Democrats having 'flashbacks to 2016' about Harris campaign, report says
Democrats close to the Harris campaign are worried about how tight the race is, CNN reported, and having 'flashbacks' to 2016.
Democrats are worried about the state of the 2024 presidential race and fear the election could be a repeat of 2016, according to a new report.
Sources close to Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign reportedly told CNN that Democrats were panicked because polls have largely remained stagnant with less than four weeks to go until the election.
"People are nervous. They know the polls are tight," one source told CNN. "A lot of us are having these flashbacks to 2016, too. We know when it can go the wrong way, and it can still feel fresh."
On the liberal network on Wednesday, CNN reporter Priscilla Alvarez discussed her conversations with Democratic insiders close to the Harris campaign who are worried that the race remains deadlocked, despite the campaign's efforts to reach more voters.
Democrats are reportedly worried about the 2024 race and having "flashbacks to 2016," a CNN report said.
"This has been a campaign that was described by multiple Democrats, allies, aides to the vice president as a good vibes campaign. But what’s also creeping in now is that anxiety," Alvarez explained. "The reason for that is because these polls are not really moving. Despite multiple battleground blitzes, despite the opportunities she has had across media outlets, there is still not a lot of movement from voters who are moving more towards her versus former President Donald Trump."
The Harris campaign is trying to address pitfalls from Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign in its outreach to red, rural districts that Clinton lost in that election, like Cambria County, Pennsylvania, Alvarez explained.
"The vice president has already visited twice. And so that is the type of strategy that they’re trying to deploy to try to make up that ground where they saw Hillary Clinton wasn’t able to in 2016. Then, too, there’s the mobilizing. Talking to Democrats, they’re always pretty boastful about their ground game and they continue to be so, but that needs to turn into votes. So certainly some anxiety and nerves setting in as Election Day gets closer and those polls just remain deadlocked," she continued.
Fox News Digital reached out to the Harris campaign for comment.
Several polls show the race is neck-and-neck between former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. (Fox News )
Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons, a former staffer for Harris, also commented on anxiety swirling around the vice president's campaign in comments to The Hill on Wednesday.
"Everything is deadlocked and the composition of the electorate is unknowable, and there are so many things that are unprecedented," Simmons, who formerly served as Harris' communications director, said.
"We can’t look back with any level of security because we haven’t had an African American woman on the ticket. We haven’t had a former president running again. We haven’t had a campaign with two assassination attempts. We haven’t switched out a candidate two months before Election Day before," he added.
"So it’s just hard to know," Simmons continued. "If you’re not nervous, you’re not paying attention."
The 2024 presidential election is less than four weeks away, with some states already opening up the polls. (Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)
Political analyst Mark Halperin characterized the Harris campaign as an "experiment" that's encountering issues during his livestream show on Wednesday.
"In the conversations I'm having with Trump people and Democrats with data, they are extremely bullish on Trump's chances in the last 48 hours. Extremely bullish," Halperin said.
"Can you win a short campaign with an untested candidate? And what I’m telling you is happening in private polling is she’s got a problem now," he said.
According to the latest Fox News poll from September, Harris tops Trump by 2 points nationally, which is a 3-point shift in her direction since August.
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Fox News' Gabriel Hays contributed to this report.
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