Kamala Harris‘ most trusted pollster shrugged off claims that Donald Trump had all the momentum heading into the final week of campaigning.
And David Binder, who has served in every race in which the vice president has competed, said his advice to her was simple: Deliver a dual message attacking Trump as a threat to the world order and lay out how a Harris White House would help drive down costs for the middle class.
‘In our mind, or at least in my mind, it has to be both,’ he said on an episode of Pod Save America broadcast on Sunday. ‘You cannot do one or the other.’
With a week until Election Day, he said he saw the race as a toss up.
It had edged marginally one way and then the other since Harris entered the race in July, but the overall numbers suggested it remained too close to call.
Kamala Harris’ most trusted pollster revealed his advice to her to close out the campaign
Binder worked for the Obama campaigns but has known Harris since before her first run for San Francisco district attorney, when he helped her to victory in 2003.
That makes him a key part of her team.
This time around he is leading the opinion research operation.
He said different groups of voters need to hear a positive Harris message, while others need to hear a negative Trump message.
‘Do voters need to hear more about Kamala Harris’s positive policy prescriptions that are going to help the middle class bring down costs, make sure health care is affordable, prescription drugs, you could just go down the line of the sorts of things that she’s talking about?’ he asked.
‘They do need to hear that, and they need to know that she’s committed to fighting for those things every day.
‘But at the same time, we cannot ignore the threat that Donald Trump poses as a potential leader of the free world for the next four years.’
He cited former Trump white House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who last week warned that the former president would rule like a dictator if he returned to power.
‘Both messages need to get out,’ said Binder.
David Binder has worked with Harris ever since her first run for office in San Francisco
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump held a rally Sunday night at Madison Square Garden as he launches his closing message for the final week
Binder was one of the first people recruited when Barack Obama decided to run, according to David Axelrod, his campaign chief.
He told ABC News that Binder’s focus groups in 2011 were central to plotting a roadmap to reelection when Obama’s future was in doubt.
And he said Binder had known Harris in California’s political circles since before she ran for office.
Trump has seen several swing states edge his way, according to recent polls.
The DailyMail.com/J.L. Partners decision model, which crunches decades of political numbers plus the latest polls, gives Trump a 66.9 percent chance of victory.
But Binder said he did not see things the same way.
‘We do not see momentum for Mr. Trump,’ he said.
‘Not totally sure where the momentum stories are coming from, because … there are public polls that we do pay attention to it some we don’t, but they’re all pretty much saying that the when you look at the Electoral College, you look at the seven states that are in play, the battleground states, all of them are still within the margin of error.’
Trump delivered his closing message, ‘Harris broke it, Trump will fix it,’ at a rally in Madison Square Garden on Sunday evening.
But it was overshadowed by several speakers who made racist and crude remarks, including comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who described Puerto Rico as ‘a floating island of garbage.’
Harris is due to lay out her her closing argument on Tuesday in Washington.
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