While congressional candidates know well enough to avoid campaigning with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, statewide candidates don't seem to have gotten the memo. The vice president, as POLITICO reported on Monday morning, is heading to various states to promote the administration's pro-abortion agenda, which appears to be a campaign strategy of sorts for Democrats.
From the report:
Vice President Kamala Harris and her team plan to hit the campaign and fundraising circuit in an aggressive bid to elevate Democratic state legislators and governors on the abortion rights frontlines.
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“We need to make it a goal that we’re out in America three days a week,” Harris told her staff recently as they worked to figure out how much overall travel she should take through the November elections, a source familiar with the conversations said.
Already, the vice president has started executing on the state and local strategy. Last weekend, she surprised volunteers and campaign aides for Josh Shapiro’s gubernatorial campaign in Pennsylvania with a visit. White House aides said the campaign had asked Harris to stop by and give a morale boost in what’s set to be a very close race in the state.
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But the next chapter in her strategy will get more aggressive. White House aides said the vice president is going to specifically head to red and purple states to call out “Republican extremism” on issues like abortion. On Monday, Harris will visit Indiana, as the state begins a special legislative session on abortion, the first in the nation since Roe v. Wade was overturned last month. The White House says she’ll meet with abortion rights advocates and state legislators during her trip.
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Harris’ direct involvement in local and state elections is something that Democrats in organizations focused on those races have sought for years from top Democrats.
“If the vice president is willing and interested in doing fundraisers down ballot we would gladly welcome it,” Jessica Post, president at the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said in an interview. “We continue to trail our Republican counterparts. So having a major leader of our party out there helping with fundraising would be huge for us.”
Democrats say Harris is uniquely qualified to make the push both as the first woman vice president and a past state and local elected official herself. Allies and attendees of Harris’ legislator meetings say she has leaned on that experience to stress that “she inherently understands the stakes”of state and local elections on abortion policy.
Jessica Post, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) who is quoted in the piece, seems to have gotten something right, that they "continue to trail [their] Republican counterparts." The deeply unpopular vice president, who is even less popular than President Joe Biden, is unlikely to provide much help, though. Post has been calling on Biden to campaign for their struggling statewide candidates for months now.
Besides, the warning bells about Harris showing up on the campaign trail and doing more harm than good were even going off last July. Her favorable ratings have gotten worse rather than better since then. According to RealClearPolitics (RCP), she has a favorable rating of 37 percent and an unfavorable rating of 52.2 percent.
The Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), the Republican counterpart of the DLCC, quickly picked up on the report.
"The only Democrat in Washington who has been a more disastrous leader than Joe Biden is Kamala Harris. State Democrats will be held accountable for sharing the stump with a vice president who failed miserably to secure the border, helped wreck the national economy, and sides with teachers' unions over students," said RSLC Communications Director Andrew Romeo.
It's worth noting that the RSLC also improved its predictions earlier this month, based on recently released polls, showing the opportunity to make potential gains in Democratic trifecta states such as Maine, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.
Further, polling shows that abortion is not a key issue for voters nationwide and at the state level, including in those states referenced above. Rather, voters are primarily concerned with economic issues and with public safety due to high crime rates.