Democratic insiders and strategists heading into the final hours of the election are expressing confidence that Vice President Kamala Harris will defeat former President Donald Trump on Tuesday at the ballot box.
“Nauseously optimistic,” is how Democrats described themselves to New York magazine as the clock continues ticking for the final 100 hours of the election cycle.
Trump and Harris both delivered what were their respective closing arguments earlier this week, with Trump addressing massive crowds at a historic rally at Madison Square Garden, and Harris delivering her final pitch in the nation’s capital Tuesday at the Ellipse, located just south of the White House and north of the National Mall.
Polls are neck-and-neck, with a Fox News national survey published last month finding that Trump had a two-point edge over Harris, while the pair have zeroed-in on campaigning in key battleground states to increase the weight on their respective political scales. As of Saturday morning, Trump has nine events scheduled until Election Day, zig-zagging from battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania and Michigan to Georgia and also Virginia.
Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally at the Williams Arena at Minges Coliseum on the campus of East Carolina University on October 13, 2024, in Greenville, North Carolina. (Alex Wong)
Harris is expected to travel to Georgia and North Carolina on Saturday, before delivering her final pitch to voters in Michigan’s rust belt on Sunday. As she caps off her final leg of the campaign since ascending the top of the Democratic ticket in July, when President Biden dropped out of the race, her allies have touted that she has a win within her grasp.
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David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the Harris campaign, said this weekend that voters deciding for whom to cast their ballot late into the election are going to benefit the Harris campaign and carry them to a victory.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during Turning Point’s United for Change rally at the Thomas & Mack Center on Thursday, Oct. 24, 2024, in Las Vegas. (Madeline Carter/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
“The question is, of the people who have not yet decided who to vote for, who are actually going to vote?” he said on CNN Friday, noting that current polls show Harris and Trump tied. “And our sense in the last week is that the people who have made up their mind in the last week we’re doing quite well with, and we like the people who have yet to make a decision . . . .”
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“It’s very important to look at who those undecideds are,” Plouffe added.
Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville, who worked as lead strategist for former President Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 election, touted that Harris’ financial backing and “united” Democrat Party sets her up for a win over Trump come Tuesday.
“I think she’s going to win,” Carville said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday. “She’s got more money, more energy, has a more united party, has better surrogates, and he’s stone-a–nuts.”
New York magazine detailed in a piece this week that the buzz among Democrats is they are cautiously optimistic of a win on Tuesday, “largely based on the campaign’s close monitoring of early voting data from the seven battleground states, and its evolving understanding of who has already cast ballots and who’s left to convince.”
“The posture is driven both by reports from the field, especially from canvassers in competitive suburbs, and by senior advisers staring at the analytics in Wilmington. It’s far from a prediction of a win. Instead, it’s a belief that Harris maintains achievable paths to winning a majority or plurality of the vote in the tightly contested states — each of which they see as effectively tied, and almost all of which they see as home to a Democratic advantage in get-out-the-vote operations,” the outlet reported.
Other Democratic insiders are reporting more or less the same on social media and during media interviews.
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Jon Favreau, former President Barack Obama’s director of speechwriting, posted on X, for example, that though the race is an “extremely close toss-up,” he argued that Trump isn’t ending on a strong note, pointing to jokes made by a comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally that were viewed negatively by the media and Democrats and other political issues he sees as election demerits.
Daily Beast columnist and political affairs analyst David Rothkopf declared in a column on Friday that, “Kamala Harris is going to be the next president of the United States,” pointing to Harris’ “exceptional campaign,” speeches that were “suffused with a new energy and vision” for the nation, and her “‘closing argument’ on the Ellipse in Washington.”
“On January 20, 2025, she will become America’s first woman president, America’s first woman of color to be commander-in-chief and America’s first person of Asian heritage to become the country’s chief executive,” he wrote.
CNN senior political data reporter Harry Enten said Thursday that there are “clear” signs of a Harris win.
“And the number-one sign is that Harris, simply put, is more popular than Donald Trump,” he said.
Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris sits with former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) for a town hall at the Royal Oak Music Theatre on October 21, 2024, in Royal Oak, Michigan. Cheney joined Vice President Harris for stops Monday in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. (Photo by Sarah Rice/Getty Images)
The Trump campaign and its allies have meanwhile remained steadfast that the Republican ticket will be victorious on Tuesday, as Trump rallies his base to vote early and attracts new supporters through his “make America great again” pleddge following the Biden-Harris administration. As the cycle entered its final weeks, Trump said during a Las Vegas rally last month that the Harris campaign is “imploding” and has a victory in his sights.
“[Harris is] actually imploding, if you take a look. Because, look, I’m not supposed to say it, but we are leading by so much,” Trump said last Thursday.
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“Now, we’re leading by a lot in Nevada. We’re leading by a lot in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. Even states that are typically never in play for 50, 60, 70 years. . . . But the fact is that states, other states too, big states, are all in play and they like us. But you know what? They think she is grossly incompetent. Let’s face it, she is not doing well,” Trump continued.
Former US First Lady Melania Trump applauds her husband former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump after he spoke at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, October 27, 2024. (Photo by Angela Weiss / AFP) (Getty Images)
The 45th president added during his Madison Square Garden rally that he will have the “biggest victory in the history of our country” on Election Day.
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“We’re running against something far bigger than Joe or Kamala. And far more powerful than them, which is a massive, vicious, crooked, radical left machine that runs today’s Democrat Party. They’re just vessels. In fact, they’re perfect vessels, because they’ll never give them a hard time. They’ll do whatever they want. I know many of them. It’s just this amorphous group of people. But they’re smart, and they’re vicious, and we have to defeat them,” he said.
“We’re going to have the biggest victory in the history of our country on Nov. 5, and it’s going to be the biggest victory in history. We’re going to make America great again.”