Trump aims to drag down Harris as he scrambles to keep up in tight race

President Joe Biden was also broadly unpopular, but now Trump faces Harris, whose favorability rating is roughly even. An ABC News/Ipsos poll released on Sunday found that 46 percent of likely voters viewed Harris favorably versus 43 percent unfavorably, while Trump’s ratings were 33 percent to 58 percent.

With little chance of improving Trump’s standing, Trump’s advisers see the only option as damaging hers.

“What matters is their ability to prosecute a case to the point where she feels like she needs to answer questions and that she’s on defense,” said Josh Holmes, a prominent GOP consultant. “I think it’s a serious paper tiger we’re dealing with here. I don’t think for 60 days they can keep the train on the tracks.”

Republicans have already started pummeling Harris with attack ads. The bulk of television spending by the campaigns and their allied super PACs between Aug. 23 and Aug. 29 — 57 percent — were attacks on Harris, according to data from the media-tracking company AdImpact. Twenty-one percent were pro-Harris ads that drew a contrast with Trump, and another 14 percent were purely positive about Harris, the data showed. Only 8 percent were anti-Trump attack ads.

“This is a moment in the message arc of us seeking to define her, she’s seeking to define herself,” a Trump adviser said. “We have a defined candidate — everyone knows everything about the person. There’s lots of new information about Kamala Harris that people just don’t know.”

As another adviser told reporters last month: “If you think this race is going to be decided on likability, you’re making a grave error because neither one of them is going to be liked at the end of this race.” Like others, the advisers spoke on the condition of anonymity to more candidly discuss strategy.

Democrats see the more hardwired views of Trump as an opportunity for Harris to define herself by contrast. While the Trump campaign emphasizes the issues of immigration, crime and inflation, Harris’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said Harris has room to expand her support on the issues of democracy, abortion, health care and gun violence. In a memo dated Sunday, she pointed to public polling that showed Harris within the margin of error on crime and the economy — issues on which voters have historically favored Republicans.

“Make no mistake: we head into the final stretch of this race as the clear underdogs,” O’Malley Dillon wrote in the memo. “This race will remain incredibly close, and the voters who will decide this election will require an extraordinary amount of work to win over.”

Harris has largely avoided engaging with Trump over his most personal attacks, including his baseless questioning of her racial identity as the daughter of a Black father and an Indian American mother. In her first interview Thursday as the Democratic nominee with CNN’s Dana Bash, Harris addressed the question by saying, “Same old tired playbook. Next question, please.”

“I thought she handled it brilliantly in that interview,” said David Axelrod, a Democratic political strategist. “Getting sidetracked on that discussion is unprofitable for her. … She’s not made herself a kind of symbol, she’s not made herself a historic candidate. She’s simply running as someone who has the experience and the values to move the country forward and to deal with the problems that people are most concerned about, and I think that’s a wise strategy.”

The vice president and her allies have taken on Trump on other fronts. She used her Democratic National Convention speech to call for moving “past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past.” Her campaign and its surrogates have also waged an effort to tie Trump to “Project 2025,” a right-wing policy agenda from his allies and administration alumni that the former president has tried to distance himself from in recent months. The campaign is training volunteers to criticize Project 2025 to echo paid advertising.

The tension within Trump’s campaign centers on how to make the case against Harris. Many allies and advisers want him to focus on policy positions, concerned that personal insults could backfire. But Trump wants to do things his way. Trump recently polled a rally crowd over whether to focus on personal or policy attacks — and when the crowd favored the former, joked that his professional advisers were worthless or fired.

Trump often relies on his own instincts — particularly at times when he feels things aren’t going his way. Many Republicans fear the feuds and controversies he instigates — recent examples include attacking Georgia’s Republican governor during a rally in the state, clashing with Arlington National Cemetery over a visit that produced a campaign video contrary to federal law, amplifying a joke about Harris performing a sex act, sparring with megadonor Miriam Adelson over staffing of a super PAC and defending his supporters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — can damage him more than any Harris attack.

He gave mixed messages on abortion in recent days, first signaling he was opposed to a Florida amendment that would strictly curb the procedure after six weeks, then reversing his answer the next day.

“Being off message, that’s everything. A few bad days wipe out a lot of gains,” Scott Reed, a veteran Republican strategist, said. “But he still needs to be interesting, exciting and volcanic and go to crazy town once in a while because that’s what keeps his supporters excited and motivated. He can’t go cold turkey and start reading boring speeches.”

