Early and Often: David Freedlander

Momentum vs. Machine The Trump and Harris campaigns battle it out for every last vote.

- Pablo Delcan

WITH TWO WEEKS LEFT to go, the contours of the 2024 presidential election are clear: Both campaigns need voters who usually don’t vote, and Kamala Harris needs to bring the Democratic coalition, including its Trump-curious members, back home.

While the Republican side plans to spend the remaining days of the contest trying to lure low-propensity voters to the polls, the Harris team will attempt to persuade voters of color to return to its side and will try to increase numbers among white voters in previously red suburbs.

Despite some increasingly erratic public appearances, Donald Trump has the momentum: He has managed to narrow Harris’s already microscopic lead in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada while holding steady in the battleground states where he has a small advantage: North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona.

But the Trump campaign—called an unstoppable force by its own officials—is about to run headlong into what the Harris team describes as an immovable object: the vast get-out-the-vote apparatus that Democrats have built over the past four years. “We have the maga coalition,” one Trump official said. “But we also know that it is not enough. And so we need to form a broader coalition, mostly with people who have never voted before. The other side has the easier task. You never want to plan a victory party that is dependent on new voters.”

But that other side is reaching beyond their base, embarking on a media blitz to capture the vanishingly small slice of the electorate that is still considered persuadable, appearing on nonpolitical podcasts including All the Smoke, a show hosted by two former NBA players, and Call Her Daddy, by one metric the second-ranked podcast among women 18 to 29, as well as sitting down with Howard Stern and Fox News. Harris is also exploring the possibility of an interview with Joe Rogan.