The Kamala Surge and "Smart Trump"
Fifteen thoughts on where we stand and where this goes
Note: State of the Race is my attempt to categorize my electoral analysis in an easy to digest way.
I think Kamala Harris is going to become the next President of the United States. Every poll released that I think will show Harris’s momentum slowing shows the opposite. Every chance the Trump campaign gets at re-establishing itself as the clear frontrunner ends with Trump explaining how multiracial people aren’t real. My thoughts on this are a bit staccato, so I’ll be going over them in bullet form with varying lengths. Here we go:
How was the Trump campaign so unprepared for this? For weeks they goaded the press about how, if God forbid Biden dropped out, they would be ready. The “border czar” attacks lasted about ten minutes before Trump pivoted to saying Harris isn’t black (?). Trump may course correct for a bit, but it’s clear he thinks he has an Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” style attack here.
Trump’s campaign drastically missed a key opportunity to define Harris before her campaign got started. In 2012, the Obama campaign nailed Romney as an out-of-touch elitist before Romney could adequately defend himself. Trump missed what may have been his last opportunity to substantively change the race on his terms.
I don’t believe that Harris is riding a particularly strong wave of enthusiasm that Trump doesn’t also benefit from. In the latest NYT/Sienna polls, Trump registered his highest approval since they tracked his favorability. That is way more likely to drop than Harris performing at the level of any competent Democratic candidate.
Harris’s numbers are a bit of a statistical lasagna. The first layer of her surge is due to the fact that she rebuilt the Democratic coalition that had no interest in Joe Biden. The second layer is that she’s meaningfully improved across the Midwest and the Southeast in ways that go beyond this coalition building. There’s a lot more to Harris as a candidate than “she just isn’t Biden or Trump,” but for a ton of voters, the decision really is that simple.
Her favorable numbers are ridiculous. The fact that her favorables are above fifty percent is probably the most astonishing part of this entire campaign. I don’t expect that will last for the entire election, but the rate at which that number goes down will be much less than if she had been the presumptive candidate since May.
Kamala is a good politician and a good candidate! Her rallies have been looking like 2016 Bernie/2008 Obama events. She’s a good public speaker, and her campaign has nailed the messaging of this election in a way that the Biden campaign refused to. The right-wing media trying to give her a Hillary-esque public demeanor are incredibly misguided (and sexist, but that’s a given). Hillary was a once-in-a-generation bad candidate who still probably would’ve won had Comey not reopened the investigation. Bottom line: People like Kamala because she’s Kamala, and because she also isn’t Trump.
Harris should pick Shapiro. He will help in Pennsylvania in a way that no other Democrat could. Whatever you may think of Shapiro as a person, it feels like a mistake to undercount just how powerful he would be on the ticket.
Re: VP. Picking Walz wouldn’t be a bad decision, but it wouldn’t dramatically help the campaign in a way that Shapiro would. Additionally, and this probably doesn’t truly matter, I know that Walz is only sixty, but the truth is that he looks about Biden’s age. If I were Harris, I would want to fully lean into the youth aspect of my campaign, and Walz doesn’t help that.
There’s a lot more to happen in this election, but forecasting events as unilaterally going against Harris is ignoring the history of the last two election cycles. Trump is a bad news cycle machine. He cannot help making a comment about how Kamala is actually white, or how he wants to become king. Is it possible Harris burns out? Yes. Is it way more likely that Trump can’t find a narrative that hurts Kamala and results to constant racist tirades and apocalyptic messaging? Yes.
The Harris campaign has been so much more effective at messaging that it should forever discredit the Biden poo-bahs. For months the Biden campaign tried to get the country to care about January 6th, an event that is much more historically significant than culturally. Harris has recalibrated the campaign and attacked Trump on issues that he has avoided for far too long.
Speaking of these issues, abortion! Biden didn’t like talking about abortion because he quite obviously doesn’t support the idea of abortions. Even when Biden was running, he left abortion to Harris. In my opinion, there’s a lot of electoral meat left on the bone here, and Harris is going to have ample time to bring abortion back into the political discourse.
Voters are tired of incumbents across the world. I would argue that this dynamic hurts Trump much more than Kamala. While the Harris campaign is focused on the idea of “forward, not backward,” the Trump campaign has boiled down to “you remember when that guy we all hated was running?” If voters in the U.S. want the same change that populations across the world are demanding, that benefits the person who hasn’t already been President (and who a majority of the country hates).
The opportunities Trump has to regain or steal momentum from Harris are extremely small. If he agrees to a debate (big if) he will lose, just like he’s lost every debate he’s participated in that included an opponent who could speak coherently. Like I mentioned previously, Trump is going to continue saying things that remind the public why they hate him. Harris isn’t.
Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles have gotten a lot of good press for running a campaign that has shown to be built off a house of cards. The entire Trump campaign was built off running against Joe Biden, and they’ve failed to adapt to Harris even weeks after her presumptive nomination. The strategy of turning out low-propensity male voters is fine if you’re already running ten points ahead in Michigan. Now, however, they have to actually compete for swing voters while having a VP pick who has a sexist soundbite pop up every day.
Re: Trump. The Vance pick truly may be the rare (even only) Vice Presidential candidate who drags the top of the ticket. Trump’s ability to moderate on reproductive rights is significantly encumbered when Vance has a million soundbites about how he wants to jail childless women. Similarly to point thirteen, Vance is a fine VP pick when you already have this election in the bag. They don’t now, and Vance is a political albatross on this entire campaign.