NBC News reported last week that Kamala Harris’ campaign was planning to “more aggressively attack” Donald Trump in the election cycle’s closing weeks, which represented “a new phase aimed at trying to move the small number of undecided voters her way.”
Quoting multiple officials with the Democratic campaign, the report added that the shift in strategy was driven, in part, “by internal campaign data showing that sharper messaging against Trump could persuade some still-unsure Americans to support Harris.”
Those Team Harris insiders didn’t specify what these “more aggressive” tactics might entail, though we apparently didn’t have to wait too long to see the strategy come into sharper focus. Politico reported:
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is directly invoking special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation to attack former President Donald Trump, in a new ad provided first to POLITICO. “We knew it was bad. But it’s worse than we thought. Much worse than we thought,” reads the ad, between videos of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, as Trump’s past comments play in the background. “We fight like hell. If we don’t fight like hell, we’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump’s voice can be heard saying in the ad.
The commercial, which will air in battleground states this week, is available via YouTube. It’s the first ad from the Harris campaign focused exclusively on Jan. 6.
It also puts the special counsel’s indictment up front and center, while simultaneously reminding the electorate in the ad’s closing message: “And next time, there will be no one to stop him.”
As the words appear on screen, ominous music airs in the background as an image of Trump’s vice president on Jan. 6, Mike Pence, is replaced by a picture of Trump’s new running mate, Republican Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.
Circling back to our coverage from last week, this might seem difficult for well-informed news consumers to believe, but a significant chunk of the population no longer remembers Jan. 6 or Trump’s efforts to overturn the will of his own country’s voters.
I’m reminded of a report from Columbia Journalism Review, which spoke with Celinda Lake, one of the leading pollsters who worked on Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, who was stunned during a focus group session earlier this year with swing voters.
According to the report, Lake had asked how the voters felt about Trump’s indictment related to Jan. 6.
“They go, ‘What court case around Jan. 6?’” the pollster recalled. “These were swing voters, and about half of them weren’t sure what we were talking about. And I said, ‘Well, you know, the insurrection and that he was the one that provoked it.’ They go, ‘Oh, yeah. I kind of forgot about that.’”
A few months later, a national poll from Yahoo News and YouGov found an astonishing number of Americans were unfamiliar with the criminal cases against the former president.
Many voters don’t know that a jury found Trump guilty of 34 felonies. They don’t know that a different jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse. They don’t know that a separate court found that Trump oversaw a business that engaged in systemic fraud.
And they don’t know that federal prosecutors have charged Trump with a variety of felonies related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The new Harris ad doesn’t just remind the public of the Capitol violence the Republican nominee was responsible for, it also reminds voters that the former president is a convict who has been accused of even more felonies.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
