Why Is Kamala Harris Visiting ‘Safe’ Blue New Hampshire?

Vice President Harris has maintained a relatively light campaign schedule since she became the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee last month, so why will she spend one of only 63 days before Election Day campaigning in New Hampshire, as state polls project she will win by 5 points?Ms. Harris’s announced campaign stop “in the Portsmouth area” Wednesday is fueling speculation that internal Democratic Party polling shows this race is closer than expected. The secrecy about where the event is going to be held is also raising eyebrows.“We’ll follow up with details soon,” a message sent via text to those who RSVP to the event says. A Sun reporter received three confirmation texts and one email since Monday asking to re-confirm that she will be attendance. The location for the event, though, is still being withheld.President Trump is using Ms. Harris’s visit to attack her for President Biden’s decision to move the first-in-the-nation primary to South Carolina from New Hampshire. Ms. Harris hasn’t visited the state this election cycle.“Comrade Kamala Harris sees there are problems for her campaign in New Hampshire because of the fact that they disrespected it in their primary and never showed up,” Trump said in a post to Truth Social and then in a campaign press release. “I protected New Hampshire’s First-in-the-nation primary and always will!”This comes one day after the Boston Globe reported that a Trump campaign volunteer was asked to leave after he wrote an email message to other volunteers saying that New Hampshire was no longer a winnable battleground state for Trump.“The state is absolutely in play. It’s a battleground state,” Trump’s former campaign manager and current advisor, Corey Lewandowski, a New Hampshire native, tells the Sun. “I will continue to advocate for the president to come.”Mr. Lewandowski is projecting optimism and says a deficit in the polls is nothing new for Trump — yet a Republican presidential candidate has won New Hampshire only once in the last eight elections. When Mr. Biden was still in the race, New Hampshire and a handful of light blue states looked like they were in play. The Cook Political Report, though, just moved New Hampshire and Minnesota back to “likely Dem” from “lean Dem” status. “I don’t see it as a red flag that she’s going to lose the state or anything like that, even remotely,” the director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, Neil Levesque, tells the Sun of Ms. Harris’s visit. He says that New Hampshire is a “second tier battleground,” and that Ms. Harris is likely visiting just to shore up support.A Reuters reporter posted to X Tuesday afternoon that Ms. Harris will propose expanding the small business tax deduction to $50,000 from $5,000 in New Hampshire. What’s unusual is the secrecy around Wednesday’s event. The Sun spoke with a dozen “blue no matter who” voters at Portsmouth, and only two had heard that Ms. Harris was even coming.“Their new MO is to limit the amount of discussion of their events before they happen,” Mr. Levesque says of the Democrats. “It probably limits protests.”Mr. Levesque says when Governor Newsom visited New Hampshire in early July to campaign for Mr. Biden, the event’s location was kept even from reporters until 45 minutes before it started. “It was very secretive,” he says, adding that this strategy makes it easier for “true believers” and “the person who’s door-knocking every Saturday” to attend events but not the opposition.The Harris campaign has been criticized for being all vibes and no substance — for having no policy positions page on its website and for only conducting one press interview since securing the nomination — and the events strategy aligns with that idea. Neither the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party nor a communications representative returned The New York Sun’s request for comment.

Why Is Kamala Harris Visiting ‘Safe’ Blue New Hampshire?

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