WASHINGTON — In battleground Pennsylvania, Kamala Harris warned that democracy and reproductive rights were at stake as she campaigned alongside a former Republican congresswoman.
Going to the same state the day before, Donald Trump served french fries at a closed McDonald’s.
As the 2024 presidential contest speeds to its conclusion on Nov. 5, Harris and Trump are embracing wildly different strategies to energize the coalitions they need to win. Both are making bets that will prove prescient or ill-advised.
Trump’s team has largely abandoned traditional efforts to broaden his message to target moderate voters, focusing instead on energizing his base of fiery partisans and turning out low-propensity voters — especially young men of all races — with tough talk and events aimed at getting attention online.
Harris is leaning into a more traditional all-of-the-above playbook targeting the narrow slice of undecided voters that remain, especially moderates, college-educated suburbanites, and women of all races and education. More than Trump, she is going after Republican women who may have supported rival Nikki Haley in this year’s GOP primary and are dissatisfied with the former president.
“It’s all pieces of a very complex puzzle,” Harris senior campaign adviser David Plouffe said this week. “This would all be a simpler exercise if you can focus just on one voter cohort. You can’t. And you got to make sure you know you’re doing well enough with all of them so that when you put all that together it adds up to 50 percent.”
Trump’s team sees it as a much simpler equation.
His aides insist that efforts to maximize turnout from Trump’s hardcore base do not mean he’s ignoring swing voters, even if he’s not tailoring a different message to
reach them.
“I just think that there’s a misunderstanding on what’s motivating those people,” Trump political director James Blair said. “I mean, the fact is the economy’s motivating those people. Those people overwhelmingly think that they’re worse off than they were four years ago... So then the question becomes: Who’s better equipped to fix it?”
The divergent strategies underscore the stark differences between the candidates themselves, in personality and policy.
Harris, a former California senator who would be the first female president, has promised to include a Republican in her Cabinet, while prioritizing efforts to protect democracy, reproductive rights and the middle class. Trump, a former president, has vowed to fight for the working class as well. He also has promised a campaign of retribution against his political enemies with an administration packed
with loyalists.
One point on which both camps agree: The election will be decided by voters in just seven swing states, a political map that has not shifted significantly or narrowed as Election Day speeds into view. They are Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.
One Harris adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy, described the situation as “still terrifyingly close in all seven.” / AP