Days before the debate that ended up cutting off President Joe Biden’s path to a second term, his campaign chief, Jen O’Malley Dillon, defiantly set expectations: “We are going to win,” she said in an interview with the news site Puck.

Fast-forward 10 weeks. Democrats have a more popular nominee in Vice President Kamala Harris, torrents of grassroots campaign cash that Biden could have only dreamed of, a well-received convention and a running mate who has energised the party’s liberal base.

O’Malley Dillon somehow seems less optimistic.

“Make no mistake,” she wrote in a campaign memo released on Sunday. “We head into the final stretch of this race as the clear underdogs.”

How can it be that a campaign that by all metrics is better off than it was in late June is now pushing a narrative that things are worse than they were when Biden was in the race?

It is because the Harris operation is suddenly worried about overconfidence. The New York Times’ polling average has shown her ahead since August6, the day she unveiled governor Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate. And the mood carried over from the Democratic National Convention is hardly one of a party despairing about its chances.

Biden never declared his campaign an underdog. Neither did Harris until July 27. Before that, she had nothing but confidence in public.

As soon as Biden dropped out and Democratic fortunes began to rise, Harris began trying to temper expectations. “We are the underdogs in this race, OK?” she said at a July 27 fundraiser in Massachusetts. “Level set. We’re the underdogs in this race.”

New York Times News Service