It's Alright to Admit Harris is Winning
With the debate behind us, Trump has few options left to shift the momentum
It would be difficult to make an electoral environment more friendly for the Republican party. With a world at war, an immigration crisis, and a sputtering economy, this should be an open and shut case for the GOP. If the Republican Party had nominated a candidate who wasn’t seventy-eight years old, extremely unpopular, and rambled about immigrants eating pets, I would likely be writing about whether Nikki Haley could carry Virginia. Fortunately the Republican Party, which at this point is the Party of Trump, has shown time and time again that they are not truly interested in winning at all costs. Demagoguery and extremism are both what makes this Party of Trump so formidable but also so beatable. With the endless stream of tweets and think pieces regarding her candidacy and campaign, I want to extend some credit to Harris and her team. It’s alright to admit it: Kamala Harris is running a great campaign.
Presidential campaigns are not an easy operation to run. The most valuable resource you have, the candidate, can only be at one place at a time. You have to localize advertisements and policies to specific areas of the country while also threading a vision for the nation that promises change, but not too much change. There’s a reason that most primary campaigns fail to even see Iowa. Kamala Harris has surprised me by how ready she was for this moment. Harris has, in record time, reorganized the Biden campaign into a targeted and efficient machine focused solely on winning. Instead of focusing on NATO enlargement and protecting American democracy, two issues the average Allentown voter does not think about, the Harris campaign has been surgical. The campaign has focused on the issues that Harris does well on, hedged the ones that she doesn’t, and ignored the rest.
Of course on Twitter nothing can ever be universally liked. According to many individuals who I otherwise respect the Harris campaign is filled with idiots who lucked their way into the upper echelon of Democratic politics. This is a narrative that I truly do not understand. Was Biden not the issue all along? Would Biden be beating Trump if he didn’t have the same staff that helped him win four years ago? According to this logic, Kamala would be polling lightyears ahead of Trump if she simply fired every operative in her campaign and replaced them with a mysterious cabal of highly-intelligent, cunning, and currently unemployed political masterminds. The Harris campaign, like almost every presidential campaign ever run, is filled with people who are exceptionally bright and have worked relentlessly to reach the point they’re at now.
I don’t want to suggest that just because these individuals are in important positions that they are infalliable to making mistakes or indeed being wholly unqualified for the job they have. That being said, it’s ridiculous to suddenly shift the blame for Biden’s flailing candidacy from the President onto his staff. Reporting has made it clear that much of Biden 2024 was centered around the advice and counsel of the “poo-bahs”, Biden’s decades-long advisors who were severely out of touch with the reality of our current political moment. I assure you that focusing on expanding AUCKUS was not a focus group tested messaging strategy, but the instincts of men who had been in DC for too long. Presidential campaigns are filled with potholes and slip-ups that are almost entirely unavoidable, and it’s incredibly easy to point these mistakes out and call for heads to roll.
Critics of Harris’s campaign want more specific policies and a detailed vision for the future of this country (maybe Elizabeth Warren’s policy write is free?). However, when the fundamentals of this race are so strongly tilted against Harris, it only makes sense to operate in a “vibes based operation” that focuses more on generalities and less on specificities. If Harris moderates on key issues she risks deflating the exuberant Democratic base, but if she moves to the left she will play into the framing of radicalism that Trump has attempted to smear her with. The least damaging pathway is to continue her current trajectory, promising tangible benefits and policies that most Americans support, while not giving the Trump campaign or the left more ammunition to attack her candidacy. This isn’t without risk, of course, and the possibility that voters passively support but lack the enthusiasm to show up and vote is always there. That being said, the other options at her disposal are perhaps even riskier and lack a clear payoff in November.
Many on the left have criticized Harris for her suprisingly strong rhetoric on the border. They argue that by “capitulating” to Trump on this issue, she loses valuable ground while also sacrificing electoral gains. Unfortunately, this just isn’t true. The country is generally conservative on immigration unless the President is locking children in cages, and the influx of immigrants into cities like New York and Boston has only exacerbated the idea that our country is being overrun. The reality of the situation is that voters find immigration to be a prescient issue, and moving left or not talking about it at all is an electoral deathwish. Harris is smart to ham up her experience in prosecuting trans-national gangs and bringing up how Trump killed the border bill earlier this year1. Just as Trump has moderated but not sacrificed his “beliefs” on abortion, Harris is doing the same for immigration.
