With Biden out and Harris in, congressional Democrats plot 2024 gains

Earlier this month, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) was nowhere to be found as President Biden quietly joked about his age and defiantly declared he would not let anyone “push me out of this race” at a low-key rally in her hometown of Madison.

But just a few days ago, the two-term senator, who faces a tough battle for reelection this year in her swing state, was beaming as she spoke before Vice President Harris in front of a roaring crowd of re-energized Democrats in West Allis.

The scene underscores the feeling of cautious optimism that is boosting Democratic candidates all the way down the ballot in the eight days since Biden stepped aside. Vulnerable Democratic incumbents hoping to hold onto their slim majority in the Senate and flip the House had all but resigned themselves to defeat after Biden’s disastrous debate, and they were running as far away from his candidacy as possible.

Now that Harris has an opportunity to introduce herself to a Democratic base woken up by her candidacy, congressional Democrats are starting to see a path to victory with fewer than 100 days until Election Day, even as Republicans are organizing themselves around a line of attacks they hope will tie Democrats to Harris’s past positions.

“We see huge energy everywhere,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who is running for reelection this year in Virginia, which some polls showed would be close on the presidential level with Biden atop the ticket. “In the events that I’ve done since that announcement, the energy is really, really ratcheting up.”

Still, Harris is battling deep dissatisfaction with inflation and the administration’s handling of the border among voters, and Democrats are facing a brutal Senate map full of purple and red states that favors Republican attempts to wrest back control of the chamber. House Democrats have to win four more seats if all incumbents are reelected to retake the majority.

“The additional enthusiasm that the Democrats have shown will obviously help down ballot races,” said GOP political consultant Whit Ayres. “Whether that will be enough to overcome the other negatives and challenges remains to be seen.”

Democratic strategists running Senate and House campaigns noted an abrupt shift in messaging as soon as Biden, 81, passed the baton to Harris, 59, from an operation focused on the president’s record the last four years to a campaign leaning into the future with slogans like “We’re not going back.”

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), who runs the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, called the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, argued the contrast with Trump would be good for Harris and all Democratic candidates.

“Campaigns are about the future. And how the policies they’re fighting for are impacting their lives,” Peters said. “That’s why I think it’s a real problem for Donald Trump he continually dwells on the past.”

House Democrats also see the future-forward messaging as a welcome change. Multiple House Democratic lawmakers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak openly about Biden’s troubles, said the president spent the last several weeks recounting his first-term accomplishments rather than laying out a concrete vision for the future.

Democrats this week cheered on Harris as she embraced “freedom” as a core tenet, and they noted her sharper messaging compared with Biden on abortion rights and other issues.

“We have an opportunity to move past the chaos and extremism and return to normal, pragmatic, reliable leadership, and [voters] get that with her. They get a better understanding of what’s on the line in terms of democracy and how we’re going to strengthen it,” Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) said. “It’s also an opportunity not just to say, ‘Here’s who I am,’ but to set the terms of the debate.”

Over the past eight days, the once-depressed Democratic base has woken up, helping amass more money and a volunteer army down-ballot. The Harris campaign said Sunday that it had raked in $200 million in the week since Biden exited the campaign, two-thirds being from new donors.

Earlier this week, the DSCC raised more than a million dollars online two days in a row, the most of the cycle, according to the group. And Peters said the number of statewide volunteers in his state doubled in the four days since Harris announced her candidacy.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had its best day of the cycle in the first 24 hours after Biden’s announcement and one of the best online fundraising days in the House Democratic campaign arm’s history, raising nearly $1 million, they said. In the first nine hours after Biden’s Sunday announcement, the DCCC was raising $1,300 per minute, according to the DCCC.

“I love Joe Biden, but I think it’s a fact that we were having a difficult time activating our base. We have that problem solved,” Rep. Daniel Kildee (D-Mich.) said.

The latest influx of cash is something keeping Republicans up at night because it can take some districts off the competitive map, according to GOP campaign strategists.

“Knowing the path forward has folks incredibly energized, and frankly, our candidates have always been running ahead, so we’ve been on a good path to take back the House from the beginning of the cycle and continue to date,” DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) said.

Both a Siena/New York Times poll and a Wall Street Journal poll published this week showed Harris faring better than Biden among young, Hispanic and Black voters — all key constituencies for Democrats up and down the ballot this fall. But the Siena poll also registered some slippage compared with Biden among older voters, showing the rapidly shifting coalitions that Democrats are still deciphering. An ABC/Ipsos poll released Sunday showed an eight-point spike in Harris’s favorability rating from 35 to 43 percent, with an unfavorable score of 42 percent.

