Kamala Harris May Yet Regret Sitting on Her Lead

Since Kamala Harris was awarded the Democratic presidential nomination less than a month ago, her campaign has ridden a wave of relief and “vibes” to an increasingly strong position in the polls, pulling her into a lead in the national poll average, leads in Wisconsin and Michigan and perhaps Pennsylvania (which would give her the presidency), and a newly competitive position in Georgia, Arizona, and perhaps even North Carolina.

She has responded with what amounts to a strategy of trying to run out the clock: no interviews or press conferences or other unscripted remarks from the candidate, no platform (until Friday’s rollout of her first economic ideas), no “issues” section on her website, unexplained disavowals through staff statements of her prior positions, only vague slogans to make the case against her opponent, and caginess about agreeing to debates.

This is how you run when you think you’re safely ahead and just want to avoid mistakes and kill the time in which your opponent can get back off the canvas. There are three possible reasons why Harris is running this way:

1. Harris genuinely believes that she’s got this thing in the bag and doesn’t need to do anything but run TV ads;
2. Harris thinks that Trump is already well-defined with the public and that relying on sympathetic press coverage and ads is enough to overcome any efforts by Trump to define her; and/or
3.  Harris is so terrified of making mistakes that it is freezing her from doing unscripted things or making decisions.

These are not mutually exclusive explanations. While it’s almost certainly true that Trump’s image is set in stone with voters, Democratic overconfidence and reliance on protection by the press have been recurring themes since 2009. Harris is also notorious for over-worrying and under-preparing. She avoided even remotely challenging interviews for years after a poorly received appearance with Lester Holt in June 2021 about why she hadn’t visited the border. She convened a crisis team later that summer to deal with bad press and leaks. She cultivates a reputation as someone who pores over briefing books, but leaks from staffers suggest the opposite: a boss who “would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared.” Yet, she gets obsessively insecure over trivial setbacks in her press coverage such as Vogue selecting a photo she didn’t like, and she “fixated on real and perceived snubs in ways the West Wing found tedious.” As Alex Thompson of Axios reported, this sort of mind-set induces paralysis:

Between the lines: Harris has been cautious and reluctant to participate in events that weren’t tightly controlled, Harris and Biden aides said.

• In 2022, the White House internally pushed Harris to be the headliner for D.C.’s traditional Gridiron Dinner, but she resisted. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo did it instead.
• Harris . . . at times has focused on critical coverage of her in ways aides have found unhelpful — like when she has watched Fox News’ “The Five.”

In April 2022, Harris was the guest for a dinner at D.C. news mogul David Bradley’s home — a salon-style event Bradley hosts with Washington journalists and newsmakers.

• Harris’ anxiety about the dinner was such that her staff held a mock dinner beforehand, with staffers playing participants, according to two people familiar with the event.

• Harris aides even considered including wine in the mock prep so Harris could practice with a glass or two.

• They ultimately decided against it.

A 2022 column by Christina Cuaterucci at Slate, arguing for Biden to replace Harris, captures how even many Democrats felt about Harris until they were compelled to talk her up by her ascension to the top of the ticket:

Her dazzling presence in planned speeches and gotcha moments flickered out when she was forced to think—and relay a coherent policy position—on her feet. It was a spectacular letdown that contained a lesson about electoral politics: candidates who looks promising on paper can easily flounder under pressure. . . . Harris, a proven dud of a presidential candidate who has done little to distinguish herself since, is not a good choice for the Democrats’ top billing. . . . It’s not just that Harris was a bad presidential candidate. She was a bad vice-presidential one, too. I will never forget how clumsily she struggled to respond to what should have been an easy, predictable question. . . . This is the response of a candidate who, when pressed to the point of discomfort on matters of policy, instinctively pivots to her biography.

Earlier this year, progressive journalists Hunter Walker and Luppe B. Luppen published a book quoting an aide to the 2020 Harris campaign: “A lot of us, at least folks that I was friends with on the campaign, all realised that: ‘Yeah, this person should not be president of the United States.” The book’s sources “refused to characterise the experience of working for Harris, apart from offering a three-word assessment. It was, they said: ‘Game of Thrones’.”

In short: Maybe this whole strategy will work, and maybe it’s forced on the Harris campaign by the insecurity and weaknesses of its candidate. But if Harris loses, Democrats could look back on her campaign not as a triumphal march but as the biggest 100-day flameout since Waterloo. And if they do, they may very well regret wasting the rollout/honeymoon period by never having Harris talk to the press or take questions from voters — much in the way that Ron DeSantis’s primary campaign waited far too long to have him do the big media stages outside the bubble of his friendliest outlets.

Sooner or later, Harris will have to get on the debate stage — and a candidate who is nervous about doing so is better off shaking off the rust before she is standing toe-to-toe with an opponent who (while he is hardly Daniel Webster) is a master of getting under people’s skin.

A lot can still go wrong. The Harris campaign is on uncharted ground. Eight other sitting vice presidents have run for the presidency, but five of those were running to succeed two-term presidencies: John Adams in 1796, Martin Van Buren in 1836, Richard Nixon in 1960, George H. W. Bush in 1988, and Al Gore in 2000 (three of them won, Nixon and Gore each lost by a hair). A sixth, Thomas Jefferson in 1800, ran as the leader of the opposition in the pre-Twelfth Amendment system. That leaves only two role models: John Breckenridge succeeding James Buchanan in 1860 and Hubert Humphrey stepping in for Lyndon Johnson in 1968. And while Breckenridge was in a totally different situation (with the Democrats running two separate, warring tickets and Breckenridge not on speaking terms with Buchanan), Humphrey’s inability to get out of LBJ’s shadow stands as a warning.

The convention is the first of those hurdles, as it highlights how difficult it will be to get distance between Harris and Biden. Even if the anti-Israel protests remain a non-event (as they’ve been so far today), the hazard of the anti-Israel wing to Democratic unity and to avoiding association with violent street theater won’t go away. Staying on the script may not be as easy as it has been so far.