Tens of millions of dollars in television ads made it clear what the Democrats want their closing message to be: Donald Trump will curtail abortion rights, cut taxes on the wealthy, and cut Americans’ health care.

But getting a 24/7 news cycle to focus on positions that Trump and other Republicans have held for decades is a tough sell, especially when the news media can (rightfully so! ) may focus more on warnings from Trump’s top aides suggesting he has a fondness for Adolf Hitler and has fascist tendencies more widely, or at his final rally in New York featuring lots of racist, sexist and generally offensive comments.

Vice President Kamala Harris hopes she can spend next week connecting Trump’s autocratic ambitions with his right-wing views on abortion and the economy in the minds of voters, a process her campaign said could be summed up with a simple line she deployed -o during a rally in Georgia on Thursday when he asked attendees to imagine who will be sitting in the Oval Office in a few months.

“It’s either Donald Trump over there ticking off the enemies list or me working for you checking off my to-do list,” Harris said to cheers from the crowd.

As the campaign enters its final days, Harris’ success in a general election may come down to how well she and her allies can combine these two very different cases against Trump and deliver each message to the persuasive voters who must to hear

Finding the right balance is causing some anxiety among Harris supporters, with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) warning about Democratic campaigns that don’t focus enough on the economic struggles of the working class. (Sanders, for what it’s worth, issued similar warnings in 2020 and 2022.)

“They need to start speaking more to the needs of working class people,” Sanders said he told the Associated Press last week. “I wish it had happened two months ago. It is what it is.”

Harris, speaking to reporters Friday before her rally in Houston, indicated she was confident her campaign could deliver both messages simultaneously.

“One of the things I love about the American people is that we can have many thoughts at once,” she said, before listing “cutting costs,” “fighting for our democracy” and “fighting for people’s freedom to make decisions.” . about their own body’ as among her top priorities.

A memo from FF PAC, the main super PAC backing Harris, sent to Democratic operatives Friday cautioned against focusing too much on Trump’s fascist threat, noting that its internal tests found it less effective than focusing on Harris’s plans for the economy, including expansion. the child tax credit and building hundreds of thousands of homes to reduce housing costs. The note was first reported by The New York Times.

In a statement to the paper, the super PAC chairman — who typically doesn’t comment on his strategy or even warn reporters about the ads he’s running — downplayed the note and explicitly complimented Harris’ rhetoric.

The PAC’s research “shows people that the most effective way to use Trump’s words and behavior is to tie them to consequences in the lives of voters,” wrote Chauncey McLean. “That’s it Kamala Harris does every day comparing her to-do list with his enemies list, for example.”

The Harris campaign released two ads Thursday night using the audio of John Kelly’s interviews with The New York Times about Trump being a fascist to attack the former president, though it’s unclear how often one of the ads aired on TV. In recent months, the campaign has occasionally released ads more focused on Trump as a threat to democracy without airing them widely on television.

And other members of the Democratic ecosystem seem more confident in using Kelly as a messenger to attack Trump. Blueprint, a centrist Democratic polling institution, found in a survey earlier this month that Harris’s most effective closing argument involves citing how many of Trump’s cabinet members and others republicans they refused to support the former president.

Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chairman, agreed in a televised interview Sunday.

“When someone like John Kelly stands up and talks about what it was like to serve Donald Trumpspeaks to how he clearly wants unchecked power, the American people are not comfortable with that,” she said on MSNBC show hosted by former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. “It’s very important when people who are close to Donald Trump talk about it, and we’ve seen that in all of our data.”

But in the end it may not be her own economic plans or Trump’s fascist threat that provide Harris’ strongest closing message. Her campaign used Friday night’s rally, at which the vice president appeared alongside Beyoncé and Willie Nelson, to highlight how the Lone Star State’s abortion ban could soon reach swing states under a Trump presidency.

Priorities USA, a super PAC focused on digital advertising, told reporters Friday that they are confident abortion messages are making their way to persuasive voters and get-out-the-vote targets still available to Harris — people who tend to be younger, women and more likely to be black or Latino. In the group’s poll, the number one issue voters said they heard about in ads in recent weeks was abortion rights.

“We feel really good about the messages that people remember hearing, because those are messages that they tend to trust (Democrats) more,” said Nick Ahamed, the group’s deputy executive director.

At the same time, the group also cautioned Democrats against a particular line of attack, saying that focusing on the idea that Trump is “exhausted” or acting strange has not helped Democrats much.

“When we talk about Trump and fascism, authoritarianism, as long as we connect that to what it means to voters, we’re in great territory,” Ahamed told reporters. “The concern is more that we’re talking about him not showing up at rallies or canceling press conferences or doing weird dances.”

The Harris campaign has a second major rally planned for Tuesday night on the National Mall in Washington, not far from where Trump spoke to the crowd on Jan. 6, 2021, before they marched on the Capitol. While the venue would seem to indicate a focus on Trump’s threats to democracy, O’Malley Dillon anticipated a speech with a distinct focus on the economy.

“The vice president is going to talk about how this election is not about her or Donald Trump, it’s about the American people and her to-do list,” O’Malley Dillon said. “He’s going to think about how he can lower costs for your family, how he can make housing more affordable, how he’s going to protect Medicare, Social Security and Medicare.”

Around Tuesday’s speech, the campaign is largely chasing a more traditional storm of the seven states considered the core of the electoral battleground: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina. Polls in all seven states indicate their electoral votes are on the line.

Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will hit every state over the next four days, including a joint appearance in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Monday, with Harris hitting North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Wednesday and Nevada and Arizona on Thursday.

Trump is taking what appears to be a much more adventurous approach after his Madison Square Garden rally. While he and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), do have rallies in the expected places — Trump will be in Allentown, Pa., when Harris gives her big speech Tuesday night — they also plan events in Virginia and New Mexico. , two states where Trump is a significant underdog.