Where Things Stand Now: Harris Takes on Trump

The joy-filled Democratic National Convention, Kamala Harris’s infectious smile, her superb acceptance speech—and Donald Trump’s crassness—have boosted the Democratic nominee in the polls everywhere, but it’s still too early to tell who’s going to win the presidential election.

Her August 29 interview on CNN probably didn’t have much effect, so the September 10 Trump-Harris debate—if it happens—could push one candidate or another into a decisive lead.

Harris wants debate microphones to remain open to catch what she expects will be rude interruptions by an undisciplined Trump. He wants the other’s muted when each candidate is speaking. The dispute has been creating uncertainty whether the debate will come off.

Regardless, Harris’s main task in the time remaining before the Nov. 5 election is to convince voters that she’s not the “San Francisco liberal” she was when she ran for president in 2020. Trump is labeling her a “radical leftist” or “communist.” He finally hit on his nickname for her: “Comrade Kamala.”

In the CNN interview, Dana Bash asked her to explain why she no longer thinks that illegal immigration should be de-criminalized and no longer opposes fracking for oil or supports the expensive Green New Deal. She was not asked about Medicare for All or her call to end private health insurance.

Her answer was that her “values haven’t changed” on climate change and that the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act calls for huge investments in clean energy programs that already have created 300,000 clean energy jobs.

(She might have added that the U.S. is producing record supplies of oil and natural gas and that Trump labels climate change a “hoax” despite all evidence to the contrary—constantly rising temperatures and mounting costs caused by floods, heat waves, winter storms, hurricanes, droughts and wildfires—and shut down federal climate science studies.)

On immigation, she said that as California Attorney General, she prosecuted criminals who traffic in guns, drugs and human beings. Without acknowledging record influxes of migrants under Biden, she blamed Trump for torpedoing a tough bipartisan border plan because he did not want the current administration to get credit for it.

Ever since Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy and endorsed Harris, Trump’s polling has weakened. The Democratic convention bounced her into a national lead that varies depending on who’s doing the averaging. Real Clear Politics has it at 1.8 percent; the Washington Post, two percent, the New York Times, 3 percent, and the website 538, 3.4 percent.

What counts, of course, is what happens in seven key swing states. Harris has been making progress in all of them, but all remain within the margin of error and in all but one she is still polling marginally behind Biden’s 2020 performance.

A deep-dive polling analysis by Politico shows that Harris has registered gains across a wide range of demographic categories, but the improvement has been especially pronounced among young voters, non-white voters and women voters.

She’s gained 9 points among independents, 12 among Blacks, six among Hispanics, 17 among young voters and seven among women.

Besides energizing Democrats and improving her status with various demographic groups, Harris has benefitted from evident confusion and some gross faux pas by Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance.

Trump outraged attendees at a national Black journalists’ convention by claiming that Harris had changed her identity from Indian to Black (she’s both). He’s also repeatedly gone off GOP messaging on the Southern border, inflation and crime, hurling insults and expressing resentment at being charged with multiple felonies.

He also declared the civilian Medal of Freedom Award that he just gave to a GOP super-donor to be superior to the Congressional Medal of Honor awarded to military heroes whose sacrifices he disparaged.

He made matters worse by trying to lay a wreath at the grave at Arlington National Cemetery and having a picture of it used in a campaign post. He was criticized by the Army for violating rules against exploiting Arlington for political purposes.

And he recently stooped to using vile sexual language to disparage Harris.

Meantime, Vance has drawn allegations of misogyny for for disparaging childless “cat ladies” and saying that people without children should pay higher taxes and have reduced voting privileges.

But Harris and Democrats still have serious work to do in the next ten weeks. In nearly every swing state, Harris is running behind where Biden was in 2020, when he beat Trump by just 44,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin. This election figures to be just as close.

Harris needs to give more interviews, press conferences and town halls to show she doesn’t need a TelePrompter to make her case. That’d also aid her debate preparation.

Trump can be expected to run a vicious campaign of lies and disortions against Harris. He just won an endorsement from anti-vaccine conspiracy-monger Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been polling well enough in swing states—between 1 and 3 percent in most—that he could spell the difference in November.

Who’d benefit is still uncertain, but it figures that Kennedy has lost most of his Democratic support and would take more votes away from Trump than Harris. If so, joining forces would help Trump.

Harris has improved her favorable-unfavoravble ratings from -15 on July 21 to +2 now. Trump has gone from -12 to -10. He deserves his low ratings, but she’s got to improve hers.

A major problem is that Trump retains a 9 percent lead on handling the economy and inflation, according to an ABC News-Washington Post poll, the issues most voters think are most important. He’s 10 points ahead on handling immigration, three percent on crime and five percent on the Israeli-Hamas war. She leads on abortion by 12, protecting democracy by 6, gun violence by 5 and health care by 7.

And then there’s the problem of GOP efforts to suppress Democratic votes with onerous voter ID requirements and cutbacks in polling places and hours.

If Harris is declared the winner, Trump will surely claim fraud and try to reverse the result, legally or otherwise. One tactic is for GOP state and county election officials to delay or refuse to certify election results when Trump loses, possibly affecting the Electoral College.

All that said, Harris accomplished about everything she could have at the convention.

She introduced herself to the country as the product of a hard-working, “you can do anything,” middle-class, single-parent Indian household. She presented herself as having made a career of public service as a prosecutor of cheats, predators and criminals, then as U.S. Senator and Vice President.