Harris’s strengths have presidential strategists hoping that Sun Belt states including Nevada, Arizona and Georgia may be back in play after the Biden campaign had begun to write them off. That is welcome news for Democrats running for the Senate there: Rep. Ruben Gallego (Ariz.) and Sen. Jacky Rosen (Nev.). Democrats also believe Harris’s candidacy will help incumbents in the “blue wall” of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, states Democrats historically have won to secure the White House.

House and Senate Democrats running in swing districts and states had been outperforming Biden before his exit from the campaign — strategists said they continued to do so in the weeks after the June 27 debate.

But Democratic lawmakers feared that if Biden stayed on the ticket, he would eventually doom their chances down-ballot. They worried that Democrats were unlikely to hold onto the Senate if Biden lost, given the fact that even if all their incumbents win, the Senate would be split 50-50 next year. (The president’s party gains control of the Senate in the case of a split.) House Democrats also were concerned that a depressed base would result in historically low voter turnout, which is critical in swing districts where elections are determined at the margins.

“I think the dynamic for them has improved simply because it’s not Biden,” said Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.). “We still are trying to catch up in some of the swing states in the Senate races.”

In the red states of Ohio and Montana, where Sens. Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester, respectively, are fighting for their political lives, it is less clear that Democrats will be aided by Harris at the top of the ticket. Tester is the lone vulnerable Senate incumbent who has not endorsed Harris, even though the Los Angeles Times reported in 2015 that he encouraged her to run for Senate in the first place.

“He’s doing his best to try and get himself aligned with his state, which is going to be really hard because his state is a far cry from the kind of San Francisco liberal policies that Harris brings to the ticket,” said John Thune (R-S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican.

National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Steve Daines (R-Mont.) said he believed that Harris will eventually help Republican candidates because it’s easier to connect Democrats to her policy positions, which he cast as far left, than to connect them to Biden’s age.

“She is a San Francisco radical, and this just feels a lot like a replay of George McGovern and Michael Dukakis,” Daines said, referencing past failed Democratic presidential nominees. “The nation is not ready for a far-left president.”

That messaging is being used by Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate David McCormick, who released an online ad targeting Sen. Bob Casey (D). In the ad, Casey praises Harris before a lengthy supercut of Harris previously endorsing policies such as banning fracking and discussing “starting from scratch” in designing the agency charged with enforcing immigration law inside the United States. In a memo, the NRSC urged candidates not to “be shy about aggressively tying their opponents to Kamala Harris’ extreme agenda.” (The Harris campaign told reporters this week she now does not support a fracking ban.)

In the House, swing-district Democrats have largely embraced Harris’s candidacy, with many believing she can only improve on her support from here. One House Democrat representing a swing district said they called on Biden to step aside because they had seen 30 months of consistent internal polling that showed Biden not improving against Trump.

“I saw Biden’s ceiling and I think what we see in the polling is Harris’s floor,” said the lawmaker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about party leaders.

Democratic Rep. Hillary J. Scholten, who represents a swing district in western Michigan, says she has had many “moderate, even conservative crossover voters” in her district who mention liking Harris’s personality and gravitas, and who consider her a politician “who really means business.”

But Democrats say Harris must use this opportunity to reintroduce herself to a public that does not know much about her as Republicans are sharpening their attacks.

Many swing district Democrats — which represent districts with an almost evenly split mix of Democratic, Republican, and independent voters — are telling Harris’s campaign that she needs to run to the center rather than appeal to the far left.

“You’re in the general now. If Democrats are going to give you the path, you need to run like you understand what it takes to win in a battleground state,” the Democratic House member said. “If you all go off to the left and try to please the ‘Bernie bros,’ you got a problem in battleground states.”

Democrats welcomed Harris latching onto her prosecutorial record to sharply contrast with Trump’s recent felony conviction. Many noted that such an embrace could help them counter GOP attacks that Democrats are soft on crime.

It’s a difference from the Harris 2020 presidential campaign in which she often times softened her record as a prosecutor and attorney general of California in fear of disappointing the liberal base during a crowded Democratic primary.

But Hill progressives are also embracing Harris as a candidate who will continue liberal policies that Biden enacted during his presidency. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, was asked by the campaign to stump for Harris in Georgia this weekend. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said Harris’s past positions on climate, abortion and the war in Gaza will continue to excite liberals, especially young voters. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said he will do “anything” he can to help elect Harris, but he has not yet formally endorsed her.

It’s exactly what Republicans want to capitalize on.

“That San Francisco liberal wants to turn the whole country into San Francisco,” said National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) at a Trump rally in North Carolina last week. He added that Harris “wants more illegal immigration, she wants free health care for illegals, she wants to defund the police.”

But Harris has brushed off these attacks, portraying a vote for Trump as a ticket to the past. “We’re not going back,” she said in Wisconsin last week, as the crowd began chanting the same.

Leigh Ann Caldwell contributed to this report.

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With Biden out and Harris in, congressional Democrats plot 2024 gains