Campaigns matter – that’s the old political truism, anyway.
For a long time, politicos have believed that. To them, it’s like hockey: the regular season doesn’t matter, only the playoffs matter. You can be a bum in the regular season, but if you can get your act together in the playoffs, you might end up hoisting the Stanley Cup.
That’s the old political chestnut, anyway. But it sure hasn’t been true in the 2024 U.S. presidential race, has it?
The Democrats’ Kamala Harris has run an excellent campaign. She entered the race late, she hasn’t made any big mistakes (Joe Biden has, however), and she has raised more than $1 billion in a very short time – the biggest fundraising haul in the history of U.S. politics.
The Republicans, meanwhile, have made mistakes aplenty. Childless cat ladies, “island of garbage,” people eating dogs and cats, and on and on.
Their candidate, Donald Trump, hasn’t had a great time of it, either: he’s a convicted felon, an adjudicated sexual offender, a twice-impeached president and a serial denier of election results that have been certified by the courts, Congress and his former vice president. Oh, and quite a few of the people who worked for him from 2016 to 2020 are voting for Harris.
But you know what? It hasn’t mattered. They’re tied.
Trump isn’t just competitive against Harris – he’s very competitive. Even though the Vice President has run a solid campaign (and, full disclosure, this writer worked for her on it), and even though Trump has had a less-than-stellar campaign, it hasn’t changed much. The race has been tighter than a tick.
But this writer still thinks Harris will win.
Now, put down your pitchforks and torches, Canadian Trump fans. Hear me out. There’s one reason why Harris is going to win. Not by a landslide, mind you. But by enough to eke out a win the electoral college – likely several days after E-day.
It’s GOTV: get out the vote.
Getting out one’s vote is always important. But in a race with a bigger margin, it arguably doesn’t matter as much. In a tight race, like the Harris/Trump contest, it is critical. And believe me when I say that Kamala Harris has got a GOTV organization that is going to crush Trump’s. It’s already doing so, in fact.
Look, for example, at North Carolina, which was devastated a few weeks ago by Hurricane Helene. Democrats have only won there once in the past quarter-century – and only barely – with Barack Obama in 2008. Despite that, the Harris Democrats have been everywhere in the state in 2024: delivering supplies for relief efforts, ferrying in water and batteries and toiletries, doing wellness checks on residents, running helplines for victims, and knocking on tens of thousands of doors.
How could Team Harris do all that? Because they’ve got a huge GOTV team, and more money than God, that’s how. Trump’s team have simply not been able to compete at that level, financially or organizationally.
Other signs of the Democrats’ GOTV dominance:
As early as July, Harris had nearly 300 field offices in every swing state, with hundreds of paid staffers and volunteers. As much as a month ago, that Democratic army had knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors and made millions of phone calls. In swing state Wisconsin alone, Harris’ direct voter contacts “number in the millions,” with a big focus on first-time voters.
Volunteers, which Harris has in abundance, are highly motivated to GOTV.
Trump, meanwhile, has been forced to hire paid mercenaries who simply do not have GOTV experience, or the passion to win. Republicans themselves admit that they are being beaten, badly, on GOTV efforts.
Democrats are working with groups like Indivisible, which specializes in micro-targeting of voters – mobilizing them where they live, with the help of people who live there, too. Their innovation, called Neighbor2Neighbor, is far and above anything the GOP has. It’s an approach that works because nothing motivates voters better than neighbours talking to neighbours.
Could I be wrong? Of course I could. I worked for Hillary Clinton and thought she’d win, too.
But the difference, this time, is that Democrats learned that painful lesson in 2016. They’re not underestimating Donald Trump this time. And they’ve got a ton of money, and a huge army, to get out the vote on Tuesday. My bet is that it’ll make the difference.
But we’ll see, soon enough, if I’m right!