Voters do not think nor do they care about how illegal immigration is the backbone of cheap produce and infrastructure. The average voters believe that immigrants are coming to “steal” their manufacturing job in Grand Rapids, not pick berries in Southern California for just a few dollars an hour. You cannot outmessage or persuade voters on this topic. Distrust of immigrants stretches back into fourteenth-century Europe, and as unfair and cruel as it may be, it won’t be changing anytime soon. I of course am not advocating for Harris to adopt the draconian and inhuamne mass deportation that Trump pushes for, but the Harris campaign has been right to alter the framing on immigration. If she is able to shave just five to ten percent on how voters view her on immigration while keeping her coalition intact, she will win this race.
The other issue drawing the ire of many online is Harris’s firm commitment to aiding and arming Israel. Unlike immigration, this is *probably* an issue that Harris could benefit from moving to the left on. I am perpetually confused why Biden and Harris have allowed Benjamin Netanyahu to become the spokesperson for all of Israel, even as his own country protests against his refusal to agree to a ceasefire. Respecting the right of Israel to defend itself against threats and supporting Netanyahu’s political house of cards are two fundamentally different things. Supporting an offensive arms embargo until a ceasefire is reached or Netanyahu resigns would be an effective way to remain strong on foreign policy while throwing a bone to a disaffected left that is in danger of not turning out in November.
Israel is a divisive issue and something I plan to write a full-length piece about in the future, but it’s clear that the current messaging coming from Harris is not effective. Even if voters en-masse don’t particularly care about foreign policy, young college aged voters most certainly do. These aren’t coastal leftists residing in New York or Seattle, these are students at the University of Michigan and Penn State who Harris can’t lose if she wants to win in two months. The GOP is already launching ads in places like Dearborn Michigan proclaiming Harris as a staunch defender of Israel and the genocide in Gaza. That should be the clearest possible sign that there is room to change course as it relates to this issue, and I hope on both a moral and electoral level that we see change on the issue. Is it a surefire plan? Of course not. College aged voters could just stay home, wanting Harris to go even further left on the issue while Trump paints her as weak and ineffective. Alas, you do have to take risks to win the Presidency.
Finally, the debate! The most pivotal moment in the entire campaign, and the last predictable opportunity for either candidate to shift the momentum of the race. I don’t think I’m saying anything particularly controversial when I say Harris wiped the floor with Trump. It might’ve been Trump’s worst showing on a debate stage save for his apocalyptic 2020 performance against Biden.2 As I have writen before, I was concerned that Trump would be able to brand Harris on his terms before she was able to get her campaign infrastructure fully up and running. There was ample opportunity to label Harris a flip-flopper who stood for no real issues and was a partner to the mayhem that the Biden administration caused at home and around the world. Instead of doing any of this, Trump focused on vile attacks against Haitian immigrants while looking and sounding seventy-eight-years-old.
Even though presidential debates typically don’t move the needle (although I believe they have more influence than most), this debate was different. Harris was a new candidate who most of the country didn’t have a firm opinion on. Sure, they might’ve passively liked her as a person and candidate but that is far from a guarantee of support on election day. This was the time for Trump to define her as too liberal for the country and too weak for a chaotic world. Conversely, it was also Harris’s opportunity to show that she was a strong leader who wanted to push the country out of the Trump era and into a better brand of politics. Harris, with the benefit of some fortunate ordering of topics, did this. Her political brand is far more defined today than it was last week, and she is the better for it. If Trump had dug himself a hole out of dirt before, he’s now dug it with cement. I struggle to see how he can rebound from this, bar a geopolitical meltdown that makes voters rush to whoever they see as the strongest leader.
Harris could lose in November, some would argue it’s even slightly likely that she does. That doesn’t take away that the process this campaign has undergone and continues to undergo is one of solid political reasoning and is almost certainly the best chance this party has to winning. The failures of Hillary in 2016 and Biden’s zombie campaign in 2024 rightfully instill a sense of distrust in individuals who want to see the Democratic party win. There will always be those who think they and they alone have the path to victory, and if Harris loses I’m sure they will reap the attention they get. The fact remains, however, that this is a campaign operating on all cylinders under a time crunch that hasn’t been seen in American presidential politics in over fifty years.
Even if this line of messaging is a bit convoluted
Biden also didn’t perform very strongly in any debate in 2020, whereas I think Harris was effective even without Trump’s implosion.