The Candidate Has Changed, but the Phantom Campaign Remains

S top me if you’ve heard this one before: A presumptive Democratic nominee for president is nowhere to be found on the campaign trail. A welter of online delirium surrounds the candidate, who is proclaimed inevitable, possessed of superhuman (yet relatable) perfection. But there is a feeling of forced enthusiasm about it all, for the candidate seems to be curiously absent — a missing center. The candidate is seen only in official images or written about in the third person, and the appeal is explained in achingly clumsy online memes; every now and then a clip surfaces of excerpts from a prepared speech. But the candidate is never addressed directly. You might say that this candidate was being quite intentionally shielded from the media and thus the public by a campaign with something to hide. Does any of this sound familiar?

You know I’m talking about Joe Biden, because we all just lived through it and not a single one of us has fully processed the longer-term implications of that mess. (I remind you: Joe Biden is still president of the United States, yet this is absurd.) But are you aware that I’m also talking about Kamala Harris? The candidate name at the top may have changed, but in a supreme stroke of irony, the playbook for the Democratic Party in 2024 remains the same: Keep Kamala away from loose microphones, press gaggles, adversarial interviews, and interactions with voters — as far from the unblinking gaze of any independent camera as possible. Sell the myth, not the actual candidate herself, because that’s all you really have — and the reality has distinctly limited commercial appeal.

So have you seen Kamala Harris in public recently? This woman became the Democratic presidential nominee eight days ago and since then has promptly vanished into the same protective bunker where they store whatever spare organs Joe Biden needs to hot-swap in and out to get through the next day. An adviser to the VP tells America she is “closely monitoring” developments in the Middle East, as if she is being allowed to cosplay the presidency.

But otherwise, Kamala Harris is a mere rumor to the world outside of a few well-manicured public events — she is appearing at a rally tonight in Atlanta with rapper Megan Thee Stallion, to give you some sense of the tone of engagement. Apparently she did a rally in suburban Philadelphia yesterday, but the only allowed media takeaway was the speech she read off a teleprompter; her campaign team actually strong-armed the press away from interviewing any rallygoers for fear that a tonally unfortunate quote from a Real American (as opposed to the carefully contrived online orchestra of hype) might set their lovely new Cinderella story askew.

Which is just as well, given that her first national campaign ad has seemingly been created for a candidate whose past is dust. There is no policy argument contained in it at all. Instead the appeal is biographical: Kamala the “prosecutor for 20+ years,” Kamala the “fearless.” As an introduction to a candidate it might work as a sub-par convention reel. (This is not cheap snark. The ad reveals that Harris has a problem with her public-speaking voice, which will soon become the subject of memes: She tends to warble like a tipsy finch whenever she strains for an emotional note.)

The problem, of course, is that Kamala Harris has been vice president of the United States for three and a half years already. We are being told to forget all that. Except for “fighting drug companies,” it never happened. She never accumulated any history prior to the moment she was magically parachuted into a nomination nobody wanted to give her. It is not an accident; it is entirely in keeping with a campaign that, just yesterday, casually announced to the New York Times via “unnamed campaign sources” that all those hatefully insane and unpopular positions Harris took during the 2019–20 primary campaign — defund the police, pass the Green New Deal, ban fracking, ban red meat, get rid of private health insurance, etc. — were no longer operative. “That candidate never existed in the past,” we are urged to accept. “She only exists now, fresh and unburdened by what has been.” It’s a pretty big ask.

And it just might work.

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Let me pause this narrative for a moment to level with you. Speaking strictly as a handicapper, I’d say the polls indicate that the race has now reset to where it was before Biden’s self-immolating debate appearance: Trump holds a steady but narrow Electoral College advantage. Opportunities that sprang up after Biden’s numbers cratered postdebate — Virginia, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and New Mexico — are now off the table for the Republican, along with a number of Democratic Senate seats in states Trump otherwise might win.

The gap for Democratic victory is narrow — narrower than Democrats want to acknowledge, given that unless either Arizona or Georgia remains blue, they can only win by fully running the table of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. But, given the way voting patterns in states are regionally correlated, the task is not insurmountable. The next Democratic play will be to maximize suburban female and educated white turnout in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Ann Arbor by pounding furiously on every culture-war button imaginable to reach these specific, pre-activated demographics. (Witness “White Dudes for Harris” and “Karens for Kamala” — and understand that, as loathsome as these awkwardly racialist and sexist appeals are to conservatives, they succeed in reaching a key voter bloc in the blue coalition.)

Activating the base is not going to be enough, however — the polls make that beyond clear. For swing voters otherwise unmoved by abortion or culture-war appeals, the Democratic argument was always intended to be a repeat of 2022: Donald Trump is a chaos agent, a “threat to democracy.” And there was a good reason for this focus: The majority of Americans continue to be appalled by January 6 and instinctively want nothing to do with the forces behind it. But then, earlier this month, Trump nearly got his head blown off by an assassin in an act that — fairly or not — rendered the persuasive force of that argument null and void for all but those who have already made up their minds. (I can tell you that people in the Trump campaign’s orbit are eagerly hoping the media or the Harris campaign will make the mistake of pursuing this line. They very much hope to be tossed into that briar patch.)

* * *

So what does this leave us with? A 100-day campaign where many anticipated lines of attack on both sides have been hopelessly scrambled. The Democrats shucked off the dead skin suit of Joe Biden only to find themselves wearing Kamala Harris awkwardly around their shoulders, so they have found themselves stuck in the same strategy they were using with Biden: the “prevent defense.” All sports fans are familiar with the concept: Prevent errors, prevent breakouts, keep the ball away from the opposing team, run out the clock. John Madden would have been the first to tell you that the only thing the prevent defense prevents is your winning. But in any case it’s a strategy that only works when you already hold a lead; it’s utterly perverse in a situation where you’re behind. And yet the Harris campaign must default to it in the hope that media-assisted smoke and mirrors can sneak them across the finish line.

And Donald Trump? Well, Donald Trump is in Chicago today of all places, joining what promises to be an extremely interesting Q and A at the yearly convention of the National Association of Black Journalists. (Karen Attiah just resigned her position as NABJ co-chair over this, which alone makes the appearance worth it.) He’s not delivering a set-piece speech — as if the endlessly extemporizing Trump was capable of one of those anyway — he’s sitting down to get grilled by a vehemently skeptical audience, with genuine stakes. (Trump fans should pray that if he makes news today it’s only for giving away the store politically, as opposed to accidentally alienating an entire voter demographic.)

Whatever else I can say about the Trump-Vance ticket, they are actually working for it. Trump is out there mixing it up with the people least likely to cut him a break. J. D. Vance is perfectly happy to shrug off a torrent of online defamation and deliver a minute’s worth of uninterrupted campaigning to any audience willing to listen, including the hostile ones. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, is kept hidden in a sheltered carriage while her myrmidons fan her and praise her on the streets. The new hope of the Democrats, the (relatively) youthful star intended to rejuvenate an aged party and sell their agenda for the future, the weight of Biden shrugged off — she hides from view, known only through a phantom campaign.