Politics

Kamala’s Campaign: Trump’s ‘Garbage’ Will Get Harris Elected

TRASH TALK

Harris officials say a “more unhinged” GOP candidate is delivering votes to his rival–but also say he is going to claim victory.

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
Photo composite by The Daily Beast/Getty/Reuters

Donald Trump is pushing last-minute swing voters into voting for Kamala Harris, her campaign officials said Friday.

Internal data shows Harris winning late-breaking battleground voters by a “double-digit margin,” campaign officials said, a margin that would suggest a path to victory for the Democrat.

But they also warned that they “fully expect” Trump to make a bogus declaration of victory after the polls close on Tuesday and said they are preparing for court battles over it.

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The upbeat briefing about their prospects came after public sweating by MAGA that Trump is falling short in Pennsylvania and that turnout among women is outpacing expectations.

On a briefing call Friday, one Harris operative said internal campaign data shows the Democratic presidential candidate is winning big time with battleground voters who have made up their minds late, just in the final week of the race.

“And we’re winning them by a double digit margin,” the operative said.

Harris has Trump to thank for her alleged success heading into Election Day, her aides said. They cited internal data, which came from a recent focus group, showing voters who are still undecided are “more open to supporting us than Trump.”

They credit Trump’s “more unhinged,” more unstable” behavior and his team’s ill-advised slap at Latinos and Puerto Rico at his Madison Square Garden rally with steering undecided voters her way.

“It’s not just impacting the Puerto Rican community or Latinos, but we are seeing undecideds writ large that they really don’t like what they’re hearing and it really kind of crystallized for them,” one Democratic campaign official said on the call.

Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump reacts as he sits in a garbage truck, in Green Bay, Wisconsin, U.S., October 30, 2024. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
Garbage-gate has dominated the final stretch of the 2024 presidential campaign.

Specifically, a Harris campaign official said, the voters in the recent focus group said they were turned off by Trump’s MSG rally, where the featured comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” among other offensive comments.

“Bricks he keeps piling on top of that, like what he said yesterday about Liz Cheney is icing on the cake,” one aide said.

At an event with Tucker Carlson in Arizona Thursday night, Trump called the former Wyoming congresswoman, who is the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, a “radical war hawk.”

“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay?” Trump said. “Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

A Harris campaign official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that a repeat of his 2020 “frankly, we did win this election” move was to be expected because, the aide said, Trump knows he’s a goner.

“This should be no surprise because he lies all the time and wants to sow doubt about a loss that he anticipates is coming,” the official said.

Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe speaks during a rally for Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden, in New York, U.S., October 27, 2024. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe's infamous line—that Puerto Rico is a "floating island of garbage"—has caused a huge stink for Trump.

“It won’t work. He did this before and it failed. If he does it again, it will fail.”

The officials said the Harris-Walz campaign is staffed up and fully prepared to defeat the Trump campaign in court if it comes to that. One official said Democrats are ready to address “literally anything and everything that the Trump campaign throws at us.”

“We now have hundreds of lawyers throughout the country, lawyers throughout the battleground states,” the official said, “already working around the clock to protect our voters and ready to go into court.”