One thing that’s been striking about the shift from Biden to Harris is how little the fundamental playbook has changed. Back in March, at the campaign’s headquarters in Wilmington, Biden’s top lieutenants described to me essentially the same approach for this fall that’s unfolding now, including a push to illustrate the economic good news from the president’s first term. What’s changed, drastically, is the messenger. Instead of reciting statistics about moderating rates of inflation, Harris has smartly emphasized empathy around the fact that prices are still too high, and she’s done it with an energy and a coherence that Biden could no longer muster. “We had the structure in place, and now we’ve got a charismatic candidate plugged into it,” a senior swing state operative for the Harris campaign says. “There’s a lot of genuine excitement at the possibility of a woman becoming president, and of a Black woman becoming president.”
Harris’s performance has sparked relief and elation among Democrats. It has also provoked the political media to demand that Harris supply more policy detail. Some particulars will be spelled out in the coming weeks—though they likely won’t deviate greatly from Biden’s plans, and they won’t dominate the campaign’s time and attention. “Because you know what? All those excited young voters out there are really waiting to see her 15-point plan on banking regulation on TikTok,” jokes Cornell Belcher, a strategist for both of Barack Obama’s winning presidential bids. “Sure, the campaign is going to talk about policy, because they’re running a real campaign, and that’s what real campaigns do. But that’s for the chattering class. It’s not why she’s done something I thought was impossible, going from having a net negative favorability to a net positive in about two weeks. That was all social media. It was all grassroots. It was all energy.”
The campaign, even when it was Biden’s, had long planned for an unprecedented amount of digital-media spending this fall, which is likely to exceed spending on traditional TV ads. What’s changed, besides the lead character, is just how much money can be poured into the effort, mainly designed by deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty, thanks to the flood of donations set off by Harris’s ascension. Last week Flaherty and principal deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks announced a post–Labor Day ad buy of at least $370 million, with more than $200 million devoted to digital. To combat Trump’s attempts to “other” Harris, those ads will highlight her bike-riding, regular-American-kid upbringing and her years as a prosecutor. Another prominent theme will be shackling Trump to the right-wing Project 2025 agenda, and casting it as more akin to Project 1825 in enabling the government to do things like track women’s abortions. Many of those ads will be targeted at younger and non-white voters; Harris has better poll numbers than Biden with both groups, but actually turning them out on November 5 is a much harder task.
All the fresh cash will enable another crucial element of the plan to extend Harris’s momentum: stretching the playing field. She will continue to wear out airport runways in the core battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia. She and Walz will also head to Nebraska, his birth state and a place that allocates most electoral votes by congressional district. But North Carolina should expect to see more of Harris, as could a few states that appeared to be lost causes when Biden was at the top of the ticket just over a month ago. “They should focus on those six or seven, but she also has to spend time in Florida,” Richmond says. “And Ohio, if you look at what they did to come out and protect women’s freedoms—I think that is all fertile ground to go and make arguments for why she moves the country forward.”
