PHILADELPHIA, PA — Vice President Kamala Harris knows the race is tight. She knows there’s a chance she’s about to do what no woman, certainly no Black woman, has ever done before. And she’s deeply fearful for the future of the country under her rival. Donald Trump, should she fail.
“She’s nervous,” said one operative close to her, who has witnessed her in similar moments — though nothing she’s faced before has felt quite like this. Harris is someone who typically projects confidence and holds her emotions close to the chest, but in recent days, she’s had moments where her guard came down.
“I wouldn’t call it nervous,” said one friend who has spoken with her in the last few days. “I think she doesn’t overstate her vision, in terms of winning. She doesn’t take herself there. She takes herself where she can feel the energy and she can feel the love, but I don’t think she’s embracing winning until it’s over.”
Others who have been around Harris either on the trail or in quiet moments at the end of a frenetic campaign say it’s not a nervousness based on fear or worry. But more of a clear-eyed recognition that she’s done all she can and her fate is now up to America.
“She’s tired, but she’s convicted, she is determined, she’s a smidge confident — not overly so,” a senior Democrat who saw her this week told NOTUS.
“The race ain’t over yet,” she said at her closing rally in Philadelphia just before midnight. “This could be one of the close races in history.“
While the vice president understands the work is not truly over until the polls close, she is certain that her team’s job is done — and she does believe she will win.
Democrats enter Election Day more optimistic than they’ve been in weeks, not quite a whiplash but a marked shift in energy as Harris has gone all out in the battleground states in the final days.
“We have momentum on our side,” Harris said to a packed crowd in Allentown on Monday. “Can you feel it?”
Eighteen-year-old Jake Restivo, a freshman at Muhlenberg College who is voting for the first time, said even he feels it.
“I do see the shift,” he told NOTUS after Harris’ short but lively rally. “I think that people are becoming a lot more open about voting, I think people are starting to see and realize that Kamala, she seems [to] really know what’s best for this country.”
Part of that movement, Harris campaign aides say, comes from Trump’s unforced errors, starting with the Madison Square Garden rally where a comedian called Puerto Rico “floating island of garbage.”
“The rhetoric spewed out of his mouth doesn’t help,” said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, who attended one of Harris’ last rallies in Allentown.
The backlash provided Democrats with a windfall of focus group data that suggested late deciders were breaking their way. That’s borne out in recent polling. Americans had finally started paying attention, Harris’ team believed, and are looking at Trumpism up close after months of Democrats waiting for them to do so.
The Harris campaign also feels certain that they’ve outworked their opponents, with Herculean numbers of 90,000 volunteers over the weekend knocking on 3 million doors, alongside endless phone banking.
“What you all are signed up to do today, and what you have been doing,” Harris told door-knockers Monday during a canvass kickoff in Scranton. “Let’s enjoy it.”
The campaign ramped up dramatically over the last two weeks. Harris has increased her travel, hitting five states in one day the weekend before the election. On Monday, she went door knocking in Reading after the sun set. She’s done a rotation of backstage — somewhat newsless — interviews with cable news networks, after an initial resistance to the media. More surrogates have hit the trail. More money has left the door, according to two Democrats familiar with the spending. To some, even the slow and deliberate Harris team’s decision-making seemed to grow more efficient, according to two operatives familiar with the campaign.
One clear example of that change is the sudden outpouring of yard signs, which for months had been hard to come by for campaign offices across the country. The campaign had told supporters to purchase signs online for $25 if they wanted to display their Harris pride. Campaign leadership stalled on deciding which vendor to use, delaying the printing of signs. In the last three weeks, the campaign printed more than 1.5 million, according to a source familiar with the planning.
The campaign also spent the final days shoring up the Democratic base. The sit-down events with Liz Cheney disappeared, replaced by rallies at colleges, in inner cities and across the ever-important suburbs.
After months of risk aversion, Harris gambled more at the end. On Sunday night in East Lansing, Michigan, the vice president faced a threat hanging over her run: that voters furious with the Biden administration’s actions on the Gaza conflict — and her refusal to break from it — could erupt and derail her.
Harris and her team sought to meet it head-on at the Michigan State University campus, one aide said, and address the issue that’s top of mind for the community, which may decide whether she’s successful in the state.
“There are Arab community members here tonight,” she said at the start of her remarks, just days after Trump had a flashy stop in Dearborn. “This year has been difficult,” calling the carnage in Gaza “devastating.“ “As president, I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza.”
Looking out at the crowd on the ground and up in the stands, one senior Democrat told NOTUS that they had never seen that type of coalition at a closing rally for a Democrat — pointing to young and diverse people standing alongside white men who they said were clearly not Democrats. And Harris’ allies said the momentum in Michigan had swung in her favor.
“They think they’re going to win — Detroit early votes are high,” said an operative close to the campaign.
But one high-profile surrogate ended a short run of campaign stops with darker warnings, saying what someone running for office couldn’t say herself.
If Trump wins, Michelle Obama said in Norristown, Pennsylvania, this past weekend, it will “infect all of our lives.”
“Once you wink at hate and make it normal to call somebody a ‘bimbo’ or ‘low IQ’ or ‘human scum,’ look, you cannot control how fast and far that fire of hate will spread,” she said. “Destruction is swift and it is merciless. And no one knows where it will stop,” she said to gasps.
Voters felt that warning in the packed high school gymnasium where she spoke on Saturday. “I just feel as though they don’t want us here. Like we’re not part of anything,” said Tamera Rivers, from Delaware County, Pennsylvania. “If Trump wins, I would feel like I’m unwanted here.”
Earlier that day, in the predominantly working-class Latino neighborhood of Kensington, a trio of canvassers well into and beyond their 60s sporting “the day to take out the garbage is November 5th” shirts went door-to-door trying to ask for the neighborhood’s support after the MSG rally.
All the women the crew managed to speak with, if they could vote, were pro-Harris. But the men were harder to gauge, a direct example of the gender gap that could bring Harris success or failure.
Magali Larson, an Italian Argentinian woman in her 80s who the Philadelphia Democrats have deployed in Puerto Rican neighborhoods since the Obama years, stopped every person in the street to ask if they were voting. Running into a self-proclaimed undecided man on the corner, she said in Spanish, “Why are you undecided! She doesn’t call us garbage!”
One woman, feeding the pigeons, told her, “Kamala es mi mamita.” One man Larson spoke with said he heard the comedian’s comments but he didn’t live in Puerto Rico anymore, instead, he lived in the states. He said that there were no wars when Trump was in charge. And that life had been better. He then ripped up one of the flyers with the vice president’s face on it.
And another woman, Nancy, said she was bringing her mom, brother, uncle, cousin, sister and nephew to the polls with her to cast their ballots for Harris.
“You guys are going to run into a lot of ignorant people out here,” she said while holding a warm mug of coffee. “Ignore them, or send them a blessing with God and just keep going.”
In Philadelphia at her closing rally — in front of the Rocky steps, “a tribute to those who start as the underdog and climb to victory” — Harris embodied that same optimism.
“So America, it comes down to this — one more day, just one more day in the most consequential election of our lifetime. And the momentum is on our side.”
She didn’t say Trump’s name.
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Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS.