Kamala Harris Team Acknowledges Underdog Status, Labels Trump as 'Formidable'

In a letter to supporters on Sunday, US Vice-President Kamala Harris's campaign called itself the "clear underdogs" in an effort to temper expectations and electrify Democrats, saying the 2024 White House race would be decided by "razor-thin" margins in battleground states as in 2020.

The memo, written by Harris campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon, called former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for the White House, a "formidable candidate" and said he has a "motivated base of support, with more support and higher favorability than he has had at any point since 2020".

"Make no mistake," Dillon wrote, "We head into the final stretch of this race as the clear underdogs.

Harris leads Trump 48 per cent to 46.2 per cent in the average of national polls computed by RealClearPolitics, and 47.1 per cent to 43.8 per cent in the weighted average of national polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight. But the difference is slim, and within the margin of error and the campaign is cautioning Democrats against complacency. The race is tight in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

"In 2020, the election came down to about 40,000 votes across the battleground states," Dillon wrote.

"This November, we anticipate margins to be similarly razor-thin."

The Harris campaign has been working to pry open states controlled by Republicans like North Carolina and Georgia, where the Vice President had called herself the underdog earlier in this race. Dillon described the road ahead as "very hard.".

The latter, among other things, gave Harris and her running mate Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota, the license to remain relatively unknown.

While Donald Trump is a heavily-defined candidate, voters do not know Vice President Harris or Governor Walz as well," she wrote, adding: "While we continue to ramp up our organizing and paid efforts, over this final stretch, an aggressive campaigning schedule to introduce and define our ticket to the voters that will decide this election will be critical.

The road ahead is led by the presidential debate between Harris and Trump on September 10. The last Democrat to face Trump in a debate was President Joe Biden, and that did not go well for him. His dismal performance triggered a call for him to drop out of the race and make way for someone else. He pulled out and endorsed his Vice President to take over the Democratic ticket. The two sides have been publicly squabbling over some of the details in the run-up to the debate: The Harris campaign wants the microphones to be live for both candidates at all times; the Trump campaign says it should be muted after the candidate's time to respond to a question is over.

"The next 65 days will be very hard," Dillon wrote. "This race will remain incredibly close, and the voters who will decide this election will require an extraordinary amount of work to win over.