Kamala Loses Momentum

Has Kamala Harris’s campaign stalled? It is now less than a month before the election, and the energy and excitement that built up around the Democratic candidate after her assumption of the nomination have visibly dissipated. The vice-presidential debate this past week did not help.

Looking back, we can see that Harris took brilliant advantage of opportunities that came her way: Biden’s withdrawal, the Convention, the vice-presidential nomination, the debate with Trump. She has not, however, successfully taken the initiative in creating new opportunities, in generating news around herself.

Generating news, of course, is one of Donald Trump’s great skills. Whatever you think of him, he is a natural showman. His opponents may laugh at his bad taste (descending a golden escalator to announce his first campaign!). They may boil in anger at his lies, his exaggerations, and his absurd promises (deporting tens of millions of migrants, imposing economy-wrecking tariffs on imported goods). But the man knows how to generate headlines.

Harris, by contrast, has been playing a very careful game—too careful. She makes fewer appearances than Trump in the swing states and gives far fewer interviews. And she is hyper-cautious in her statements, out of fear that an overly strong statement could alienate a vital group of supporters or that a verbal flub could generate damning video. But as a result, apart from her Convention speech and the debate with Trump, she hardly said a single memorable thing in the past two months. She has tried to rely on “good vibes,” on a politics of feeling, to carry her over the finish line. It may not be enough.

To be sure, she is trapped, in a sense, by her quasi-incumbency. If she proposes a new initiative, Trump and Vance will immediately respond: Well, you and Joe Biden have been in office for nearly four years. Why haven’t you done this already? She is hesitant to tout economic news—even including the remarkably positive job numbers released on October 4—because polls continue to say that the economy is a losing issue for her. Since choosing a left-wing favorite as her running mate, in her search for the elusive swing voter she has diligently tacked back towards the center on immigration and the border, on foreign policy (especially Ukraine and Israel/Palestine), and on energy policy (especially fracking—and she hardly mentions climate change). She has gone so far as to campaign with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, and to express her gratitude towards Cheney’s father Dick, the former Republican Vice-President and mastermind whom Democrats still call the “prince of darkness.” These moves may have helped reassure some voters, but they have depressed enthusiasm in her own ranks. And they come uncomfortably close to making her look to some like Trump lite, following his cues on the issues.

As a result of this all, she has been forced, essentially, to run on a single campaign plank, a single justification for her election: She is not Donald Trump. She will not be incompetent, erratic, corrupt, and democracy-destroying (which is more than enough as far as I am concerned, but I’m not a Pennsylvania swing voter). As her principal campaign slogan has it: “We’re Not Going Back.” Being the non-Trump worked for Joe Biden four years ago, immediately after years of Trumpian chaos and the disaster of the pandemic. It did not work for Hillary Clinton eight years ago. And it may not work for Kamala Harris this time. For one thing, it means that Trump is driving the campaign agenda, with Harris mostly responding to what he says and does. Meanwhile, the very fact that the country is still standing suggests to many voters that Trump couldn’t have been as bad as the Democrats claim. And let us not forget that some of those voters are still going to hesitate before choosing to put their destinies in the hands of a black woman.

The vice-presidential debate this past week between Tim Walz and JD Vance might have provided an opportunity to reinvigorate the Democratic campaign—or at least to reinforce powerfully the anti-Trump message. Before the debate, commentators largely saw the choice of Vance as a disaster. He had come across as arrogant, smarmy and hypocritical, and badly damaged by his own offensive remarks about women. Tim Walz, by contrast, impressed talking heads with his reassuring, Midwest Dad persona, his very ordinariness compared to what he cuttingly labeled the “weird” Republicans. But in the debate, Vance the Yale-educated lawyer came across as smart, articulate, and calm, even reassuring. Yes, he could only reassure by lying through his teeth about his running mate’s positions, record, and character. But again and again, Walz stumbled, lost his train of thought, and failed to call out Vance’s fabrications. Only at the end did Walz score a palpable hit, directly asking Vance whether Trump had lost the 2020 election, and, when Vance tried to pivot to talk about “the future,” interrupting him with the line: “that is a damning non-answer.” 

Thanks to that final moment, the debate ended as only a narrow win for Vance, rather than a slam dunk. And as many commentators noted, vice-presidential debates matter very little in the end. In fact, vice-presidential candidacies matter very little. Quick: can you remember the name of Hillary Clinton’s running mate? Of John Kerry’s? Of Mitt Romney’s? (Tim Kaine, John Edwards, Paul Ryan). But the Democrats needed a clear, news-generating triumph, to swing some favorable coverage their way, and they didn’t get close to it.

Yet despite Harris’s loss of momentum, the race remains agonizingly close. Most polls show the candidates within two points of each other in all seven swing states. And there are still many large elements of uncertainty. Are some voters unwilling to admit to pollsters their intention to vote for Trump, as was the case in 2016? Will the Trump campaign’s failure to match the Democrats’ “get out the vote” efforts in either money or personnel depress his support? Will Trump’s increasingly unhinged rantings finally get so bad that they drive voters away from him and towards Harris in significant numbers? A victory for either side remains entirely possible.