Kamala Harris strategy to beat Trump: Win over young voters and women, juice turnout with people of color
Vice President Kamala Harris plans to beat former President Donald Trump in the November election by winning over young voters and women while turbocharging turnout with people of color.
As Harris hit the trail for a second straight day Wednesday, her newly minted campaign says it will lean heavily on reclaiming voting blocs that traditionally vote Democratic, but have drifted toward Republicans in 2024.
“In this moment, I believe we face a choice between two different visions for our nation,” Harris told a gathering of Zeta Phi Beta, a national Black sorority in Indianapolis. “One focused on the future, the other focused on the past. With your support, I am fighting for our nation’s future.”
Harris scored another record-breaking day of fundraising, raising $276 million in donations and pledges since launching her campaign Sunday afternoon, including $126 million from 1.4 million individual donors and another $150 million from mega donors to the main Democratic super PAC.
The campaign believes Harris, who would be the nation’s first Black woman president if elected, can win over what it calls persuadable swing voters who had been apathetic or unhappy with their choice when President Joe Biden was leading the ticket against Trump.
“Harris enters the presidential race with clear advantages among voters critical to victory,” campaign director Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote Wednesday in a memo about the race. “This campaign will be close, it will be hard fought, but Vice President Harris is in a position of strength — and she’s going to win.”
The biggest challenge in building Harris’s coalition is she may have an even tougher time than Biden in maintaining support among white men, and especially white men who lack a college degree.
Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance have already signaled that they plan to double down on his wildly successful strategy of appealing to working class voters, especially in the Rust Belt.
The GOP also hopes to win a greater share of Latino and young voters, with some polls showing Trump winning or about even among both groups.
Harris will need to counter that approach by winning a bigger share of white voters with a college education, especially white women, and boosting turnout among Black and Latino voters.
On the issues, Harris plans to push harder than Biden on reproductive rights, the party’s best issue and one that can potentially dramatically expand her appeal to women.
They believe she is much better qualified than Biden to roast Trump for his hard-to-pin-down approach to the issue, which includes boasting about appointing the judges who allowed abortion to be outlawed while insisting he would leave abortion bans to the states.
She will also aggressively attack Trump over the right-wing Project 2025, which amounts to an extremist blueprint for the nation.
The memo laid out an electoral college strategy that includes battling hard for the Sun Belt swing states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina, along with the Rust Belt so-called blue wall battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
That amounts to a shift from Biden’s campaign, which was forced into a risky plan of hoping to get to 270 electoral votes by sweeping the Midwest swing states and the Omaha, Nebraska-based NE-02 district, because he had fallen too far behind Trump in the Sun Belt.
