Harris’ team, with a wink, insists she’s an underdog

WASHINGTON — Days before the debate that ended up cutting off President Joe Biden’s path to a second term, his campaign chief, Jen O’Malley Dillon, defiantly set expectations: “We are going to win,” she said in an interview with the news site Puck.

Fast-forward 10 weeks. Democrats have a more popular nominee in Vice President Kamala Harris, torrents of grassroots campaign cash that Biden could have only dreamed of, a well-received convention and a running mate who has energized the party’s liberal base.

O’Malley Dillon somehow seems less optimistic.

“Make no mistake,” she wrote in a campaign memo released Sunday morning. “We head into the final stretch of this race as the clear underdogs.”

How can it be that a campaign that by all metrics is better off than it was in late June is now pushing a narrative that things are worse than they were when Biden was in the race?

It is because the Harris operation, like any campaign riding a wave of momentum, is suddenly worried about overconfidence. The New York Times’ polling average has shown her ahead since Aug. 6, the day she unveiled Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate. And the mood carried over from the Democratic National Convention is hardly one of a party despairing about its chances against former President Donald Trump.

Biden never declared his campaign an underdog. Neither did Harris until July 27. Before that, with Biden still running, she had nothing but confidence in public. Several times in the post-debate period, as Biden’s campaign began to look like a rolling catastrophe, Harris declared that they would be reelected.

“I say with full confidence, we will win,” she said at a June 29 fundraiser in Los Angeles — two days after the debate. On July 11, she told a crowd in North Carolina, “In November, we will win.”

At the time, all polling said otherwise.

Then, as soon as Biden dropped out and Democratic fortunes indisputably began to rise, Harris began trying to temper expectations. The performative confidence was gone, replaced by the campaign’s current posture that things are not so great after all.

“We are the underdogs in this race, OK?” she said at a July 27 fundraiser in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. “Level set. We’re the underdogs in this race.”

Politicians in both parties often claim to be in trouble to help juice their fundraising — and to keep volunteers working hard. Still, it is hard to believe that Harris and her top campaign officials really think they are, given the other contents of O’Malley Dillon’s memo Sunday.

The document is littered with the sort of details a confident campaign would want everyone to know about. The Harris campaign now has more than 2,000 staff members working in 312 offices across the country, she wrote, and it has reserved $370 million in advertising time — a figure certain to increase as cash continues to flow in. Trump, she wrote, has far fewer offices, staff members and advertising reservations.

She also ticked through an array of issues on which the Harris campaign says it has a demonstrated polling advantage: abortion rights, health care, gun control, democracy and even the economy.

“The difference maker will be which campaign has the candidate, the infrastructure and the grit capable of expanding their support to build the type of broad, diverse coalition that wins elections,” she wrote. “Every day, Vice President Harris proves she is that candidate.”

This is all good practice for Team Harris as it heads into the next round of expectation-setting: the presidential debate on Sept. 10 in Philadelphia.

Already, campaign aides have been quietly talking up Trump’s debating skills. By this time next week, they might just be saying he is the next coming of Stephen A. Douglas.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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