Harris’s campaign embraces ‘underdog’ label – even as polling shows her beating Trump

Kamala Harris’s campaign is entering September with the mindset of a campaign running from behind – even as polling shows that is not the case.

A memo sent out by the Harris campaign on Sunday morning claimed that the vice president was still the “underdog” in the race and projected “razor-thin” margins for the race in November.

Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’s campaign manager, said in the memo that the reason for this mentality was Donald Trump and his continued dominance over the Republican party — whose core base of supporters is as motivated as ever to support him in 2024.

And she previewed how the Harris campaign looks to make up the ground it supposedly needs to win key battleground states in November.

Polling actually shows that Harris has narrowed the gap to the low single digits in a wide array of battleground states, including some that were seen as clearly becoming out of reach for President Joe Biden, such as North Carolina and Georgia.

O’Malley Dillon said that Harris’s massive fundraising haul — $540m since launching her campaign on July 21 — will be put into a massive battleground states ground operation.

Harris’s “historic sum” will go “directly to a relentless battleground operation, with more than 312 coordinated offices and 2,000 coordinated staff in the states – a reflection of a campaign with presences in every corner of every battleground state and with the communities critical to victory,” she said.

“During a recent Weekend of Action, more than 10,000 volunteers made nearly 900,000 calls and knocked on 150,000 doors, contacting more than 1 million voters,” said O’Malley Dillon.

It’s the kind of investment, if it’s used to boost participation numbers among Harris’s core base of supporters, that