Trump-sized crowds and battleground wins: Harris is now a big problem for Republicans

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They’re feeling the Kamala-mentum in the battlegrounds.

Just under two weeks since the vice president became her party’s presumptive nominee, Democrats around the country are feeling a surge of optimism that is translating into real, tangible gains — and a real, tangible problem for Republicans.

On Tuesday night, Harris was in Atlanta, Georgia, where she turned out a Trump-sized crowd of 10,000 at Georgia State University. A fired-up audience roared in response when she dared her opponent to “say it to my face” and attend a debate (or debates) with her in person.

That energy is palpable around the country. The Harris campaign has now released several statements bragging about a $200m-plus fundraising haul in less than two weeks and a surge in volunteers for the campaign. But it’s not just the vice president herself seeing eager supporters coming back into the fold — it’s the party as a whole, and that’s something that spells trouble not just for Donald Trump but for all Republicans.

VP Kamala Harris holds Atlanta, Georgia rally

Harris held her first event as a candidate in Milwaukee just days after Republicans held their convention in the city. Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin, who is running in a must-win campaign, said the energy was electrifying.

“I understand that seven to eight thousand people had RSVP’d to come and they had to go from the smaller arena to a big high school gym and still had to turn away, like, 5,000 people,” she told The Independent. “But I can tell you this weekend at home, I did some campaign kick-offs. I've never seen so many people wanting to go knock doors. So it's really, really very, very exciting.”

The reversal of the race’s trajectory was well-needed for Democrats, who were warning openly in media interviews that their party was on track for a historic defeat, were Joe Biden to remain the candidate.

Take Florida, where reporters and pundits (and Harris’s own campaign chair) continue to treat Democratic predictions of competitive races with skepticism. Harris’s campaign manager, at the time working for Joe Biden, vowed in April that Democrats would make a serious play for the Sunshine State, which she said the president’s campaign saw as contestable, if not outright winnable. Jaime Harrison, DNC chair, said the same thing this month, after Biden stepped aside.

Despite Florida’s reddening statewide government, Democrats saw a greater surge of volunteers here than anywhere else after Harris took Biden’s place at the (presumptive) top of the ticket. It’s a rapidly-shifting dynamic that has Democrats eyeing key down-ballot races, even if electoral votes may end up being out of reach in the end. Florida — like North Carolina, Ohio and other key battlegrounds — is the site of a Senate race this year, where incumbent Republican Rick Scott is up for reelection. The state party is also eyeing a number of congressional seats and others in the statehouse to halt advances made by the GOP over the past few election cycles.

“It’s hard to even describe the excitement, the energy, momentum, and what we’ve solved over the last week,” Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried told The Independent as Harris moved through her second week campaigning for the presidency. She said that 12,000 volunteers had signed up to help Democrats across the state, including in deep red areas like The Villages.

“It’s not just Democrats,” she said. “We are hearing anecdotal stories of past Republicans coming to our offices, phone-banking with us. We’re hearing from Republicans saying: ‘Maybe this is the final straw that’s going to break the MAGA base and wipe them out for this election cycle, and finally return the Republican Party back to some sense of normality’.”

Kamala Harris, alongside New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, in a visit to Florida in 2019. Her party says the state’s Senate race, against Rick Scott, is winnable. ( Getty Images )

Fried went on to say that the surge of Democratic momentum in the state was being met with virtual silence from the GOP — an advantage she urged national Democrats to capitalize on, and quickly.

“There is no Republican operation here. They have no offices. They have no grassroots door-knocking,” said Fried. “They’re taking this for granted, and they really are being very overconfident in this moment…we’re going for the prize. We do believe that Florida is and should be on the battleground maps.”

She’s hardly the only Democratic leader in a battleground state seeing such a shift in fortune in a matter of weeks.

Gary Peters, a senator from Michigan who chairs the Democrats’ campaign arm (DSCC) in the upper chamber, told The Independent this week that he was seeing the same dynamic play out in his state, where Joe Biden was once trailing Trump according to polls that have now shown Harris taking a lead.

Kamala Harris rallies a fired-up crowd of 10,000 in Georgia, a state which went blue in 2020 and cost Donald Trump the election ( REUTERS )

“The amount of enthusiasm on the ground for her campaign is something I haven’t seen... it’s turned on a dime,” Peters said. “The last week has been amazing. Just in Michigan over the last week, the number of people who volunteered for our statewide campaigns, for our ‘get out the vote’ efforts and outreach — the number of volunteers doubled in a week.”

In Nevada, the Democrats signed up 1,200 new volunteers. There were 1,000 more in Georgia. Six hundred and fifty showed up at just one congressional district in Michigan. The Harris campaign’s battleground states director says more than 360,000 have signed up nationwide over the past week and a half.

The momentum has clearly shifted in Harris’s favor, and the question now posed is whether Trump’s own ground game will be able to match it.

His campaign has been largely quiet about its ground operations and volunteer efforts, instead choosing to assert dominance through fundraising numbers. On Thursday, the campaign said it had $327m cash on hand at the end of July.

The Trump campaign only announced that it was beginning voter canvassing in late May, as the verdict was handed down in his sex affair hush money trial in New York.

Over the course of the 2020 campaign, the Trump campaign claimed to have raised more than 2.5 million volunteers to support its ‘get out the vote’ efforts. The ex-president, despite breaking a volunteering record set by Barack Obama, ended up losing several key swing states to Joe Biden including Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, all of which he had won in 2016.