Unless anti-Israel protesters cut through the noise at the Democratic convention, expect her polling momentum to continue.
Almost three weeks after emerging as the Democratic Party’s new presumptive presidential nominee, Kamala Harris decided that it was time to chat on the record with the press.
“Whatcha got?” the confident-looking veep joked as she approached reporters on the tarmac in Detroit on Thursday, August 8, taking off her sunglasses for dramatic effect. Then came an approximately one-minute-long gaggle with the press, during which she fielded a few softball questions before reassuring the American people that she has talked to her team and wants “to get an interview scheduled before the end of the month.”
As Harris nears next week’s Democratic convention, she is basking in the glow of friendly wall-to-wall media coverage, even as she continues to avoid lengthy press conferences and adversarial interviews.
Watching Harris rack up so many glowing headlines has caught GOP nominee Donald Trump “completely off guard,” former representative Donna Edwards (D., Md) told National Review in an interview. “The former president is accustomed to being able to dominate the news cycle himself,” she added of Trump, who has tried to compete with Harris on the earned-media front with a long (and meandering) press conference in Mar-a-Lago last week and a two-hour conversation last night with Elon Musk.
Like every presidential candidate, the goal for Harris is to define her candidacy on her own terms. “She’s done that very well on the campaign trail, to define who she is, why she’s running, and what her aspirations are — before those are defined by everyone else,” adds Edwards, the former Maryland congresswoman. “It’s actually been quite smart to do that at the beginning rather than sitting through a bunch of back-and-forth with reporters before she’s had a chance to launch herself to the American people as a presidential nominee.”
On the stump, the vice president’s “freedom”-focused campaign pitch means lengthy broadsides against her GOP opponent patched with vague promises to protect abortion rights, voting rights, entitlements, etc. “We are not going back!” she often tells her supporters from the podium.
No matter that her campaign proposals are light on the details. She is “bringing back the joy” in politics, her new running mate likes to say. Or, put more simply by gun-control activist David Hogg in an interview with Time magazine: “Elections come down to vibes, and Kamala has got the vibes right now.”
One of her first specific policy proposals came over the weekend, when she told a crowd that she vows to eliminate taxes on tips if she is elected president — an idea she cribbed from her GOP opponent (he first proposed it at a June rally in Las Vegas). Harris’s embrace of Trump’s tax-free-tip proposal earned her the “copycat” nickname from the Trump campaign and served as a reminder to the mainstream press that she has yet to unveil a campaign platform of her own.
Reuters reports that she will debut her economic-policy platform during a Friday speech in Raleigh, N.C., a few days before the convention kicks off in Chicago. “It’ll be focused on the economy and what we need to do to bring down costs and also strengthen the economy,” Harris said during her brief gaggle with reporters on the tarmac last week.
The GOP nominee and his advisers say Harris’s media-averse strategy suggests a campaign that is entirely insecure in her abilities. “You can tell a campaign has zero confidence in the candidate when they don’t allow her to make speeches off the cuff, they don’t allow her to do anything other than scripted, prewritten types of events,” Trump-campaign adviser Chris LaCivita said in a recent phone interview with National Review. “Joe Biden’s problem was he couldn’t walk, Kamala Harris’s problem is she can’t talk.”
The Harris campaign’s Bubble Wrap strategy has earned her plenty of criticism from conservative media and the GOP ticket. But for now, at least, it hasn’t cost her much politically. As I discussed on Friday’s episode of the Editors podcast, there are merits to running a disciplined, scripted, teleprompter-heavy campaign — if you can get away with it. The polls suggest that she can — she’s now polling evenly with or above Trump in many battleground-state surveys. And unless anti-Israel protesters cut through the noise in Chicago next week, expect polling momentum and the media sugar high to continue.