Top Democratic campaign officials said Monday that Kamala Harris has “multiple pathways” to win the presidency.
“We don’t have to pick and choose, we just have a lot of options,” Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told reporters during a video call.
O’Malley Dillon said while “we feel good about Pennsylvania,” a Harris victory doesn’t necessarily depend on winning the Keystone State. Nevertheless, the vice president is spending the entire day ahead of Election Day in the crucial battle state, where 75 percent of the state’s voters will cast their ballots on Tuesday in person.
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The campaign sees signs of optimism in the other two “blue wall” states of Wisconsin and Michigan, she said. And she said Democrats are equally as optimistic about winning the Sun Belt swing states.
“We like what we’re seeing in Georgia,” O’Malley Dillon said, adding that Harris is “on pace to win a very close race” in the Peach State. “We truly believe we have multiple pathways to 270 electoral votes,” she said.
Many campaigns at this point in a presidential race will close down operations in a few states where the race no longer looks viable. But the Harris campaign hasn’t done that in any of the seven battleground states where the election will be decided.
“We believe we are built to be able to win every single one of them,” O’Malley Dillon said.
The Democratic officials acknowledged the reality: that Harris and her GOP opponent, Donald Trump, are locked in a dead heat with razor-thin margins between them in every swing state.
“We believe this race is going to be incredibly close,” the Harris-Walz campaign’s senior advisor and outside counsel Dana Remus said. And she added: “We may not know the results of this election for several days.”
The Harris campaign has regained momentum in the final weeks of the campaign after running on fumes for a spell when polls tightened and the excitement that fueled her early entrance in the race in late July waned. But the Trump campaign has helped to buoy their hopes with a series of 11th-hour blunders, including the fallout from the former president’s Madison Square Garden rally.
The Trump campaign has already begun a series of legal efforts to fight the election outcome before the counting has even begun. But Democrats say they aren’t too worried.
“They know they can’t win at the ballot box because their candidate can’t earn the votes,” Remus said.
The reality is, the 2024 election is “more secure than ever” because of safeguards put in place by the bipartisan electoral count reform act of 2022, Remus said, which will “make it much harder” for Trump supporters to use the Jan. 6 congressional certification process to “steal an election.”
“We will not let Trump denigrate the election or our institutions with his invariable attempts to create chaos and doubt,” Remus said.
