Harris’s Team, With a Wink, Insists She’s an Underdog

Her campaign’s message that Democrats are losing, which she never voiced when President Biden was tanking the ticket, is an artful attempt to lower expectations.

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Vice President Kamala Harris at a rally on Thursday in Savannah, Ga. Despite a surge in energy, her campaign has signaled that it has some concern about overconfidence.

Days before the debate that ended up cutting off President Biden’s path to a second term, his campaign chief, Jen O’Malley Dillon, defiantly set expectations: “We are going to win,” she said in an interview with the news site Puck.

Fast-forward 10 weeks. Democrats have a more popular nominee in Vice President Kamala Harris, torrents of grass-roots campaign cash that Mr. Biden could have only dreamed of, a well-received convention and a running mate who has energized the party’s liberal base.

Ms. O’Malley Dillon somehow seems less optimistic.

“Make no mistake,” she wrote in a campaign memo released on Sunday morning. “We head into the final stretch of this race as the clear underdogs.”

How can it be that a campaign that by all metrics is better off than it was in late June is now pushing a narrative that things are worse than they were when Mr. Biden was in the race?

It is because the Harris operation, like any campaign riding a wave of momentum, is suddenly worried about overconfidence. The New York Times’s polling average has shown her ahead since Aug. 6, the day she unveiled Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate. And the mood carried over from the Democratic National Convention is hardly one of a party despairing about its chances against former President Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Biden never declared his campaign an underdog. Neither did Ms. Harris until July 27. Before that, with Mr. Biden still running, she had nothing but confidence in public. Several times in the post-debate period, as Mr. Biden’s campaign began to look like a rolling catastrophe, Ms. Harris declared that they would be re-elected.

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