Harris campaign guarding against overconfidence after her debate performance sent Democrats’ spirits soaring

Washington (CNN) — Kamala Harris just roasted her opponent on national television. After months of anticipation, the world’s biggest pop star finally endorsed her. She is swimming in a veritable ocean of cash.

So why is Michigan Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell still feeling anxious about November’s election?

“I was ecstatic like every other Democrat as I watched the debate. I thought she got under his skin,” Dingell said Thursday on “CNN This Morning,” before recounting the reality check she’d been delivered in an early morning phone call from an official in her state.

“Six-fifty yesterday morning, one of my township supervisors called me and wanted to know what I thought,” Dingell said. “That discussion brought me right back down to Earth.”

Burned before by overconfidence, Democrats this cycle are running against two opponents. Yes, Donald Trump is the name opposite of Harris’s on the ballot. But it is complacency in their own ranks that many of Harris’s allies are working just as hard to protect against in the final sprint toward Election Day.

Polls provide one reason why. Surveys in battleground states indicate an extraordinarily close contest, perhaps the closest in recent memory, which many Harris allies fear is being obscured by the swell of momentum on Harris’ side.

Trump’s stranglehold on his own supporters is another. Harris’s aides view his base of support as highly motivated, and note his favorability is higher than when he lost the 2020 election.

Yet perhaps the biggest motivator — embossed on the minds of so many operatives who now are working to elect Harris — is the memory of 2016, when Hillary Clinton’s campaign believed it was coasting to victory only to see support in the so-called “blue wall” crumble.

Democrats are hardly in despair. Last month’s convention in Chicago was practically euphoric in its celebration of a new nominee that, unlike President Joe Biden, does not seem predestined to lose. And Harris herself has embraced the new sense of joy among the party, casting it as the alternative to Trump’s divisiveness.

Yet in practically every conversation, public or private, Harris aides and the candidate herself have interjected with a reality check. They have tempered expectations, tamped down on confidence and announced themselves as the underdog, despite their ostensible success in orchestrating an unprecedented candidate swap 100 days before the election and consolidating new Democratic enthusiasm.

Huddled at their campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, the day after the debate, Harris’s campaign aides determined the event would likely do little to change the overall trajectory of the race.

Their earlier projections that the results in November will amount to a razor-thin margin — likely to be as close or closer than the results in 2020 — remain the same.

Instead, they have developed a plan for the coming days and weeks that will place Harris directly in front of battleground state voters, beginning Thursday in North Carolina and continuing Friday in Pennsylvania.

Those stops for the “New Way Forward” tour aren’t just to any battleground state. They’re the states where voting is already about to get underway. And a campaign official tells CNN that’s no coincidence.

North Carolina, a purple state where Harris and running mate Tim Walz will make two stops Thursday, is racing to reprint and send out mail-in ballots after the state’s Supreme Court ruled Monday to exclude Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has exited the race. About 161,000 people have already requested mail-in ballots, according to the NC Board of Elections. Trump won the state in 2020 by less than half that number of votes.

Next week, Harris will participate in a roundtable with rank-and-file members of the influential Teamsters union, which has been withholding an endorsement for the first time in decades. She will also participate in a Q&A session with members of the National Association of Black Journalists, with whom Trump appeared in late July and remarked that Harris “turned Black.”

The campaign is expecting to rake in millions in new funds, with a Harris-helmed fundraiser in Washington on Saturday, an Oprah-headlined virtual event next week and several other high-dollar events in the works, according to people familiar with them. That cash, the campaign has said, must be quickly tabulated and quickly deployed in states where voters are beginning to head to the ballot box.

In addition to rallies, Harris also plans more local media interviews in the swing states and appearances that bring her into direct contact with voters.

Campaign officials spent part of Wednesday looking through debate footage to identify moments that would make effective television ads. The first spot features Harris framing the race as a choice between “two very different visions for the country, one that is focused on the future, one that is focused on the past.”

Even as they applauded Harris’s success on the debate stage, however, aides and allies remained cautious about declaring victory too early.

“We haven’t won anything yet!” Doug Emhoff, Harris’ husband, declared to supporters at a debate watch party in Philadelphia moments after she stepped off stage.

“We have a lot of work to do,” Harris followed up.

The next morning, it was more caution.

“Debates don’t win elections,” Harris’s team emailed supporters.

That type of message is hardly new for a campaign that is looking to maintain its fundraising, motivate its volunteers and convince its pledged voters that they still, in fact, need to cast a ballot. Al Gore even wore an “underdog” costume for Halloween in 1999 as he was seeking the Democratic nomination.

Yet the messaging this time appears to go deeper than simply a galvanizing tactic.

In battleground states like Dingell’s, where a small slice of undecided voters is likely to determine the next president, Harris and Trump remain in a neck-and-neck contest.

While some surveys in Michigan indicate Harris with a small edge, Dingell suggested the numbers could be an illusion.

“I think Michigan is a dead heat,” she said. “There’s just a lot of people in the middle … it’s just closer than people realize.”

Not every Democrat on Harris’s side seems gripped with caution.

“This is the easiest election in my lifetime. I love where we are,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said on “CBS Mornings” on Tuesday ahead of the debate, rejecting the “underdog” label for Harris: “She’s not. I don’t like hearing about that.”

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