Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event in Washington Crossing, Pa. on Oct. 16.Matt Slocum/The Associated Press
Kamala Harris is a money magnet. She has raised more cash – a cool US$1-billion and counting – since becoming the Democratic nominee in July than any previous presidential candidate over a similar time span. She is racking up campaign donations at twice the pace of her Republican rival, Donald Trump, and flooding swing-state airwaves with far more ads.
Since replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, Ms. Harris has received largely uncritical coverage from most of the mainstream U.S. media, which have also focused relentlessly on Mr. Trump’s lies, gaffes, insults and mental instability.
The boosterism passing for journalism from which Ms. Harris benefited during the summer catapulted her into the stratosphere of sudden media stardom. She became the newest “It” politician, even though she had spent more than three years as Mr. Biden’s mostly unseen and unloved Vice-President, with the worst net VP approval rating on record.
Yet, with all these variables lined up in her favour, Ms. Harris’s candidacy is treading water. Her postnomination bump in popularity has evaporated and her tiny-to-non-existent lead over Mr. Trump in most national polls leaves her far behind where Mr. Biden stood at this point in the 2020 campaign, and several points below where Hillary Clinton ranked in 2016.
In the three “blue wall” states most critical to a Harris victory – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – she is locked in a statistical tie with Mr. Trump. He is leading in most polls in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. Her path to victory is getting narrower by the day.
An NBC News poll released this week – which had the candidates tied at 48 per cent among registered voters – pegged Ms. Harris’s net favourability at minus-three percentage points, a six-point drop from September. Only 43 per cent of voters now have a positive view of her; the same proportion sees Mr. Trump in a positive light. But his rating is on an upswing.
Some now-worried Democrats have ditched the “politics of joy” shtick and begun calling openly for a Harris campaign reset. “I’m not feeling my best right now about where we are on Kamala Harris in a place like Michigan,” Democratic senatorial candidate Elissa Slotkin reportedly told a fundraiser this week. “We have her underwater in our polling.”
Most worrisome, Ms. Harris is trailing Mr. Biden among Black and Hispanic voters over all, and she is losing too many Black and Hispanic men to Mr. Trump. On the campaign trail this week, former president Barack Obama acknowledged that hesitation toward Ms. Harris is “more pronounced with the brothers.” And he accused Black men of coming up with excuses not to vote for her because they were “just not feeling the idea of having a woman as president.”
There may be some truth to that. But Ms. Harris’s candidacy is mostly struggling not because of any misogynistic backlash against her, but because she has failed to articulate a compelling case for why people should vote for her. Not being Mr. Trump is not enough.
She has been variously evasive, scripted and leaden in interviews. She looked like a deer in headlights when asked by a sympathetic host on The View what she would do differently as president than Mr. Biden. Her answer: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”
That was a terrible answer by any measure. But it was especially damaging considering that, for all of Mr. Trump’s obvious failings, far more Americans still say they were better off when he was in the White House than under Mr. Biden.
Alas, Ms. Harris’s campaign gurus appear to have finally woken up to the fact that their cautious strategy of keeping their candidate in a straitjacket is not working. A newly combative and, one senses, more natural Kamala Harris emerged on the trail this week. And oddly, it was thanks to Fox News.
In a heated exchange with Fox host Bret Baier, Ms. Harris finally breathed fire. Sure, she also served up a few of her ritual word salads. But she cut to the chase in depicting Mr. Trump as a thin-skinned wannabe autocrat who, by his own admission, would unleash the U.S. military on opponents he labels as “the enemy from within.”
“This is a democracy. And in a democracy, the president of the United States … should be willing [and] able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it. And this is what is at stake,” Ms. Harris told Mr. Baier.
Most Americans still don’t know what to make of Ms. Harris, and it is not their fault. If she loses this election, it will be because she made the early mistake of thinking she could coast to victory on the mainstream media’s fluffy infatuation with her history-making candidacy, instead of winning the trust of American voters the hard way.