Arizona, a swing state where immigration is a major concern for voters. “I went after the transnational gangs, the drug cartels, the human traffickers. I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won.”

Will she win in November?

In such a close race in an ever-changing political climate, analysts avoid claiming that the path to victory is clear for any candidate.

Harris’ campaign said they believe this will be a very close election, decided by a very small number of voters in just a few states.

Even with this momentum, said Harris campaign spokesman Munoz, “we are the underdog in this race and we take nothing for granted.”