David Axelrod issues message on Election Day “momentum”

Democratic operative David Axelrod says the presidential candidate holding momentum on the final weekend before Election Day is likely to win the White House.

Axelrod, a top adviser to former President Barack Obama in the White House and chief strategist for both of his successful presidential campaigns, wrote in a Monday post to X (formerly Twitter) that his experience tells him that momentum during the final weekend typically continues until the election itself.

“In my experience, when campaigns have momentum on the final weekend, it tends to carry through on Election Day,” he wrote.

While Axelrod did not say which candidate he thought had the upper hand heading into Tuesday, several indicators over the weekend suggest Kamala Harris has retaken the momentum from Donald Trump.

A poll released Saturday by one of the country’s most accurate pollsters shockingly showed the vice president taking a 3 percentage point lead over the former president in Iowa, a result that Axelrod called “stunning” and suggested could have “portents for the country.”

The last of the highly rated New York Times/Siena College polls conducted before the election suggest that Harris is ahead of Trump in at least four out of seven crucial swing states—with Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Georgia likely delivering her the presidency if the polling is accurate.

Election betting markets also shifted toward Harris over the weekend, although most continue to show Trump as the slight favorite.

Meanwhile, polls suggest that Democrats are more enthusiastic about the election than Republicans, which could give Harris an edge in turnout. A Gallup poll released last week found that 77 percent of Democrats felt “more enthusiastic than usual about voting” this year, while only 67 percent of Republicans felt more enthusiastic.

Newsweek reached out for comment to the Harris and Trump campaigns via email on Monday.

During an episode of his podcast The Axe Files last week, Axelrod outlined the keys to a possible Harris victory, arguing that the vice president will need to win a large share of women voters in particular to defeat Trump.

“On Election Day and election night, when the returns start coming in and we start looking at exit polls, the thing I’m going to be looking for is this: Is she doing better among college white women than we thought she would?” said Axelrod. “Is she doing better among Republican women?”

Harris has made issues like abortion rights a cornerstone of her campaign, often pointing to Trump’s role in the Supreme Court‘s elimination of the constitutional right to abortion in 2022 when it overturned Roe v. Wade.

Polling shows a wide gender gap between the candidates, with Harris having a clear advantage among women voters and Trump a clear advantage among men.

Of the more than 77.3 million ballots that had already been cast as of Monday afternoon, women accounted for 53 percent of the votes while men made up 44 percent, according to NBC News. The gender gap was wider in several key battleground states, including Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Women make up a larger percentage of the overall electorate and have voted at higher rates than men in every U.S. presidential election since 1980, according to the Center for American Women and Politics.