In “Harris’ big test: reclaiming swing states for Dems,” Erin Doherty writes at Axios: “Early national polls suggest Harris’ entry has given Democrats a bump in a tight race, but the presidential election is a state-by-state contest.

• Harris appears to be energizing many young and minority voters. A big question is whether she also can maintain Biden’s recent success among older voters — and stem Democrats’ losses among groups such as Latino men and whites who didn’t go to college.
• In a strategy memo released early Wednesday, Harris’ campaign argues she can. She aims to do so partly by focusing on women’s reproductive rights and contrasting Trump’s legal problems with her history as a prosecutor.
• Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020 was aided by his gains among whites who didn’t attend college, a group that helped Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center.

Driving the news: Larry Ceisler, a Pennsylvania-based public affairs executive, said he doesn’t expect Harris to match Biden’s numbers in rural parts of the state.

• But, he said, Harris “is going to boost turnout and support from African American voters, diverse voters and younger voters.”
• “It could be a net positive for the ticket,” Ceisler said.
• Another thing that might help in must-win Pennsylvania: Harris is considering Josh Shapiro, the state’s popular Democratic governor, as her running mate. Putting him on the ticket could alter the calculus there.

Doherty continues, “What they’re saying: In its memo, Harris’ campaign argues that she’s positioned to expand Biden’s winning coalition from 2020.

• “Her net favorability is 19 points higher than Trump’s among white, college-educated voters, and 18 points higher than Trump’s among voters over 65,” the Harris campaign writes.
• It also claims that the roughly 7% of voters who remain undecided are “disproportionately Black, Latino and under 30” — voting populations more likely to favor Harris.

By the numbers: Few polls have been released since Biden left the race Sunday and Harris jumped in.

• Reuters released a national poll Tuesday showing Harris with a 2-point lead over Trump, (44%-42%).
• The same poll the previous week had Trump with a 2-point lead, suggesting that the Democrats’ candidate switch led Trump to lose ground instead of picking up a post-convention bump.
• A new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll indicates that Harris’ entry reset the race, which the poll says is statistically tied.

Swing-state polls are done less frequently, and don’t yet reflect the historic twists and turns of the past two weeks. The latest batch showed Trump ahead in most of the six states likely to decide the election — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

• In a New York Times/Siena College poll — taken before Biden dropped out and the assassination attempt against Trump — Harris fared better than Biden, and was essentially tied with Trump in Pennsylvania.
• Harris also polled stronger than Biden with Black voters and younger voters.
• In Michigan, Real Clear Politics found that Trump led by about 2 points from an average of Trump-Harris polls.

Doherty quotes Ceisler on Harris again, “She’s going to have to introduce herself to the electorate — and she can’t let herself be painted as some far-left ‘woke’ activist from San Francisco, because she’s not.”

Sahil Kapur and Scott Wong share some observations regarding how “Harris’ candidacy reshapes strategies for key House and Senate races” at nbcnews.com: “For Democrats, candidates in battleground races are still planning to localize their races as much as possible. But lawmakers and party operatives are now hoping they can benefit from the wave of enthusiasm provided by Harris’ campaign in down-ballot races….Republican strategists said their priority is to craft and drive a negative portrait of Harris in the minds of voters, using some of the same issues they attacked Biden on, such as immigration, crime and inflation….“What is going to be critical important for Republicans as a whole is to quickly define Kamala Harris,” said one GOP strategist, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, adding that the party is already evaluating new messages in the field. “We have a very short runway to take the four or five most unpopular positions she has and brand her as a supporter of those.”….Democratic strategists say their candidates will continue to run state-specific Senate campaigns and district-specific House campaigns. Many of those candidates had been overperforming Biden for months before he dropped out, and party operatives expect that to continue with Harris, whose favorability ratings are also under water in recent surveys….They’re also continuing to run against what they’re portraying as Republican extremism and out-of-touch candidates after successfully using that approach in 2022….”‘Despicable Me 4’ was a big hit this summer and the problem in the Republican Party is they’ve got a bucket full of minions running for the U.S. Senate,” said JB Poersch, the president of Senate Majority PAC, a deep-pocketed Democratic super-PAC. “Republican candidates are trapped well behind where Trump is.”

Harold Meyerson opines on “Kamala’s Strengths and Weaknesses: Today on TAP: And how she can talk to working-class voters” at The American Prospect: “….there’s not much in Harris’s history to suggest she’s the cure for the Democrats’ growing weakness among working-class voters—most particularly, the white working-class voters who’ve been trending Republican for a very long time….How, though, can she reach out to the working-class men who build buildings, drive trucks, and operate assembly lines (all alongside women, but it’s the men who’ve been moving en masse into Republican ranks)? Chris Hannan, who heads the California Building Trades Council (which represents virtually every union of construction workers in the state)….was clear on how unions like those represented in his council would campaign against Trump and, now, for Harris. “Trump had an ‘infrastructure week’ every year, which led to no increase in infrastructure construction, every year. Under Biden and Harris, we’re building more roads and bridges and rail lines, and electric car factories and semiconductor factories, with union members and union-scale wages, in California, in Arizona, and across the country,” he said. “Trump gave corporations a huge tax cut with no conditions on spending that money in the U.S.; Biden and Harris have prioritized investing in America.”….Will Harris’s strong environmentalism be an obstacle to winning a number of working-class votes? Most likely, particularly in places like Western Pennsylvania, where her opposition to fracking will surely be something that the Trump campaign will stress. “She may not do well in Western Pennsylvania outside Pittsburgh,” another labor leader told me, “but she’ll boost turnout in [heavily Black] Northern Philadelphia and Detroit, particularly if Obama campaigns alongside her there.” That labor leader is also confident that Harris will stick with the kind of pro-union appointees to whom Biden entrusted the Labor Department and the NLRB. “Democrats with centrist records, like Biden had, now understand this is good policy and good politics,” he added….I herewith offer a couple of suggestions myself that might win her more support, or at least more of a hearing, among working-class voters. As I’ve noted, Trump’s suggestion of making tips tax-free actually won’t affect most tipped workers because they don’t make enough money, even with the tips, to pay income taxes. (Indeed, according to a report released today by UC Berkeley’s Food Labor Research Center and the organization One Fair Wage, fully 66 percent of tipped restaurant workers have incomes falling beneath that threshold.) Nonetheless—and despite some speculation that Wall Street consultants would mislabel their fees as tips if such a change were made—I think Harris should adopt this proposal (saying she’s open to crossing the aisle when a decent, or even half-decent, proposal originates there) and go it one better, challenging Republicans to raise the national minimum wage from the $7.25 where it’s languished for the past 15 years, and the tipped minimum wage from its microscopic $2.13—positions I doubt the newly “pro-worker” Republicans will embrace….As well, she should emphasize the arguments that Hannan has made: that factory construction increased by 73 percent once the Inflation Reduction Act passed, that infrastructure construction stagnated under Trump and soared under Biden, and that, as vice president, she cast the deciding votes on much of the “Build, Baby, Build for a Clean, Prosperous Future” legislation that is Biden’s legacy.”