As Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump begin the final 30-day push for the White House, they are locked in a neck-and-neck race from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt.
With polling averages showing all seven battleground states nearly tied, many Democrats believe their biggest advantage may be an extensive ground game operation that their party has spent more than a year building across the country. Mr. Trump’s campaign thinks that recent events — the escalating conflict in the Middle East and deadly hurricanes that have killed more than 200 people across the Southeast — will give them an edge in the final weeks.
In some ways, the two approaches mirror the final days of the 2016 race, when Hillary Clinton’s campaign boasted about a massive, data-driven field organization while Mr. Trump pressed a national message based on stoking anti-immigrant sentiment and improving the economy with a relatively meager staff and almost no field operation in the key states. Mr. Trump, of course, prevailed, helped by the F.B.I. director’s reopening of an inquiry into the Democratic nominee’s emails.
This time, Democrats have no such overconfidence. Although Mr. Trump and his party have lost or underperformed in every major election since then, many Democrats believe this year is one they could lose.
“Anybody would be a fool to write Trump off,” said Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor who ran for president in 2020. “I think she’s going to win, but am I absolutely sure she’s going to win? No. The 2016 experience taught all of us that you can’t count this guy out.”
Veterans of presidential campaigns say this year’s contest is distinct for how little impact major political events seem to be having on the relative standing of the two candidates. Two assassination attempts on Mr. Trump, a presidential and vice-presidential debate and the party conventions have brought both him and Ms. Harris temporary bumps in support, but no enduring shifts in public opinion.
The result is what top officials in both campaigns describe as a grind-it-out race, where movements measured in a few thousand votes could sway the outcome of the entire election.
Ralph Reed, a socially conservative activist in Georgia who is helping turn out voters for the Trump campaign, said he could not recall a presidential race since 2000 in which so many states were effectively tied this late in the campaign.
“In the battleground states, it is like trench warfare during the First World War,” he said. “Everybody is dug in. Everybody is throwing artillery and machine gun fire, and it’s just a no man’s land.”
The tightness of the race has meant an onslaught of spending, especially in those battlegrounds of Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Source : https://dnyuz.com/2024/10/05/30-days-out-the-harris-and-trump-campaigns-brace-for-trench-warfare