‘Nothing persuades anyone anymore’: Insiders from the Trump and Harris campaigns get candid about their election fears

One says this election features ‘the most staggering issue I’ve seen in my entire 50-year career in American politics’. Another thinks North Carolina will decide everything. Andrew Feinberg speaks to strategists about what they actually believe will happen in the next month — the good, the bad and the ugly

Harris and Trump remain locked in a dead heat (AP)

In 27 days, Americans will go to the polls. Yet it remains unclear whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump has the edge in a byzantine electoral system that will determine the next American president.

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report’s most recent poll of the swing states shows Harris with a two-point lead over Trump in Arizona; Trump two points ahead in Georgia; and Harris with three, one, and two-point leads in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, respectively.

The Democratic candidate also has a single-point advantage in Nevada and is tied with Trump in North Carolina, a state that no Democrat has carried since Barack Obama’s first presidential run in 2008.

All of those contested states are showing Harris well within the polling margin for error — in essence, a statistical tie everywhere. That makes the race to the 270 electoral college votes each candidate needs to claim victory an extremely difficult one to call.

Over the last week, The Independent reached out to insiders with both the Trump and Harris campaigns to get a sense of where each campaign feels that they stand.

By and large, both the Republican and Democratic candidates were circumspect about the closeness of this unprecedented election contest.

One Trump-aligned operative was candid enough to admit that the surprise switcheroo atop the Democratic ticket caused by President Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race put the ex-president and his advisers on the back foot. And Trump’s debate performance against Harris — one that was at least as bad as Biden’s performance when the two men squared off in late June — did not help things.

But the Trumpworld veteran said the campaign’s brain trust believes the worst is behind them and sees a path to victory in sight powered by outsized gains among Black and Latino voters.

Their view is one that one anti-Trump Republican strategist, Mike Madrid, has seen coming for years.

Madrid, who was a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project Super PAC, is a veteran of California politics and an expert on how to best target Latino voters. And he told The Independent that Trump’s inroads with Latino voters are a significant danger for Harris.

“​​There are some things that [Trump] is moving on… I think regardless of what happens, the Latino vote looks like it’s going to keep getting stronger for him,” he said.

Madrid attributed the growing strength for Trump among Latinos to years of inept Democratic messaging that assumed immigration — ensuring a compassionate attitude towards migrants from South and Central America — was a priority for voters who had roots in that part of the world.

“We’ve never been interested in immigration. It’s just this political and media narrative that the Democrats have been driving,” he said.

He added that Harris’s campaign has made some positive moves by making an abrupt shift to the right on border policy — but he warned that more needs to be done if they want to put Trump in the rearview mirror for good on November 5.

For one, he said the Harris campaign should stop assuming they have a path to victory running through Arizona and Nevada because she is in “deep, deep trouble” in both states. Instead, he urged Democrats to “run up the score” with the suburban women and college-educated voters who have powered their success in Trump-era elections.

“It’s gonna be the largest gender gap in the history of the country, and it’s correlated into the diploma divide … What’s keeping her competitive is she is increasing the margins with college-educated women, and that includes Hispanic women, white women, African American women — all women with degrees are opening up this gap,” he said.

He also suggested that Democrats need to stop putting forward Republican surrogates like Liz Cheney, the one-time House GOP conference chair who became a top Trump antagonist by serving on the House January 6 select committee and lost her seat in Congress over it.

The reason, he said, is because the endorsements from high-profile, anti-Trump Republicans can just as easily harden GOP voters and keep them from considering pulling the lever for Harris. That’s because many of them deeply dislike “turncoats” such as Cheney, former Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger, and former Trump staffers who make frequent TV appearances such as The View co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin (Griffin is even set to take part in a pro-Harris bus tour with the ex-Wyoming congresswoman.)

While Madrid was bearish on Harris’s chances in the West, he said the vice president could lock down an unassailable path to victory by doubling down on efforts in North Carolina. There, she is tied with Trump in an election where the GOP has all but abandoned their disgraced gubernatorial candidate, Mark Robinson.

“Demographically, the shift of North Carolina has made it far more important than Arizona, so that if Harris wins North Carolina and Pennsylvania, there’s virtually no roadmap for Trump,” he said.

The Latino turnout expert, who took pains to make clear that he’s not involved in any national campaigns this election cycle, also told The Independent that he would not necessarily put too much stock in the so-called “ground game” — canvassing, door-knocking and other get-out-the-vote operations — to boost the Harris campaign. He explained that the demographic shifts of the Trump-era Republican party have given the Democrats a massive boost with the people who vote most reliably.

That’s how Democrats have been winning unprecedented victories in low-turnout and off-year elections that were once the GOP’s strongest suit.

By contrast, the voters moving into Trump’s corner have been the “the low-information, low-educated, low-propensity voters” that were once the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party.

“Donald Trump has a unique ability to turn out low-information, low-propensity voters — rural whites, but also low-information, urban Latinos and poorer people that are less civically engaged,” he said. And with the massive shifts to the GOP in “Hispanic, dense, poor immigrant precincts” in places like Pennsylvania, he warned that the field operations that the Biden campaign spent the first year and a half of the cycle building before Biden was forced out of the race could backfire and help re-elect Trump.

