We are now in the home stretch of the 2024 election season and both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are pulling out all the stops to secure the White House next year.
Both candidates are neck-and-neck in several battleground states including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Their respective campaigns are employing different strategies to win over as many voters as possible as Election Day inches ever so closer.
Harris’ campaign has deployed a gaggle of seasoned political operatives to swing states, with experienced advisers such as Paulette Aniskoff and Marlon Marshall leading the charge in Pennsylvania and Nevada, respectively, according to NBC News.
The campaign has acknowledged that Pennsylvania could be a “problem spot,” which explains why they’re rolling out the big dogs in the Keystone State. There is “a lot of late help coming in, as you’d expect,” said Dan Kanninen, Harris’ battleground director. “It’s wonderful because the capacity is really needed to make sure we can do all the things that we need to do in battleground states.”
An anonymous source told NBC News that “Everyone is nervous – both our camp and the Trump camp.”
Meanwhile, Team Trump is taking a different approach that involves aggressive campaign appearances and rallies in swing states and even blue states. The former president held 21 public events in September, far outpacing Harris’ 13, according to ABC News.
Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), has held 14 events during the same time period. The campaign appears to be picking up the pace in October, having already held eight campaign events in the first week alone. During a rally in Savannah, Georgia, Trump quipped, “I got to a lot of places, we’re definitely outworking the opposition. She’ll go to one place in three days. I say, ‘Why can’t I do that?’”
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The former president’s approach is not only about outworking Harris but also honing in on counties that flipped between elections. Trump visited areas like Kent County, Michigan, which flipped to President Joe Biden in 20202. He also went to Crawford County, Wisconsin, which flipped from Obama to Trump in the 2016 election.
The former president is focusing heavily on battleground states like Wisconsin, where polling shows a razor-thin gap between him and his opponent. Trump said his campaign is “going to leave nothing to chance and everything on the field … and we’re going to defeat Kamala Harris,” during a campaign stop in Waunakee, Wisconsin, earlier this month.
Team Trump also recognizes Pennsylvania’s importance. The former president held four events in the state in September. Harris held five. “This is a margin-of-error race. We are the underdog. And I am running like the underdog because I am the underdog in this race,” Harris said at a fundraiser in San Francisco.
With only weeks between now and November, the race remains tight. Both candidates are pulling out all the stops in this final stretch in an effort to make the most of the limited time they have left.
