WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is intently focused on making sure the burst of enthusiasm after her rapid ascent to the Democratic presidential nomination is organized into a sustained campaign that will mobilize an army of volunteers ahead of November.
In the last week, as Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, crisscrossed the country speaking to packed rallies with thousands of voters, the campaign has also been hard at work signing up volunteers at those events in an effort to ensure victory.
“We have this very organic, very real, very palpable energy from people that want to support the ticket,” said Dan Kanninen, the Harris campaign’s battleground states director. “We are turning that energy and that enthusiasm into action. And at all of these events, because we’re organized, because there is a large campaign presence across the battleground states — more than 1,500 staff, more than 260 offices — those teams are able to effectively marshal that enthusiasm into volunteer shifts that mean a direct line into additional volunteer recruitment, into voter contact, knocking doors, making phone calls and driving that forward in a way that actually appreciably changes the margins in these very, very close states.”
To underscore that point, the Harris campaign shared new numbers with NBC News that it said illustrates the effort to give its supporters ways to work on the race.
Last week in Nevada, 1,000 of the 5,010 volunteer sign-ups were for the next day to join a series of weekly events the campaign holds on Sundays, a campaign official said. The campaign official said the burst of sign-ups made Sunday the biggest day yet for the weekly series. For comparison, the official said, attendance at Sunday’s events was 669% over attendance at the previous one, which was held July 7, before President Joe Biden dropped out.
In Wisconsin, the campaign had 13,000 conversations with voters over the weekend, and it got more than 1,100 volunteer sign-ups at a rally in Detroit to volunteer, the official said.
“All those folks will get called, they’ll get shifted, they’ll have a good experience,” said Kanninen, who said the campaign is mirroring much of what officials did during the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns, which he worked on. “We’ll ask them to do more. We hope they bring their friends. And it’s a snowball that grows upon itself.”
Since she entered the race, Harris has drawn even in national polling against former President Donald Trump — a tightening that Trump has tried to dismiss as a “honeymoon” period that will fade.
Harris’ campaign sees the moment of enthusiasm as one to build on, not squander.
Kanninen said the campaign operation, which Harris inherited from Biden, has been working hard from the beginning to organize in the “big seven” swing states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina.
“We expect them to be close again,” he said. “We’ve all long designed a campaign that was intended to be able to win a close race, and now that we have this tremendous enthusiasm, which is just wonderful to see, the teams that are there and have organized and built volunteer relationships and built systems are turning that into action and getting folks signed up for shifts on the spot.”
Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said Saturday that he believes the path to victory for Harris is “widening every day” and that states like Florida and Ohio, which Republicans have repeatedly won in recent cycles, could be competitive this year. “I do believe there are more and more avenues opening up to the Harris-Walz ticket, and I think this is a battle royale underway, and I think it’s leaning toward the Harris-Walz ticket,” he said.
Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del., a national co-chair of the Harris campaign, also said the campaign has always had a plan to keep fighting until Election Day.
“We knew this was going to be a hard election when it was Joe Biden,” she said. “We never thought that we would take any votes for granted or that we wouldn’t put all of the effort that we needed to put into it. And I want us to keep our eyes on the prize. We’ve got to use this excitement, use this energy as momentum, to fuel us across that finish line.”
Asked how the campaign is tailoring its organization to Harris, Kanninen said that the level of energy “gives us a lot more to work with” but that the plan and the job of the campaign remain the same.
“The challenge always is to continue to scale and to meet the moment, you know, when a campaign really becomes critical,” he said. “Every campaign has to do that. So we have to continue to grow and build and have a place for volunteers to go, have a place for voters to access this campaign, and to draw that contrast, you know, between the vice president and Donald Trump. … I’m not sure it keeps me up at night, but it does mean late nights.”