The cemetery controversy continued into the weekend as Harris weighed in with a post on X on Saturday that criticized his Aug. 26 filming at Arlington as “a political stunt” that “disrespected sacred ground.” Trump responded with a searing statement from family members of some service members killed in a 2021 bombing in Afghanistan saying Harris was the one politicizing Trump’s visit.

Many on Trump’s team are now tired of arguing with him and inclined to let him campaign his way. In August, he brought back his 2016 campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, despite past allegations of unwanted sexual advances. Lewandowski has been interviewing staffers about whether they are getting what they need and how they think the campaign is going, according to people who have talked with him. Campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt called the staff “a world-class team.”

“Our focus every day is on ensuring the American people know Kamala’s dangerously liberal record and see her for who she is — a phony, radical, San Francisco liberal who would further spiral our once great nation into a sanctuary for illegal immigrants and a nightmare for law-abiding Americans,” Leavitt said.

Beyond the campaign, many Trump supporters have expressed despondency because of the sudden lurch from anticipating a landslide at the time of his formal nomination in July to fearing his campaign could blow it. Still, Trump remains in a better polling position than at this point in 2020 or 2016, and his advisers said the race was reverting to the nail-biter they always expected.

“The campaign is better positioned today than it was in 2016 and 2020. There’s no reason to panic,” said Reince Priebus, an informal adviser and Trump’s former chief of staff.

Democrats also expect a razor-thin margin on par with the 40,000 votes across three states that decided the 2020 election.

Republicans view Georgia as a must-win for Trump and Pennsylvania as pivotal for Harris. Heading into the traditional start of the peak campaign season after Labor Day, Trump led in Georgia by 2 percentage points in The Washington Post’s polling averages as of Sunday, and Harris led in Pennsylvania by 3.

“Gen Z, Black males and metropolitan, White college-educated voters, he was just not doing as well as he should with those groups,” said Brian Robinson, a Georgia-based GOP strategist, speaking of Biden. “A lot of that is just coming home, they want to be Democrats but couldn’t vote for Biden.”

TV ad spending highlights the pivotal role of Pennsylvania, where, as of Thursday, Democrats had invested nearly $69 million on television ads related to the presidential race, while Republicans are spending $66 million between Labor Day and Election Day, according to AdImpact.

After Pennsylvania, Democrats are spending the most on television commercials in Michigan ($52 million), followed by Arizona ($35 million), Georgia ($35 million), Wisconsin ($33 million), North Carolina ($25 million) and Nevada ($20 million). Republicans, meanwhile, are spending $34 million in Georgia, $9 million in Arizona, $7 million in Michigan, $4 million in Wisconsin, $4 million in North Carolina and $2 million in Nevada.

“Every single one of these competitive battleground states is within the margin of error. This is a race that’s going to be decided like the last two elections … on the margins,” said Amy Walter, editor in chief of the Cook Political Report. “The benefit that Trump had in 2016 and for much of 2024 was that he was seen as the outsider, he could grab the mantle of change. … He doesn’t own that in the same way anymore.”

Going forward, Harris and her allies have reserved more airtime than Republican presidential advertisers through the election, according to AdImpact, though those bookings often fluctuate in the final weeks. A Trump campaign official declined to comment on ad-spending strategy.

The Harris campaign is also counting on a large turnout operation powered by 2,000 staff across 312 offices in the core battleground states. Fueled by $540 million raised since Harris entered the race in July, the campaign is targeting moderate independents and Republicans to cut into Trump’s leads in rural areas and red counties such as Washington and Jenkins in Georgia, Union and Jefferson in Pennsylvania, Jackson and Wilson in North Carolina, and Waushara and Rusk in Wisconsin.

The Trump campaign, by contrast, is relying on 18,000 volunteers trained to turn out their neighbors, alongside various field programs run by allied super PACs.

Both candidates are preparing for the Sept. 10 debate. After much bluster from Trump, the date, moderator and rules will be the same as the debate he did with Biden in June.

Labor Day now also marks the beginning of voting season, as the first mail ballots go out to voters in North Carolina this week. Republicans have sought to make up ground with early and mail voting after deficits cost them in 2020 and 2022, but Trump has continued to cast doubt on mail voting.

Emily Guskin contributed to this report.