One notable thing about the shift from Biden to Harris is how little the basic strategy has changed. Back in March, at campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Biden’s top lieutenants described to me is essentially the same approach that is taking place this fall, including an effort to illustrate the good economic news from the president’s first term. What has changed, dramatically, is the messenger. Instead of reading statistics about inflation adjustments, Harris has skillfully emphasized empathy around the fact that prices are still too high, and she has done so with an energy and coherence that Biden can no longer muster. “We had the structure in place, and now we have a charismatic candidate brought into it,” said a senior Harris campaign official. “There’s a lot of real excitement about the possibility of a woman being president and a black woman being president.”
Harris’s performance sparked relief and excitement among Democrats. It also prompted calls from the political media for more policy details from Harris. Some specifics will be revealed in the coming weeks—though they likely won’t be drastically different from Biden’s plan, and they won’t take up all of 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 for banking regulation on TikTok,” jokes Cornell Belcher, a strategist for both Barack Obama‘s win in the presidential election. “Sure, the campaign will talk about policy, because they’re running a real campaign, and that’s what real campaigns do. But that’s for the talking class. That’s not why she did what I thought was impossible, which is going from a net negative to a net positive in about two weeks. It’s all social media. It’s all grassroots. It’s all energy.”
The campaign, even Biden’s, has long planned for an unprecedented digital media spend this fall that is likely to exceed its spending on traditional TV ads. What’s changed, aside from the main character, is the amount of money that can be poured into the effort, which is largely designed by the deputy campaign manager. Rob Flaherty, thanks to a wave of donations generated by Harris’s rise. Last week Flaherty and his deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks announced a post-Labor Day ad buy of at least $370 million, with more than $200 million going to digital. To counter Trump’s efforts to “other” Harris, those ads will highlight her cycling, her childhood as a typical American kid, and her years as a prosecutor. Another prominent theme will be to tie Trump to the right-wing Project 2025 agenda and position it more like Project 1825 in allowing the government to do things like track women’s abortions. Many of those ads will target younger and nonwhite voters; Harris polls better than Biden with both groups, but actually taking them out on November 5 is a much tougher task.
All that new cash will enable another key element of Harris’s plan to expand her momentum: widening the playing field. She’ll continue to grind out airport runways in the core battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. She and Walz will also go to Nebraska, his birthplace and the state that allocates the most electoral votes by congressional district. But North Carolina should expect to see more of Harris, as should several states that seemed hopeless when Biden topped the list just over a month ago. “They should focus on those six or seven states, but she’s also going to spend time in Florida,” Richmond said. “And Ohio, if you look at what they’ve done to speak up and defend women’s liberties, I think that’s fertile ground to go and make arguments about why she’s moving the country forward.”
