3 observations from Harris’s Wisconsin and Michigan rallies
The latest from my campaign notes: Hill Dems hug veep after avoiding Biden on the trail, she takes the high road from an anti-Trump chant and Team Harris sees a path to victory beyond the Blue Wall.
Vice President Kamala Harris will continue her tour across the swing states in a few hours as she and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), make the case to the voters who will decide the election in November that they’re the only ones standing between their freedoms and the Project 2025 takeover Harris and Walz say former President Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance would implement if elected.
Harris will speak to a group of automobile manufacturing workers in the Detroit area at the invitation of Shawn Fain, president of United Auto Workers. This powerful union endorsed Harris last week. Then she’ll travel to Phoenix this afternoon, where she and Walz will soldier on with campaign stops out west. (She was previously scheduled to travel to Raleigh, North Carolina and Savannah, Georgia, today, but the campaign canceled those stops due to Tropical Storm Debby.)
Harris spoke at two rallies in Wisconsin and Michigan on her first full day on the campaign trail with Walz as her vice presidential nominee. The rallies followed a boisterous event in Philadelphia on Tuesday night in front of 10,000-plus supporters. They also invited humongous crowds: 12,000 people attended the Wisconsin event, followed by 15,000 who pulled up to the Detroit function—the largest of the campaign so far.
Keep reading for a few observations I documented in my notebook from the campaign stops.
1) Hill Dems continue to hug Harris tight
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) was all smiles as she fired up the crowd before Walz and Harris emerged to deliver their remarks.
The two-term senator, caught up in a competitive reelection campaign, was often nowhere to be seen when President Joe Biden traveled to Madison, her state’s capital city, last month—instead opting to attend a previously scheduled campaign stop.
Later that evening in Detroit, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who’s coming off a decisive primary victory in her campaign to succeed the retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), pumped up the crowd ahead of Harris and Walz’s appearances after she was missing in action during Biden’s last visit several weeks ago.
Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), who, like Baldwin, is in a race Democrats will likely have to win this November to preserve any chance of holding onto the Senate majority, often stood by Biden during his frequent visits to the state. But while Harris briefly served with Casey in the Senate before joining Biden’s ticket in 2020, Casey and Biden have a longstanding relationship so it made sense the three-term incumbent would show up for his friend.
However, Casey also joined Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) on Tuesday as part of the pre-program in Philadelphia touting the Harris-Walz ticket as the top choice for the top of the ticket this fall.
Once Harris is out west, she’s expected to be joined on the trail this weekend by Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), another Senate Democrat fighting for her political life in another must-win seat.
The warm embrace of Harris is significant because many frontline House members and vulnerable Senate Democrats distanced themselves from Biden, whose sagging poll numbers and unpopularity were seen as threats to their down-ballot prospects. And that was before the Dump Biden campaign launched to pressure him to end his reelection bid after his poor presidential debate six weeks ago today.
“I was really asking for a better campaign,” former Speaker Nancy Pelosi told a group of reporters this week during a roundtable interview to promote her new book. “We did not have a campaign that was on the path to victory. Members knew that in their districts.”
Biden, a career politician who served 36 years in the Senate and eight years as vice president, took it in stride during a press conference last month, 10 days before he ultimately dropped out.
“The truth of the matter is I understand the self-interest of a candidate,” Biden said. “If they think that, you know, running with Biden at the top of the ticket is going to hurt them, then they’re going to run away. I get it.”
Still, it’s a fascinating turn of events to see so many Hill Democrats immediately hug Harris—a sign of the drag members viewed Biden to be on their races and the possibility that they could ride Harris’s coattails this November if she continues to poll and campaign formidably against Trump.
2) Harris tempers anti-Trump chant
Supporters at the vice president’s rallies have recently started showing “Lock Him Up” when she mentions former President Trump. She distanced herself from the chant during her Wisconsin and Michigan events yesterday.
