Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks with members of the press on board Air Force Two at Philadelphia International Airport, October 21, 2024.
By now, we were expecting that Kamala Harris would be slowly widening her lead against a badly impaired Donald Trump. Discounting all the noise in polls, that clearly isn’t happening.
I still think that the combination of the Democrats’ superior ground game, the power of the abortion issue and related gender gap, and Trump’s increasingly florid lunacy will drag Harris across the finish line. But it will be a lot closer than it should be. And if she does lose, the verdict will be death from a thousand cuts.
Trump’s supporters are in a state of high excitement. Harris’s mostly are not. Never mind the polls, you can see it in the divergent presence of lawn signs.
When Biden finally stepped aside, there was a combination of relief and excitement. The excitement built as Harris took charge of the nominating process and within 48 hours had cleared the field. A leader! And one evidently competent at politics as well. The excitement only built at the Democratic National Convention.
But that enthusiasm has faded. Harris has run a lackluster campaign, made unforced errors, and missed opportunities to score lethal punches. Instead of showing up at the Al Smith Dinner and blowing away Trump’s crassness with a sane and eloquent speech, she sent a lame video. Whose idea was that?
Interviews and focus groups keep quoting undecided or Trump-leaning voters as saying that they don’t really know what Harris stands for. Could that be because her own message is blurred?
We get a few gestures toward Elizabeth Warren–style progressive populism undermined by offsetting gestures for Wall Street. (I will raise your capital gains taxes but not by as much as Biden wanted to. Say what?)
In some cases, her surrogate Mark Cuban is actively undermining proposals Harris made earlier in the campaign, like the plan to tax unrealized capital gains.
Nobody says they don’t know what Trump stands for, even though his issue positions are often contradictory. Voters think they know Trump so well that they discount his sheer craziness and vulgarity. What voters know is that Trump radiates power and energy. That has always been his secret weapon.
Too many so-called low-information voters compare Trump and Harris in terms of the price of eggs or gas or housing before 2020. Harris needs a stronger, more consistent story of how her administration would make life better for ordinary people.
One such story is the relentless corporate concentration that keeps adding costs and hassles in everything from health care to credit cards. Biden’s appointees at the FTC, Justice Department, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have won major victories on these fronts, but Harris has been slow to embrace these abuses and remedies as a core theme of her own.
Instead, Harris has cozied up to billionaire donors like Cuban who would like these gains rolled back, and even featured them at rallies with her, in a way that further mixes the message. Her policy ideas have been directionally good, but mostly small ball, like a $50,000 tax break for small-business startups. A smart exception was her proposal to have Medicare pay for more home care, sparing family caregivers as well as serving the elderly.
For all of his weaknesses, Biden turned out to be a great friend of labor. His persona as working-class Joe helped him carry Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2020. Harris has none of that legacy to fall back on. She needs to earn it and isn’t quite doing it well enough. Her cautious, scripted campaign suffers from front-runner disease, except she’s not the front-runner.
I still think she will pull it out. The gender gap is huge, and so is the potential turnout upside.
Most Democrats I speak with, way off the record, say that she is good enough, she will run a competent mainstream Democratic administration if elected, but there is little of the excitement of the sort when Obama was the nominee—despite the fact that she would be the first woman president and the first Black/Asian American president.
Harris has downplayed race, but that doesn’t mean race is not a factor. As some voters have admitted in focus groups, they “know people” who aren’t voting for Harris because she is Black, or female, or both.
A lot has been written about the apparent falloff in Black support for her, especially among Black men. Some of this has to reflect the fact that as opportunities have opened, it is increasingly Black women who have seized them and become the superstars. That has to grate. And here comes another of those overperforming Black women, campaigning for the ultimate superstar job.
The campaign, just three weeks before the election, responded with an Opportunity Agenda for Black Men. Harris’s plan includes providing forgivable business loans for Black entrepreneurs, creating more apprenticeships, and studying sickle cell and other diseases that disproportionately affect African American men, as well as more opportunoties in the legal cannibis industry. She also is calling for better regulating cryptocurrency to protect Black men and others who invest in digital assets. Are you underwhelmed?
This came after a high-profile speech by Barack Obama urging Black men to support Harris, in a tone that many criticized as counterproductive because it came across as scolding. In policy terms, the campaign tends to respond to perceived weaknesses with throw-everything-at-the-wall ad hoc proposals.
Granted, Harris is not making the same sort of errors that Hillary Clinton did—failing to campaign in key states, being cavalier with email, taking huge honoraria from Wall Street, making her campaign too much about gender.
Harris is making different errors.
I still think she will pull it out. The gender gap is huge, and so is the potential turnout upside. The superior Democratic ground game is real.
The challenge is that the good people doing all that prodigious door-knocking are more enthusiastic about electing Harris than many of the people they meet at the doors. The election depends on how many of them actually vote. Raising that enthusiasm level is on Harris.
