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When Joe Biden’s top political aides started setting up his campaign early last year, Jim Messina was one of their first calls. Messina, who managed Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, had plenty of thoughts on building a machine to get a second term for an unpopular president with a bad economy. For a while he sought to be helpful with occasional advice from the outside, including when he tried reminding Democrats of Biden’s (narrow) possible paths to victory.
But then those paths closed, Kamala Harris took over, and Democrats had a whole new race on their hands. Messina now leads Democracy Defenders, a super PAC that’s backing the party’s legal battles against Donald Trump and Republicans’ challenges to voting rules and their rigged-election claims. He is also closely monitoring the campaign as one of the party’s most wired-in operatives, who has worked closely with just about everyone atop Harris’s team. I called him with about two weeks left until Election Day to talk about what he sees as her best shot at victory, Democrats’ best ways to talk about abortion and January 6, and how nostalgia is buoying Trump over Harris when it comes to the economy.
Play oracle for me for a second. How would you map out Kamala Harris’s most likely path to 270 electoral votes?
I’ve always said, all along, that the “blue wall” states are the path of least resistance for the Harris campaign. If she can win Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, plus the blue dot in Nebraska, then Harris will be our first woman president.
But getting there is tough. When I ran President Obama’s campaign, one of my jobs was to create as many pathways to 270 electoral votes as possible, and I think that’s what they’re doing — they have backup states. Georgia is tied, and I was recently talking to the governor of North Carolina, who feels very good about what he’s seeing. You combine Arizona and Nevada, you could lose one of the blue wall states. I think they have several pathways to get there.
As I look at it — and every night we run 66,000 simulations of the election and look very closely at it — I would rather be Kamala Harris than I would Donald Trump for two reasons. One, I think she has room to grow. After three presidential campaigns, there isn’t a voter who doesn’t have an opinion of Trump. There are still people trying to figure out what she’s about and what she can do to make their lives better. And the second thing is I think enthusiasm matters. The number that I looked at every day as a presidential campaign manager was enthusiasm. Why? Because really you want voters to do three things. Obviously you want them to vote for you, and then you want them to give you all their money. But almost as importantly, you want them to persuade their friends and family to vote. And in looking at enthusiasm, Harris has built a big enthusiasm lead over Trump. You see that in the rallies, you see his rallies not selling out. I’m not throwing a mean punch at him — it’s hard the third time, everyone’s seen him in these states over and over and over.
But look at her volunteer shifts. I did an event in the second district of Nebraska, and we thought there were going to be 25, 30 people there, and like 150 people showed up to knock on doors. Not even the organizers on the ground knew those people were coming. And then you look at the early vote stuff. It’s too early to draw a whole lot of conclusions, but what seems to be true is that Democratic voters are more enthusiastic than Republicans. And in 2016 that was really the metric that said Trump was gonna win.
The other thing I’m looking at, which I think is one of the underreported things about this election, is the gender divide. It’s really been the story of every election since Dobbs. I remember sitting with Cecile Richards, the former head of Planned Parenthood, the day after Dobbs happened. She said, “This ruling is going to age very poorly. This throws it to the states, and you’re going to see all sorts of chaos. People, individually, will get very upset about this and take it out on elected officials.” After 2022, I said to her, “You were right.” She goes, “Oh, no no, Jim. I was right in those places, but the first time it’s really on the ballot nationally is in the 2024 presidential election.”
I’ve spent some time this cycle in states where abortion is front-and-center thanks to referenda, like in Arizona and Nevada. You’ll see where I’m going with this question in a second, but as I think about those states, I’m reminded of the focus in recent weeks on Harris’s relatively weak numbers with Latino and Black men. I asked David Plouffe about this the other day, and he more or less made the point that even if she lags where previous Democratic candidates were with those voters, Harris would over-perform with other groups, including women of all kinds. And that’s largely because of the abortion issue. Do you buy that? I know some abortion-rights activists and strategists have been warning Democrats that even though they’ve won consistently since Dobbs, they have to work to keep the focus on the issue and make sure people are paying as much attention as they were two years ago.
The Republicans are out there saying that in smaller turnout elections, in referendums, in 2022, this issue played bigger but that in a general election it won’t play as big. I don’t think that’s true, for one really big reason. Right now, women voters are going for Harris over Trump by 16 points, and this race really depends on how much Harris wins women by. Specifically, white women and working-class white women without a college degree could be the decisive voter group. White women make up about 36 percent of the overall electorate. Traditionally, Republicans win these voters — these are the voters who broke Hillary Clinton’s heart. Mitt Romney beat us with white women by 9 points, Trump won them by 6 points in 2016 and 7 points in 2020. Right now, it’s deadlocked. That’s just a massive swing. Harris is polling better with white women than any Democratic presidential candidate this century. So if she can keep white women close, that puts her in a very strong position.
Does that mean you don’t need to focus on African American men and Latino men and the bedrock of the Democratic Party, which is Black women? Of course it doesn’t. You can walk and chew gum. You can do two things. There’s this absolutely fucking stupid argument in my party that says you either turn your voters out or you persuade. The campaigns that win at the presidential level do both, and that is the campaign that Kamala Harris has built. She has the biggest field operation on the ground that we’ve ever seen to turn her vote out and to focus on some of the groups we’ve talked about: African Americans, Latinos, young people. And then she has a persuasion machine for these women. Now, these women are the same women who walked away from Hillary at the end after the Comey report, and she lost a very close election. So I agree that you can never stop talking about the abortion issue, and I think the Harris campaign knows this. It’s now the single most important issue to women under 30, with 4 in 10 saying it’s their top issue.
