The map is wide open and the attack ads are coming in ‘snap election’ between Harris, Trump

At a moment when presidential campaigns traditionally formulate their closing arguments, Kamala Harris is still making her introductions.

The vice president has flipped the enthusiasm gap, the money gap and the polling gap in her favor in the six weeks since she replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. But the race between Harris and Donald Trump remains not only tight nationally, but in a broader range of states than before.

The resulting two-month sprint to come is what Donna Brazile, the Harris confidante who managed Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, described as America’s first “snap election.” The challenge Harris’ campaign is now confronting is how to extend its late-summer surge through the fall.

“She has had as good of a first five weeks or last five weeks that I have seen since Barack Obama won [South Carolina‘s 2008 primary] and went on a roll and locked up the nomination,” said Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager who has served as an informal adviser to Harris. “But in every single battleground state, we’re still within the margin of error.”

Polls do show all the swing states within the margin of error. But the momentum, for now, appears to be with Harris. The clearest evidence of that was a Gallup poll last week that showed Democrats with a 14-point edge on which party’s voters were more enthusiastic about voting — a major shift from the organization’s March survey showing Republicans with a 4-point advantage in what was then a contest between two unpopular candidates in Biden and Trump.

“Of course people get motivated about voting against somebody. But when they're as motivated or more motivated about voting for somebody, there's magic there,” said David Plouffe, a senior adviser to Harris’ campaign.

Trump, who has yet to find an attack on Harris that sticks, enters next week’s head-to-head debate in a far less comfortable position than when he left the stage after pummeling Biden on June 27. It may be his best remaining opportunity to blunt his opponent’s momentum and change the trajectory of the race. And a misstep by Harris on that stage — or any other — could do just that.

“I always felt Labor Day was going to be about the time … the Kamala sugar high starts burning off,” said Jason Roe, a Republican strategist and former executive director of the state GOP in Michigan. “It’s gone on for too long, and there’s not a lot more left to propel it.”

While for weeks, Roe said, Harris benefited from being “a little bit undefined,” Republicans’ efforts to highlight her shifting policy positions mean she’s now “going to get a little definition.” The debate, he said, “may be one of the few opportunities that [Trump] can put her on defense.”

But if Harris doesn’t falter next week, there’s reason to believe that she may be uniquely positioned to expand her numbers with swing voters in key states. Unlike Biden or Trump — one president and one former president, and both fixtures in politics for years — Harris’ candidacy is so new that a quick introduction, followed by comparatively minimal vetting by the electorate, may benefit her.

“She’s the one with room to grow,” Plouffe said. “The Trump of ‘16, voters wanted to know more about him. Now, when Trump goes out there and campaigns and does interviews, it's questionable how helpful it is. With Harris, it's very helpful. We have a market of voters out there who want to know more about her.”

The enthusiasm Harris has ignited — all the more apparent coming after months of tepid support for Biden — has reminded some Democrats of Obama’s 2008 run, which many described as more of a movement than a mere political campaign.

“What happens with a movement is they don't wait for the campaign high command to send them buttons and posters — they do it themselves,” Brazile said. “They don’t wait for the campaign to organize rallies — they do it themselves. The vice president has a movement behind her and can use it to her advantage.”

That’s part of the reason Harris’ candidacy has uncorked a fundraising gusher — more than $540 million raised since her launch — and improved her standing in a number of swing state polls. So far, she has succeeded in making herself, an incumbent vice president, as much of a change candidate as Trump, who has struggled to adapt to his new opponent.

The obstacle for Harris is that Trump’s 2016 campaign was nothing short of a movement, as well. And in many red swaths of the country — and significantly, battleground states — it remains so. Eight years after Trump won the White House, he has remade the GOP in his image, turning the Republican National Committee into a family-run subsidiary after quashing most of the Republican resistance to his “MAGA” movement, at least among elected officials.

Even Harris’ allies acknowledge how close the race remains. As Brazile put it, “This election is far from over.”

Harris’ campaign believes she has multiple paths to securing the 270 electoral votes it takes to win the White House. Her recent swings through Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia underscored the sudden competitiveness of states that Trump, when he was opposing Biden, appeared to have locked up. But her standing in the “Blue Wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where blue-collar whites account for more of the electorate, remains unclear. On Monday, she appeared with Biden, still popular with working-class whites and union members, during a Labor Day parade in Pittsburgh.

“There's a lot of excitement, but there's certainly a sense of trepidation as people are holding their breath and waiting for the other shoe to drop," said Adrian Hemond, CEO of Grassroots Midwest, a bipartisan consultancy firm based in Michigan, where Harris also campaigned on Monday.

"Democrats are clearly excited," he said. "They're in a much better spot than they were in that regard. But there's a great deal of apprehension about whatever weird thing may happen next."

