There's been a prevailing narrative over the last few weeks that the Harris campaign, bogged by a series of missteps, is imploding, that it's struggling to find a message that resonates, and the polls are breaking against her. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign, on balance, has been running a pretty solid campaign over the past few weeks, and momentum appears to be on his side.
Reports say that his campaign is feeling good about the election. But will the Trump campaign's hubris cost Trump the election?
Curiously, according to a report from the New York Times, the Harris campaign thinks momentum is now on her side.
"As the presidential contest enters the final sprint, campaign aides and allies close to Vice President Kamala Harris are growing cautiously optimistic about her chances of victory, saying the race is shifting in her favor," the paper writes. "Top Democratic strategists are increasingly hopeful that the campaign’s attempts to cast former President Donald J. Trump as a fascist — paired with an expansive battleground-state operation and strength among female voters still energized by the end of federal abortion rights — will carry Ms. Harris to a narrow triumph."
And then there's this nugget:
Officials within the Harris campaign and people with whom they have shared candid assessments believe she remains in a solid position in the Northern “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, saying internal polling shows her slightly ahead in all three — though by as little as half a percentage point. They think she remains competitive across the four Sun Belt battleground states. Arizona and North Carolina appear to be the toughest swing states for Ms. Harris, these Democrats said, and they feel better about Georgia and Nevada.
This comes after weeks of hearing that Harris campaign polling has been dismal. Maybe those reports weren't true. Maybe this report isn't. Campaigns are always going to project confidence in their position. That's just what they do. The problem is whether the Trump campaign is overconfident and if that might backfire.
Axios reported on Tuesday that "Donald Trump's surrogates, allies, and foot soldiers appear supremely confident he'll be re-elected president next week, projecting an air of inevitability inconsistent with what polls portray as a coin-flip election."
"We've never had data that looks this good," a longtime member of Trump's inner circle told the outlet.
While Axios concedes that "Trump could win, potentially in a landslide," it notes that Kamala could as well, but "the MAGA universe largely refuses to entertain the latter outcome" and insists this is "priming Trump's base for mass distrust, disbelief, and denial of a second straight election loss."
Recommended: The Fallout From Biden Calling Trump Supporters 'Garbage' Is Huge
"The Republicans are projecting an image of a landslide and are hyped on early voting numbers in a way I have never seen before," Split Ticket elections analyst Lakshya Jain posted on X/Twitter on Sunday. "You can credibly construct an argument for Trump as a favorite, but we can do that for Harris too."
Without a doubt, the fundamentals of this election favor Trump. He leads on trust with the most important issues, and the race is basically not much different from how it was before the infamous debate between him and Joe Biden. That said, the battleground states are polling tight, within the margin of error, and we shouldn't be assuming that the polls are wrong as they were in 2016 and 2020.
