STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Vice President Harris' campaign reports record fundraising. She's polling better than Joe Biden was, and she draws big, big crowds. Yet she tells those crowds to think of the campaign this way.
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VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Please, let's not pay too much attention to the polls because we are running as the underdog.
INSKEEP: NPR's Tamara Keith asked why Harris says that, and she found a backstory.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: When Vice President Harris first ran for office in 2003 to be San Francisco's district attorney, she started out virtually unknown.
BRIAN BROKAW: She was at 6 points - 6 points out of a hundred, as she would always say.
KEITH: Brian Brokaw says he has heard Harris tell this story a million times. He came along later as the campaign manager for her next big career leap when she ran for California attorney general in 2010. Brokaw says her Republican opponent was a popular, moderate, three-term district attorney from Los Angeles.
BROKAW: There was not a single poll, a single public poll taken in that general election that ever showed her winning. But for that entire general election, she was literally the underdog.
KEITH: The race was ultimately so close it took several weeks of counting votes to determine a winner. Harris won by less than a percentage point. So Brokaw isn't surprised to see Harris describing herself as an underdog now.
BROKAW: She always runs like she's behind. And I think that has been one of the keys to her success going back to some of her earliest races, mostly because she was running from behind.
KEITH: A memo released last week by the Harris campaign underscores the challenges she faces. It cited Trump's strong base of support and higher favorability than he's had at any point since 2020. And the reality is there's little reason for Harris to feel comfortable right now. Whit Ayres is a Republican pollster.
WHIT AYRES: The polls show a dead heat race nationally and in each of the seven swing states. It's a total toss-up right now, and I don't know that anyone is the favorite or the underdog at this point.
KEITH: Harris is doing better than President Biden was in July, but she isn't doing as well against Trump as Democrats were at this point in 2016 and 2020. Pollster Christine Matthews says in both years, polls made it look like Democrats were in a stronger position than they really were.
CHRISTINE MATTHEWS: We don't know what kind of polling error we may see in 2024. With Trump on the ballot, there's always that potential.
KEITH: In 2020, the election was decided by a razor-thin margin in just a handful of states. Harris deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks says they simply can't afford to be complacent.
QUENTIN FULKS: At the end of the day, nothing for us is final until the ballots are counted and honestly, even she is sworn in. That is our mentality that we're taking through Election Day and beyond.
KEITH: Balancing the optimism needed to motivate volunteers with the sort of urgency that will get people out to vote can be challenging. Robby Mook ran Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016.
ROBBY MOOK: People need to feel like they are part of a movement but not think that it's in the bag and maybe if they have to go pick up their kid and go buy some groceries, that, eh, she's going to be fine without me.
KEITH: Clinton's campaign had an air of inevitability even as Mook says they felt the ground shifting under them in the final days.
MOOK: We had to make a decision. Do we go out there and say, hey, folks, we could lose this election. It's really darn close? Or do we go out and say, Donald Trump is a danger to this country. People are rallying behind Hillary. We're going to have a historic election. Let's get out there and do this?
KEITH: In retrospect, Mook says he would have picked a little more doom and gloom.
Tamara Keith, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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