Harris’s people are confident. The Trump campaign is panicking: ‘He’s realizing that he could lose’

The mood couldn’t be more different among the staffers accompanying the two presidential candidates, Andrew Feinberg reports

Donald Trump holds a campaign rally at JS Dorton Arena in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Monday (Reuters)

With just under 24 hours until Election Day, the contrast between the two campaigns — and the mood of their employees — couldn’t be more clear.

Harris, who just a few weeks ago appeared to have run out of the momentum she’d quickly gathered after President Joe Biden ceded the Democratic ticket to her this past July, is surging thanks to a series of late-game missteps by Trump and his allies. Those missteps include the disastrous decision to include a comedian who called Puerto Rico an “island of floating garbage” in the lineup at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally late last month.

On Saturday, renowned pollster Ann Selzer released her annual survey of Iowa voters which showed Harris with a three-point lead, 47 per cent to 44 per cent, in the Hawkeye State based on an incredibly strong showing with female voters. Harris, who’d trailed Trump by a four-point margin among Iowans in September, had also inherited a whopping 18-point deficit when she took over the Democratic nomination from Biden.

Another national poll released by NPR and Marist College on Monday showed Harris garnering support from 51 per cent of respondents, compared with Trump’s 47 per cent — a lead greater than the survey’s 3.5-point margin of error. And the final NBC News poll of the election cycle showed Trump hemorrhaging support from Black and Latino voters, while Harris was shown to be garnering support from 87 per cent of Black voters.

The Harris campaign appears to have met the moment and is finishing strongly with what it describes as the largest coordinated get-out-the-vote event in history on Monday.

The campaign is running simultaneous events across all seven battleground states, including rallies featuring Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz, plus programming tying the events in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin together as part of a national livestream program.

Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told reporters on a call on Monday afternoon that the coordinated event is intended to “capture the grassroots enthusiasm that we are seeing everywhere, to focus on mobilizing our voters heading into Election Day tomorrow”.

“Tomorrow, we’ll have elected officials and performers and speakers that really reach such a wide network across all social media platforms, helping to make sure that our message is breaking through in these final hours to voters that maybe are harder to reach or less engaged. These events will serve as a massive mobilization and volunteer engagement opportunity,” she said.

Privately, Democratic sources who spoke to The Independent are projecting confidence, with one swing-state party chair noting what they described as “a serious crossover vote among Republicans” and “explosive” turnout in early voting among key constituencies, including Latinos.

Trump’s response to a Biden gaffe in which the president appeared to call the ex-president’s supporters “garbage” in return seemed to have only prolonged the news cycle stemming from Hinchcliffe’s racist diatribe. His decision to stage a photo op with a garbage truck looks to have failed to shift the focus back to Biden and instead reminded Latino voters of what had touched off the controversy to begin with.

And while the Trump campaign had hoped to make hay out of an Associated Press report revealing that the White House communications team had tried to doctor the official transcript of Biden’s remarks to make it look as if he hadn’t said what he’d said, Trump stepped on his own campaign’s messaging over the weekend with a series of bizarre and unhinged appearances. At one rally, he even appeared to fellate a malfunctioning microphone.

One Democratic operative suggested that the stars had aligned to bring about the ex-president’s collapse at the exact time Harris has been surging.

“Aaron Sorkin couldn’t have written it better,” they said.

Meanwhile, Trump and running mate JD Vance are set to close out their electioneering with a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s the same place where Trump closed out his victorious 2016 run against Hillary Clinton, and it’s where Trump ended his re-election race against Biden four years later.

Not only is Michigan a key swing state — and Grand Rapids a historically strong Republican area — but Trump is notoriously superstitious and has insisted on closing out both of his post-2016 campaigns there for no reason but vibes, even as he was forced to open his day in North Carolina, a reliable GOP stronghold that he might well lose to Harris.

At Trump’s appearances this past weekend, the arenas he visited looked noticeably emptier and the candidate himself looked lost at times, vacillating between bewilderment and menace. He suggested that an assassination attempt against him would need to shoot through a packed media contingent to have a chance at hitting him, in one particularly concerning moment.

One Republican operative who has worked with the ex-president’s campaign in the past said it’s clear that Trump is “decompensating” in response to the late Harris surge.

“He’s realizing that he could lose the election, go to prison, and maybe die there,” they said.