In a recent appearance on MSNBC following last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), a member of the House Oversight Committee, was enthusiastic.
“The energy was incredible. I’ve never seen anything like that,” Garcia said, adding it continued “every single night leading to Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech. And what you heard over and over again from delegates is that they were fired up. They had not been this excited — many of them, their whole political lives.” The Congressman also pointed to the involvement of first-time volunteers.
“And that’s being replicated. Not just, of course, at the convention, but look at the grassroots fundraising. She’s smashing records,” Garcia added. “The tens of thousands of new volunteers: it’s smashing records, the amount of people that are trying to work for the campaign. That energy is truly magic.”
In fundraising, the Harris campaign recently flew past half a billion dollars raised — apparently just in the last month, since Harris took over for President Joe Biden at the helm of the campaign when he stepped aside towards the end of July and endorsed her. She very quickly after that point assembled the kind of support from Democratic delegates needed to actually clinch the nomination.
And a recent report said nearly 400,000 people signed up to volunteer for the Harris campaign across the United States, while following the convention, Harris was returning to the campaign trail, including planned trekking to Georgia.
And polling from her unfolding face-off with Trump shows promising signs. When Biden withdrew from the race, he trailed Trump in an average of national polling maintained by the elections data website FiveThirtyEight — where Harris now leads. And in state-level polling, some data even recently found Harris up in North Carolina, a battleground state that Trump won in both 2016 and 2020.