However, another veteran of GOP politics — former Maryland Lieutenant Governor and Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele — was far more bullish on Harris’s chances compared with Madrid in a separate phone interview with The Independent.

Steele — who led the GOP during the Obama era when the party made historic gains in the House, Senate and in state legislatures nationwide — said the Republicans’ comparatively poor efforts at field operations are going to be a significant disadvantage, come Election Day.

Steele added that when Trump engineered the ouster of RNC chair Ronna McDaniel and installed a pair of loyalists — one of whom is his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump — to redirect funds for the GOP’s ground operation into ill-conceived “election integrity” work meant to delegitimize the 2024 results — he weakened his own campaign’s chances. But Steele also suggested that Harris may have a problem because of the enduring nature of Trump’s support from his political base, and how that loyalty could negate the GOP’s lack of organization on the ground.

Steele told The Independent that Trump has managed to blunt much of the momentum that Harris enjoyed initially by running a grievance-based campaign that plays on fear, sexism and racism to drive up her negatives rather than convince voters to support him for any positive reason. Yet he also cast doubt on Madrid’s concerns over the Democratic turnout machine backfiring by bringing out hidden Trump voters in urban centers. He instead suggested that the fall of national abortion rights thanks to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision would bring out voters who aren’t likely to check a box for Trump, even if they might not intend to vote for anything other than abortion-related ballot initiatives.

“When they’re in that booth, they check that box on the thing that they care about. I then get them to check a second box, and that’s my candidate for president, my candidate for governor, my candidate for Congress and so forth,” he said.

Steele also posited that Trump may be facing a far greater disadvantage than he and his aides could have imagined two months ago because of Democratic efforts in North Carolina, Georgia and Florida. In those states, he said, there’s been more than a million new registrants in the last 45 days alone.

“Those voters are spread amongst those battleground states, because the Democrats have been focused on those states,” he said, adding that the recent push by pop superstar Taylor Swift to get her fans to register to vote will have an effect that isn’t being picked up by pollsters.

“What do you think those voters are going to do on Election Day, vote for Trump? No. And are pollsters calling them and getting them in their polls? No,” he said.

While Steele, the former GOP chair, was bullish on Harris’s chances, other Democratic experts contacted by The Independent warned that Harris and her campaign need to step up the aggression against Trump.

James Carville, the legendary Democratic strategist who masterminded Bill Clinton’s 1992 win over then-president George HW Bush, said in a phone interview that he is concerned by the possibility that the Harris team is acting as if they are “sitting on a point-and-a-half lead” and called such a play-it-safe strategy “not a good idea.” He said her decision to appear on 60 Minutes was a good one, and her push for another pre-election debate with Trump is a sound move as well. But Carville added that “a little more aggression is called for” because of the closeness of the race.

He pointed to a comment made by Trump’s running-made, Ohio Senator JD Vance, during his recent debate against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, in which Vance credited Trump with having “salvaged Obamacare”. Harris should be using that claim as a massive cudgel with which to batter the Republican ticket, Carville opined.

“​​I would have President Obama come out. I would have the highest level of anything to say: ’What are you talking about?’” he said. “He actually uttered those words — of all of the BS you hear! Seize on it … they tried to kill it 100 times!”

“They should have the vice president. They should have President Obama. They should just stuff this right down their throats. You can never trust these people,” he added.

Carville also urged the Harris campaign to lean in to arguments that activate voters who are concerned over abortion rights. He suggested that doing so could be the Democrats’ most powerful weapon over the next 28 days.

“It’s the most staggering issue I’ve seen in my entire 50-year career in American politics,” he said, adding that Harris should never pass up an opportunity to lay the Dobbs ruling right at Trump’s feet.

Susan Estrich, the longtime Democratic operative who ran then-Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis’s unsuccessful campaign against George HW Bush four years before Clinton’s triumphant run, said Harris is in a good position because Trump has not outperformed his polls the same way he did in 2016. But she also expressed concern that Harris could be at a hidden disadvantage because of her race and gender, citing anecdotal evidence which suggests that Black candidates need two extra points on Election Day compared with their public polling.

That race-related Election Day deficit, known as the Bradley Effect, was a major source of fear during Obama’s 2008 run. But Obama ended up outperforming his public polling when he defeated then-Arizona senator John McCain in the 2008 election.

The question, Estrich said, is whether Harris succumbs to a Bradley Effect against Trump, or repeats Obama’s 2008 performance.

“I think we just don’t know. And I don’t think anybody knows,” she said. “I think the consensus right now is that there aren’t too many persuadable voters out there. Nothing persuades anyone anymore.”

Estrich added that the Harris campaign should redouble their efforts to harness anger over Dobbs to bring young voters to the polls, citing the massive lead she has opened up among young voters since becoming the Democrats’ nominee. Echoing Steele, the former GOP chair, Estrich also said the Democratic ground advantage, though potentially miniscule, could be exactly what Harris needs to get over the edge in November.

“The vibes matter and the momentum matters. But what matters most, it seems like, is who’s going to win the ground game on this one,” she said. “I think if it turns into a ground game, if it’s a 1 per cent or 2 per cent advantage, that gives the advantage to Harris.”