WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is focusing on turning the burst of enthusiasm after her rapid rise to the Democratic presidential nomination into a sustained campaign that will mobilize an army of volunteers ahead of November.
Last week, as Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walsh, toured the country speaking at rallies filled with thousands of voters, the campaign also worked hard to enlist volunteers at those events to ensure victory. .
“We have this very organic, very real, very palpable energy from people who want to support the ticket,” said Dan Kanninen, the Harris campaign’s battleground director. “We turn this energy and enthusiasm into action. And in all of these events, because we’re organized, because there’s a big campaign in the battleground states—over 1,500 staff, over 260 offices—these teams are able to effectively translate that enthusiasm into volunteer shifts. Direct lines, voter outreach, door-to-door knocking, phone calls, and advocacy in these very, very close states will make a big difference in recruiting additional volunteers.
To underscore that point, the Harris campaign shared the new numbers with NBC News, which it said show an effort to give supporters ways to work in the race.
Last week, 1,000 of the 5,010 volunteers in Nevada were there the next day to join a series of weekly events the campaign is holding on Sundays, a campaign official said. A campaign official noted that the high number of registrants made Sunday the biggest day for the weekly series. By comparison, attendance at Sunday’s events was 669% higher than the previous event held on July 7, before President Joe Biden’s dismissal, the official said.
In Wisconsin, the campaign had 13,000 conversations with voters over the weekend, and more than 1,100 volunteers signed up to volunteer at a rally in Detroit.
“All these people are going to be called, they’re going to be repositioned, they’re going to get good experience,” said Kanninen, who said the campaign mirrored much of what officials did during the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns. “We will ask them to do more. We hope they will bring their friends. This is a snowball growing on itself.”
Since entering the race, Harris has even drawn national polls against former President Donald Trump — a tightening that Trump has tried to dismiss as a fading “honeymoon” period.
Harris’ campaign sees the moment of enthusiasm as a moment to build on, not squander.
Kanninen said that the campaign operation that Harris inherited from Biden worked hard from the beginning to organize in the “big seven” states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina.
“We expect them to be close again,” he said. “We’ve all been building a campaign for a long time to win a close race and now we’ve got this huge drive, which is just wonderful, the teams that are out there and organizing and building the volunteer relationships and the systems in place to make it happen and get people queues on the spot.
Rep. James Clyburn, D-C., said Saturday that he believes Harris’ path to victory is “widening every day” and that states such as Florida and Ohio, which Republicans have won repeatedly in recent cycles, could be competitive this year. “I believe there is more and more of a path to the Harris-Walz ticket, and I think it’s an ongoing battle royale, and I think it’s leaning toward the Harris-Walz ticket,” he said.
Harris campaign national co-chair Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del., also said the campaign always plans to continue fighting until Election Day.
“When it was Joe Biden, we knew it was going to be a tough election,” he said. “We never thought that we would take any vote for granted or that we wouldn’t put in all the effort needed to make it happen. And I want us to keep our eyes on the prize. We have to use this excitement, we have to use this energy as momentum to get us to that finish line.”
Asked how the campaign has adapted its organization to Harris, Kanninen said the energy level “gives us more to work with” but said the campaign’s plan and work remain the same.
“The challenge is always to continue to scale and meet the moment when the campaign becomes really critical,” he said. “Every campaign should do that. So we have to continue to grow and build and have a place for volunteers to go, have a place for voters to come into this campaign and, you know, create a contrast between the vice president and Donald Trump. … I’m not sure if it keeps me up at night, but it means late nights.”