She and other convention speakers vividly and also implicitly contrasted her with Trump.

Trump was born to wealth and privilege. He spent a career making money in the dicey world of New York real estate, cheating sub-contractors along the way. She identified herself with her opening lines in courtrooms—“Kamala Harris, for the people.”

On the other hand, he is a pathological narcissist who works only for himself. She’s a prosecutor. He’s a convicted felon still facing multiple indictments, a sexual predator and promoter of scams.

One of Harris’s best lines since Biden’s departure is that, as a prosecutor and California Attorney General, “I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”

That was a laugh line. But in her acceptance speech Thursday night, she was serious about the menace Trump presents:

Consider what he intends to do if we give him power again: his explicit intent to set free the violent extremists who assaulted those law enforcement officers at the Capitol.

His explicit intent to jail journalists. Political opponents. Anyone he sees as the enemy.

His explicit intent to deploy our active-duty military against our own citizens.

Consider the power he will have— especially after the United States Supreme Court just ruled he would be immune from criminal prosecution.    

Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.

“Not going back” was a major chant by convention delegates, referring implicitly to the eras embodied in Trump’s slogan “Make America Great AGAIN”—again referring to the 1950s when women were excluded from power and white men were totally in charge, Black Americans knew their place, students were docile, and immigration was not changing U.S. demography.

One important demonstration of Harris’s move forward was the convention’s identification of gentlemen like Vice President designee Tim Walz and Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff—one a beloved high school football coach and avid hunter and the other a successful lawyer, both clearly respectful and in love with their wives.

Trump seems to regard his wife as part-time arm candy, not a full partner, and has boasted that, as a celebrity, he can molest women at will. His idea of manly men are brutish: ex-pro wrestler “Hulk Hogan” and Ultimate Fighting Machine CEO Dana White, captured on tape slapping his wife in Mexico in 2022.

Trump’s respect for “strong men” applies to authoritarian foreign leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Trump claims that he has nothing to do with Project 2025, the 900-plus page suggested program for his second term. But elements of it are echo his state goals: the largest deportation program ever of illegal immigrants, use of the Justice Department to prosecute political enemies and presidential domination of every executive and independent agency by filling them with pre-vetted personal loyalists of Trump

Two of the most effective convention floor speeches were delivered by Republicans who have broken with Trump and endorsed Harris: his former press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, and former GOP Congressman Adam Kinzinger.

Grisham, who said she began almost as a Trump family member, was the first of his senior staffers to resign after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

She revealed that Trump privately mocked his followers as “basement dwellers” and declared he has “no empathy, no morals and no fidelity to the truth. He used to tell me, ‘it doesn’t matter what you say, Stephanie. Say it often enough and people will believe you.’”

Kinzinger, who with former Rep. Liz Cheney served on the House Jan. 6 investigating committee, said:

“I’ve learned something about the Democratic Party, and I want to let my fellow Republicans in on the secret: The Democrats are as patriotic as us. They love this country just as much as we do. And they are as eager to defend American values at home and abroad as we conservatives have ever been.

I’ve learned something about my party too, something I couldn’t ignore: The Republican Party is no longer conservative. It has switched its allegiance from the principles that gave it purpose to a man whose only purpose is himself.

At least two dozen other former Trump officials have spoken out and didn’t appear at the convention, but might still be mobilized to help defeat Trump, including former Defense Secretaries. James Mattis and Mark Esper, retired Marine General and former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, former national security advisers John Bolton and H.R. McMasters, and former White House aides Cassidy Hutchinson and Sarah Matthews.

Michelle Obama was a major hit speaker, reminding anyone who might have forgotten how Trump tried to foster fear and suspicion about her and her husband, trying to make him out to be a foreign-born Moslem and her, an America-hater.

 She said Trump’s “limited and narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people who also happened to be Black.”

And, to everyone’s delight, she finished with a skewer to his gut: “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs,’ the menial tasks he claimed illegal immigrants were going to steal.”

Another memorable moment—proof positive of Trump’s racism—was the appearance by members of the Central Park Five, the young men wrongfully convicted of raping a woman in 1989. They spent up to 13 years in jail before being exonerated. Yet Trump called for them to be executed—and has never admitted his error.

Given all this, Trump shouldn’t have a chance in a fair election, but clearly he does. Harris made progress in Chicago, but not enough to guarantee victory. Perhaps the most important thing she and Democrats did in Chicago was to recast the image of their party: far from being “Communist,” as Trump often charges, they came across as patriotic, optimistic and center-left, not far left.

And Harris, besides dropping some of her left-liberal positions from 2020, now has a center-left position on the economy, backing $25,000 subsidies for first-time home buyers and incentives for home builders to produce more housing. She proposes restoring the $3,600 per -child tax credit that expired in 2022 and adding a $6,000 credit for families with a child in the first year of life.

To tame inflation, she has somewhat controversially proposed a crackdown on grocery “price-gouging,” which some economists interpret as price controls that never worked in the 1970s.

In her CNN interview, as part of her praise for Biden’s improving economic conditions following the COVID pandemic, she cited his securing reduction in the price of insulin for seniors that she wants to expand for the whole population and establishing Medicare’s power to negotiate drug prices to bring down inflation.

Even if Harris wins the presidential election, prospects for Democrats’ controlling Congress remain uncertain—especially for retaining their tiny Senate majority, but even for taking control of the House. So Harris had better win or Trump could end up running the whole U.S. government, with dire consequences for U.S. democracy and Democrats’ new cause, “Freedom.”