They feel the Kamala-mentum on the battlefield.
Less than two weeks after the vice president became her party's presumptive nominee, Democrats across the country are feeling a wave of optimism that is translating into real, tangible gains - but a real, tangible problem for Republicans.
On Tuesday night, Harris was in Atlanta, Georgia, where she rallied a Trump-like crowd of 10,000 at Georgia State University. An enthusiastic audience responded when she challenged her opponent to "say it to my face" and attend a debate (or debates) with her in person.
That energy is palpable across the country. Harris' campaign has now released several statements boasting of more than $200 million in fundraising in less than two weeks and a surge in campaign volunteers. But it's not just the vice president himself who's seeing enthusiastic supporters return to the fold - it's the party as a whole, and that's something that spells trouble not just for Donald Trump, but for all Republicans.
Harris held her first event as a candidate in Milwaukee, just days after the Republicans held their convention in the city. Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who is running a must-win campaign, said the energy was electrifying.
"My understanding is that they had seven to eight thousand people who had indicated they were coming and they had to go from the smaller arena to a large high school gym and still turn away about 5,000 people," she said. The independent. "But I can tell you that I've done a number of campaign kick-offs at home this weekend. I've never seen so many people knocking on doors. So it's really, really, really exciting."
The Democrats desperately needed this turnaround in the race. In interviews with the media, they openly warned that their party was headed for a historic defeat if Joe Biden remained the candidate.
Take Florida, where reporters and pundits (and Harris' own campaign manager) still treat Democratic predictions of competitive races with skepticism. Harris' campaign manager, then working for Joe Biden, promised in April that Democrats would make a serious push for the Sunshine State, which she said the president's campaign saw as contestable if not outright winnable. DNC Chair Jaime Harrison said the same thing this month, after Biden stepped aside.
Despite Florida's red-hot state government, Democrats here saw a bigger influx of volunteers than anywhere else after Harris took Biden's place at the (presumed) top of the ticket. It's a rapidly shifting dynamic that has Democrats eyeing key lower-level races even if the electoral votes may ultimately be out of reach. Florida - like North Carolina, Ohio and other key battlegrounds - is the site of a Senate race this year, where Republican incumbent Rick Scott is up for re-election. The state party also has its eye on several congressional and statehouse seats as a way to counter the GOP's gains in the past few election cycles.
"It's hard to describe the excitement, the energy, the momentum and what we've solved in the last week," Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried told The independent as Harris went through her second week of campaigning for president, she said 12,000 volunteers had signed up to help Democrats in the state, including in deep-red areas like The Villages.
"It's not just Democrats," she said. "We're hearing anecdotal stories from former Republicans who come into our office and call us. We're hearing Republicans say, 'Maybe this is the straw that will break the MAGA base and wipe them out for this election cycle and finally give the Republican Party some sense of normalcy again.'"
Fried went on to say that the rise of Democratic momentum in the state has been met with almost no hesitation by the GOP, and she urged national Democrats to be quick to capitalize on it.
"There's no Republican operation here. They don't have offices. They don't have grassroots door-to-door knocking," Fried said. "They're taking this for granted and they're really overconfident right now ... we're going for the prize. We really believe Florida is on the battlefield maps and should be."
She is far from the only Democratic leader in a state where the election remains uncertain where the tide can turn so quickly in a matter of weeks.
Gary Peters, a senator from Michigan who chairs the Democratic Party's campaign arm (DSCC) in the upper chamber, said The independent This week, he saw the same dynamic play out in his own state, where polls previously showed Joe Biden trailing Trump and now show Harris ahead.
"The amount of enthusiasm on the ground for her campaign is something I've never seen before ... it's changed in an instant," Peters said. "This past week has been amazing. In Michigan alone, the number of people who have signed up in the past week for our statewide campaigns, for our get out the vote efforts and outreach - the number of volunteers has doubled in a week."
In Nevada, Democrats signed up 1,200 new volunteers. In Georgia, there were another 1,000. Six hundred and fifty showed up in just one congressional district in Michigan. Harris's campaign director for battleground states says more than 360,000 people have signed up nationwide in the past week and a half.
The momentum has clearly shifted in Harris's favor, and the question now is whether Trump's own field work can match it.
His campaign has been largely silent about its ground operations and volunteer efforts, opting instead to claim dominance through fundraising numbers. On Thursday, the campaign said it had $327 million in cash on hand at the end of July.
Trump's campaign did not announce it would begin canvassing voters until late May, when the verdict was announced in his New York hush-money trial.
Over the course of the 2020 campaign, the Trump campaign claimed to have recruited over 2.5 million volunteers to support their "get out the vote" efforts. The ex-president, despite breaking a volunteer record set by Barack Obama, ultimately lost several key swing states to Joe Biden, including Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, all of which he had won in 2016.
