With coat drives and concerts, Harris and Trump tackle winning over swing voters

Former President Donald Trump's campaign hopes to sway persuadable voters at personal finance workshops and concerts. Vice President Kamala Harris' political aides think a coat drive may help their candidate do the same.

With two months left until Election Day, the two camps are spending cash, time and energy on one of the most difficult tasks in modern elections: finding and winning over the tiny fraction of voters who live in one of the seven battleground states and haven't yet picked a side — or, in some cases, haven't even decided whether to vote.

"It's a small but critical piece of the electorate," said Nick Trainer, who was political director on Trump's 2020 campaign. "In battlegrounds, it's tens of thousands of voters, not hundreds of thousands."

That could be all it takes to determine who is sworn in as president in January.

There's no silver bullet that can move them all in one direction — they are hard to herd, like millions of cats, because they have different reasons for being undecided — but both campaigns see the economy as a pivotal issue of concern that crosses subgroups within the set of swing voters.

"These persuadable voters in many ways have a less fragmented issue matrix than is typical," said one senior Trump campaign official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid about strategy and tactics. "And that is because of the outsized concern about the economy."

The official said some persuadable voters list other topics as their primary concern, but "a much larger share fall into economic and affordability concerns."

That helps explain why Trump is vowing to bring about a "national economic renaissance" if he's elected, and why he's hammering Harris.

"She wants four more years to enforce the radical left agenda that poses a fundamental threat to the prosperity of every American family and America itself," Trump said Thursday in remarks to the Economic Club of New York.

At the same time, Harris is racing to define herself as a champion of people who have been hit hard by rising prices. Of the handful of proposals she has made since becoming the Democratic Party's pick to take on Trump, most have been aimed at providing government assistance — for parents, small business owners and first-time homebuyers.

A source familiar with the Harris campaign’s efforts to appeal to undecided voters said a large part of the strategy will be focused on economic messaging and economic proposals. 

Part of that strategy means pushing back on Republican attempts to paint Harris as a liberal who will be more worried about “increasing the social network for immigrants and other people who aren’t working” rather than on working on many Americans’ inability to pay their bills and meet their basic needs financially. 

 "A campaign focused on big philosophical issues like ‘democracy’ wasn’t succeeding because people couldn’t relate it to themselves,” the person said, referring to a major theme of President Joe Biden's campaign before he dropped out of the race July 21. “Freedom succeeds when people are thinking about how it affects them personally. Freedom to not live in poverty is a great message.”

The person also said Harris talking about how she will better people’s lives — rather than the history-making nature of her campaign — is part of an effort to appeal to undecided voters and those who may be hesitant to cast ballots for a woman who is Black and South Asian.

“I think people are going to break later than one would expect because, let’s step back for a second, she’s got two things working against her: She’s a woman and she’s black," the person said. "And, I think this country, particularly, for some reason, has a hard time seeing a woman in that role. It feels like this is one of those ‘get in the voting booth’ moments for the people who remain on the fence.”

Focus on swing voters is coming back into vogue after a few election cycles that were all about the two parties' bases. Two big reasons for the renewal: the closeness of recent presidential elections and the abundance of political money.

It is much more expensive to identify persuadable voters, convince them and turn them out than it is to simply get voters who already back a candidate to go to the polls.

For the Trump campaign, that means an ongoing collection of data about potential voters, according to the Trump campaign official. From early data sets, the campaign built models designed to predict which voters would be persuadable based on various traits and tendencies.

"Then you pressure test that by asking the modeled audience...the same sort of information that goes into [the model] to see if it validates," the aide said. "We're in a constant revalidation process."

Harris campaign officials said "relational" organizing — which includes supporters participating in community events — is the most effective way to reach undecided voters. That's the kind of thinking that puts Harris campaign aides at a coat drive in Milwaukee and Trump allies at financial seminars.