A crash is coming.
A crash is coming.
W e find ourselves deep into the irrational-exuberance phase of Kamala Harris’s surprise ascension to her role as presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. All of five full days have elapsed since Joe Biden was dragged unwillingly to the conclusion most Americans came to well over a year ago. Already, Harris’s political star is said by her allies to have eclipsed even Barack Obama’s.
“I covered the Clinton campaign, the Women’s March, the anti-Trump resistance, the wave of women in the 2018 midterms,” TIME Magazine correspondent Charlotte Alter asserted, “and the momentum for Harris over the last five days is basically like all of that rolled together.” MSNBC’s Cornell Belcher agreed. Not only has Democratic fundraising exploded since Biden withdrew from the race, but the “organic” outpouring of online enthusiasm is like nothing he has seen since 2008. “This could be bigger than ’08,” former RNC chairman Michael Steel replied. He later added that Harris’s performance over the last 120 hours suggests that the era of the prolonged campaign is over. “We can do this in a very short timeframe,” he insisted. “Because Kamala Harris is doing it.”
Democrats have not been energized by their party’s leader in a long time — that is no secret. The reprieve from psychological torment has provided Democratic partisans with a boost of enthusiasm, but that passion has clouded their judgment. At best, Democrats have transformed what was shaping up to be an epochal disaster for their party into a competitive race that nonetheless still favors Donald Trump.
It will take several more weeks for voters to fully digest the series of historic events that occurred in quick succession over the summer of 2024. The polling landscape is going to be unsettled for a while, and it’s unwise to put much stock in surveys before Democrats reintroduce Harris and debut her vice-presidential nominee at their party’s nominating convention. But it’s just as foolish to ignore the data we do have.
For example, we can deduce from the polling that every American voter is aware that the president will not be on the ballot in November. We also know that, based on her job-approval rating, most Americans have a fully formed opinion of Harris, and a plurality of those Americans don’t view her positively (indeed, she’s viewed less favorably than Trump since his brush with death). And with these two conditions established in voters’ minds, the race is still a dead heat. Substituting Harris for Biden has helped Democrats claw back to the position they occupied before the first presidential debate — both at the national and swing-state levels. But Democrats were losing the race for the White House even before the debate. Based only on the data we have so far, they still are. The acknowledgment by some on the left that Harris will have to “reintroduce” herself to voters is a tacit admission that the impression she’s already made is uninspiring.
Ah, but there is a long campaign ahead of us, and Harris has the opportunity to reintroduce herself to voters with the goal of erasing the negative impression so many Americans have of her. Whether the 104 days between now and Election Day is a “long” time depends on whom you ask, but, even if we grant the stipulation, Harris has shown no inclination to reinvent herself at all so far. Indeed, she has hewn closely to both Biden’s policies and his rhetoric.
Harris has continued to promulgate the notion that “democracy is on the ballot” in November — a message that resonates primarily with degree-holding Democrats who were already in the party’s camp. She has promoted herself as a skilled prosecutor who will finally litigate the case against “the felon” at the top of the GOP ticket. But fewer than half of American adults polled by AP-NORC in June said they “strongly or somewhat” approved of Trump’s conviction in the Alvin Bragg case, and the stronger cases against Trump are now in a state of limbo following the Supreme Court’s decision on the scope of presidential immunity. Going down that rabbit hole energizes Democrats, but it doesn’t seem to sway many persuadable voters. And if Harris’s press conference following her meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu is any indication, she intends to carry Biden’s foreign policy forward, too. In Israel’s case, that involves hectoring Jerusalem over its imagined human-rights abuses and berating it into accepting the terms of a cease-fire agreement that does not exist and by which Hamas would not abide.
If the Democratic theory of the case is that Joe Biden’s presidency would have been successful and beloved but for his decrepitude, this strategy makes sense. But voters soured on Biden not just because he was old but because his policies were broadly resented. Pledging to preserve conditions voters dislike is no path to victory.
Democratic ebullience has also obscured the fact that Republicans will get their bite at this apple soon enough, and Harris’s record is rich with targets. What will Harris’s rejoinder be when Republicans confront her with a lavishly funded campaign of attack ads featuring her repeatedly insisting that “an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal”? How will she neutralize the glaring liability she saddled herself with when she insisted that we must retire the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism”? Can she articulate a conversion narrative that explains why she once sidled up alongside “defund the police” activists? Can she defuse her association with those who sought to “reimagine how we are creating safety” in ways that don’t involve police because it’s “wrong” to suggest “you get more safety by putting more cops on the street”?
To assume that Harris can deftly maneuver her way out of these traps she’s set for herself is to put one’s faith in the unseen. The vice president spent years crafting a reputation as a far-left progressive with policy preferences that are not shared by the median American voter — a political problem that is mitigated only by how maladroitly she pursued her policy preferences.
Before the debate, political observers across the political spectrum knew that Harris was a bad campaigner with immoderate political tastes. She still is. All that has changed in the interim is that unenviable circumstances have forced Democrats to rationalize themselves into being excited about her candidacy, inflating her stock well beyond its natural value. A crash is coming.