“The courts are going to handle that,” she said in Detroit after delivering a similar response in Eau Claire hours earlier. “We’re going to beat him in November.”
The messaging allows Harris to position herself as the adult in the room who appeals to her supporters’ better angels rather than insulting them. It also plays up her background as a prosecutor who believes in the rule of law.
The chant is a riff of “Lock Her Up,” the rallying cry Trump supporters debuted at the 2016 Republican National Convention. They parlayed onto the campaign trail to claim former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was guilty of a crime.
But Harris’s response to her crowds isn’t just a quip from her stump speech: Trump is actually scheduled to be sentenced on September 18 after a New York City jury convicted him in May of 34 felony counts related to his falsifying of business records to conceal payments to a sex worker in exchange for her silence about a sexual encounter between them.
Trump is the first US president to be convicted of a felony.
The Supreme Court on August 5 blocked an attempt by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey to lift Trump’s gag order and block his sentencing until after the election after Bailey accused New York of interfering with the presidential election.
3) The sun belt is back in play
The Harris campaign got some good news this morning: Cook Political Report, the leading elections forecaster in politics, shifted its ratings for Arizona, Georgia and Nevada in the presidential election from Lean Republican to Toss Up, an indication the vice president has wiped out the advantage Trump previously held over Biden.
Trump led Biden in the CPR national vote tracker by about 2.5 points three weeks ago. But Harris leads Trump by less than one point today, a shift of more than three points in Harris’s direction as she has cut into his lead by anywhere from two to five points in battleground states.
The ratings update adds validity to the Harris campaign’s argument that the vice president has multiple paths to victory beyond the so-called Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Biden carried these states in 2020 after Clinton failed to do so in 2016.
According to FiveThirtyEight, an opinion poll analysis site, Trump is up one point in Arizona today after leading Biden by 5.5 points on July 21.
President Biden won the state by less than 10,500 votes in 2020, thanks partly to high turnout among Latino and Native American voters. He became the first Democrat to win Arizona since Clinton in 1996 and only the second since Truman in 1948. He is also the first to win Maricopa County since Truman—a traditionally Republican stronghold that tilted to Biden by 2.2 percent or 45,109 votes.
Arizona was the second-closest state in 2020, the only closer state being Georgia. This marked the first time since 1948 that the Democratic nominee won both Sun Belt states in the same presidential election (Clinton won each state in separate elections). This was also the first time since 1932 that a non-incumbent Democrat carried Arizona in a presidential election or that an incumbent Republican lost the state.
Trump carried the state by 3.5 points in 2016.
Nevada hasn’t enough Harris-Trump polls to produce a new 538 polling average. But the former president was up nearly six points on Biden almost three weeks ago and the little data that’s out there shows Harris closing the gap.
In 2020, Biden overcame Trump’s gains in rural counties with wins in the state’s most populous counties and in the state’s largest cities, which diverse and union voters heavily populated. But Nevada was his weakest victory in a state Hillary Clinton had won in 2016. (He carried all other such states by more than 7 percent.)
Trump is up on Harris in Georgia by less than a point today after leading Biden by almost six the day the president ended his reelection campaign.
I wrote about Georgia’s role as the consummate swing state last week ahead of Vice President Harris’s rally in Atlanta.
It flipped the Senate blue in 2021 when it elected Ossoff and Warnock in runoff elections months after it delivered Biden the presidency by less than 12,000 votes, enabling congressional Democrats and him to enact a historic legislative agenda. (Georgia was the only state in the Deep South Biden carried in 2020).
The state helped Democrats defy expectations and hold the Senate during the 2022 midterms by reelecting Warnock to a full six-year term.
It was the only state in the Deep South he carried in 2020 and is expected to play a decisive role in the outcome of the general election in November.
Do you have questions about the election? Drop me a line at michael@onceuponahill.com or send me a message below to get in touch and I’ll find the answers.