Gretchen Whitmer is one of the best messengers we’ve ever seen on this. Think about how she talks about it: Abortion, IVF, and fertility treatments are pocketbook issues with women. And you can now see the Harris campaign talking about it in that way. There’s this argument that, Well, in the end these women aren’t abortion voters, they’re economic voters and they’re going to walk away from Harris in the end because of the economy. But Harris has made significant strides in eroding Trump’s lead on this issue, and nearly two-thirds of women surveyed said inflation and the economy were an important issue as they decide their vote. Of these women, now 46 percent prefer Harris on the economy and 38 percent Trump. If she can keep it that close with these white-working class women and get them to vote like more educated women, she’s going to win this election.
You’re talking about the movement we’ve seen on who voters trust more on the economy, specifically. One reason Harris has until recently struggled with this is clearly that she’s part of an administration that many voters have problems with, especially when it comes to the economy. So when you study these latest positive shifts for her, do you interpret them as the product of Harris successfully differentiating herself from Joe Biden and his White House? Or is it just that people feel better about the economy now than they did a few weeks or months ago?
I don’t think any of those reasons are right. I think it’s because she’s become the change candidate. She’s now the person that voters say is more like change, and it’s not because she’s distanced herself from Joe Biden. It’s two reasons. Donald Trump’s now running for the third time, and always makes it about himself every single day, so he is functioning as the incumbent in this race. And two, she embodies change in her story and her positions and who she is. With her positive campaign and laying out a clear agenda for where she wants to take this country, she’s made it clear this is her campaign, not Joe Biden’s, or Barack Obama’s, or Bill Clinton’s.
When I look at the numbers on “Who represents change in this election?” questions and she leads, that is really important, because the overhanging thing for Democrats is 70-some percent of Americans think we’re on the wrong track. Now, that’s not a Joe Biden number. They blame both parties, they’re unhappy with the partisanship, they’re unhappy with a lot of things. But she is not bearing the brunt of a lot of that because she is viewed as the change candidate in this election.
And yet, Trump is still at the absolute center of this race, for obvious reasons. What do you see him doing from a campaign perspective that concerns you now that we’re two weeks out?
Two things. It’s incredibly cynical, but I think his team has done a great job hiding him. He’s mostly stuck to his right-wing media bubble and voters are not seeing him as much. The problem for him is that the more people see him, the less they like him. He reminds them of the part of him they didn’t like. And the second thing is that he still has a lead on the economy and that is a challenge. We need to blunt this weird nostalgia, voters thinking they were better off with him. This voter amnesia — people forget we lived through the hell of his COVID policy, he was talking about injecting bleach, and the economy tanked!
Sure, but isn’t the evidence fairly clear at this point that voters aren’t responding to messaging that says something like, “Remember how bad COVID was? It was all Donald Trump’s fault.”
What people are receptive to is the January 6 stuff. And he’s playing right into that because he’s talking about it over and over. If I was his campaign manager I’d be throwing my desk out of the office.
Okay, so what’s the best way you’ve seen for Harris to talk about this, or about Trump as a threat to democracy? Clearly Biden tried to center this issue for over a year when he was running, and it never stuck as the issue in the race.
I really like this new thing where she reads his comments on January 6, and what he’s said recently. In both the campaign and super PAC ads, they’re now showing Trump talking about it. It really is a twofer issue for the Democrats. One, it really reminds the base how important this is, and two, we know swing voters just want all of this to go away. They’ve made their decision on January 6 — they’ve made their decision on whether or not he lost — and they just don’t want to talk about it anymore. He reminds them. Her just going straight at it and saying, “Let’s just talk about what he said yesterday,” I love that tactic.
I want to talk about how you’re preparing for legal war. Tell me what you’ll be looking for when the polls close on November 5.
One thing we know for sure is that if Trump loses he will try to steal this election. He and his allies are already laying the groundwork now. You’ve already seen over 100 lawsuits before the election, in all the battleground states and around the country, trying to change the rules. In Georgia, they tried to change the rules a month before the election and the court stopped them. They tried to disenfranchise 225,000 people in North Carolina, and they’re trying to change who can vote and when they should vote in Arizona. This stuff is all happening and it’s going to get worse after Election Day. It’s not just me saying this: Every day Trump is lying about millions of people voting illegally and about illegal immigrants voting.
I’m curious: How do you respond to the fairly common argument from some Democrats that all this is clearly true, but that there’s a massive difference between now and 2020 because Trump was president then, and it’s something entirely different trying to seize power versus trying to keep it?
Some of this is damage on the front end. We know what their goal is: to create chaos and confusion and weaken the trust in the electoral system. We know that some of these lawsuits pre- and post-election are meant to scare voters and make it seem like it’s going to be really hard. He’s already saying he’s going to send supporters to “watch the polls,” which means voter intimidation. And when people see those stories they start to get worried and they say, “Jesus, is it even worth going to vote?”
I also think we shouldn’t assume that the Supreme Court is going to be a rational actor on some of this stuff. Let’s not assume that it means much that we are in government now. We need to have a long memory from the 2000 election and understand that things can happen. I’m just not as confident as people who think that. It’s more serious than some well-meaning Democrats think it is.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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