Jen O’Malley Dillon, who is guiding Harris’ campaign, described the Democratic ticket as “clear underdogs” in a memo released Sunday that predicted voting margins in the top battleground states will be “razor thin” again. Contrasting Harris’ agenda with Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s controversial blueprint for the next Republican administration from which Trump has sought to distance himself — galvanizing voters around Harris’ call to restore reproductive freedoms and leaning on a larger army of ground troops, Dillon asserted, could be difference-makers come November.

“We maintain multiple pathways to 270 electoral votes, and are growing strength across the types of voters who decide elections in every battleground,” she wrote.

Despite the clear shift in the race over the last several weeks, Trump advisers say they have more paths to victory than Harris does. They have argued that if Trump can win North Carolina, which he won in 2016 and 2020, and pick off Pennsylvania and one other state that Biden won four years ago, he will cross the 270 electoral vote threshold. Another possible route, they say, is sweeping the four competitive Sun Belt states — North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. That would force Harris to sweep the Rust Belt states, including Pennsylvania, where surveys have shown a virtual tie.

Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita described Harris as the “incumbent” in the race, reflecting the campaign’s effort to tether the vice president to Biden. In her TV interview last week, he said, Harris “defended her and Biden’s handling of the worst economic conditions in a generation, … owning all of them.”

“She owns the policy decisions, and now she owns the political path,” he said. “Sixty-five days is an eternity in politics, … too long for American voters not to sniff out her weak character and dangerously liberal view of America.”

But one Republican strategist in North Carolina, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, admitted things have tightened in the state. "I still think Trump is the slight favorite here, but things have changed," the GOP strategist said. “The anxiety is that Kamala appears to perform better with the 'double haters,’” the strategist added, in a reference to voters who viewed both Trump and Biden unfavorably before the Democratic candidate swap.

In the final weeks of the race, the Harris campaign will lean heavily on an on-the-ground organization engineered over the last year to drag voters to the polls in support of Biden. At the same time, it is poised to devote a larger percentage of its paid advertising budget to digital spots, looking to capitalize on her strong support from younger voters who’d been unenthused about Biden.

Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, is banking on several well-funded outside groups to drag Harris down. That includes Preserve America, a super PAC that is heavily funded by Republican mega-donor Miriam Adelson. The organization is set to begin a $30 million TV and digital advertising campaign in September, according to a person familiar with the group’s plans and granted anonymity to discuss them. The first ad will focus on immigration, an issue that Trump has made a centerpiece of his campaign. The commercial features a California man — who identifies himself as a former Harris supporter — who talks about how his son was killed by an undocumented immigrant while Harris was serving as the state’s attorney general.

“Kamala’s honeymoon is over, and we plan to provide her with the worst September she’s ever had,” said Dave Carney, the longtime Republican strategist and senior adviser to the Preserve America super PAC. “The second phase of our advertising will make her socialist intentions abundantly clear to every voter she’s trying to dupe.”

Another pro-Trump super PAC, Right for America, is set to begin a $60 million ad campaign beginning in September. The group’s first commercial similarly targets Harris on immigration.

The Harris campaign will be deploying its own artillery. It has reserved $370 million in TV ads to reach battleground voters over the campaign’s final nine weeks. And much of that spending will aim to focus voters on Project 2025. While Trump has sought to distance himself from the policy template, this spot — which is also airing in Trump’s home market of Palm Beach, Florida, in a playful jab at the GOP nominee — highlights the former president’s own comments about exacting revenge on his enemies should he win the White House again.

Future Forward, the primary Democratic super PAC backing Harris, is also poised to spend $300 million on TV and digital ads before the campaign’s end. Much of the Democrats’ anti-Trump messaging has focused on reproductive rights and the former president’s appointment of three conservative justices necessary to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022.

That issue, which helped Democrats avoid the typical midterm wipeout later that year and has galvanized women to defeat additional restrictions on abortion rights even in red states like Kansas, appears to be a major liability for Trump — one he looked to neutralize last week with a surprising announcement that, if elected, he would make IVF procedures free for everyone.

It’s unclear if that will help Trump close the ballooning gender gap in the race, with polls showing Trump losing even more ground with women voters now that Harris is the Democratic nominee.

Trump, who featured Hulk Hogan at the Republican convention in July, hopes to offset that with an aggressive effort to build up support among young men. According to a Quinnipiac University survey released last week, Trump is leading Harris among men, 57 percent to 39 percent. Trump in recent weeks has appeared on a number of podcasts that are popular among men, including ones hosted by Logan Paul, Theo Von and the Nelk Boys.

But on abortion, Trump has tried in recent days to muddy the waters . Seemingly aware of his commitments to anti-abortion activists and that his past statements and actions are increasingly a political liability, he made several conflicting comments last week, suggesting that he might vote for a Florida ballot measure that would enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution before stating that he wouldn’t.

Trump, in a Truth Social post earlier in the week , wrote, perhaps hopefully, that he would be "great for women and their reproductive rights."

Liz Crampton contributed to this report.