Here comes Kamala

Just a little fuel to the “Texas is in play” fire.

Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s running mate and the California U.S. senator, will be visiting Texas on Friday, according to an email Biden’s campaign sent to Democratic lawmakers in Texas on Sunday.

Harris will be the highest-profile representative of the Biden campaign to visit Texas in person during the general election, though his campaign was already set to spend millions of dollars on TV ads in Texas.

“Allow me to provide as a courtesy, the below in person travel notification for Sen. Kamala Harris which will be publicly released momentarily,” the email reads. “Sen. Kamala Harris will be personally traveling to Texas on Friday – October 30. 2020.”

Her visit comes as polls project a tight presidential race in Texas. According to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll, Trump leads Biden in the state by 5 percentage points. Trump won Texas by 9 points in 2016.

I have to admire the Trib’s branding department for only mentioning their poll from a couple of weeks ago, which was one of the best results for Trump this cycle, and not any of the five more recent polls that show a tie or a Biden lead. That UT/Trib poll would be Exhibit A for why Team Biden shouldn’t be paying any attention to Texas. I love the Trib, but they really needed to read the room here.

Here’s the Chron story.

Vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris is set to campaign in Texas this week, with Democratic sources saying Houston will be one of her stops.

Harris, a U.S. Senator from California, is set to be in Texas on Friday in a push to get more voters to the polls on the final day of early voting. The exact location and times have not been released publicly.

Her trip marks the first time in over 30 years that a Democratic vice presidential nominee has been sent to campaign in the Lone Star State this close to election day.

It is yet another sign that the Donald Trump campaign and the Joe Biden campaign have vastly different views of political conditions in Texas.

“The president is going to win Texas,” Tim Murtaugh, the communications director for Trump’s reelection campaign, said on Sunday. “And the president will be focusing his time and travel and energy on the states that will decide the election.”

But public polls over the last week have shown Trump and Biden locked in a dead heat. A Dallas Morning-News and University of Texas at Tyler poll released Sunday showed Biden leading Trump 48 percent to 45 percent.

The Biden campaign is convinced early voter data shows Democrats have a legitimate shot of delivering Texas for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1976.

See, that wasn’t so hard. At this point in the voting cycle, the key task is to push lower-propensity voters to the polls. The hardcore folks have mostly voted, or will be voting soon. This will excite them most of all, which may spur them to volunteer to help push those less-frequent voters out. After two weeks of voting, and what feels like thirty years of anticipation, keeping everyone’s energy up is important. I can’t think of a better way to do that.

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