Kamala Harris trounced Donald Trump in their debate and now, with help from Trump and his runnning mate, JD Vance, she has a two-point edge over Trump in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls and a three-point lead in 538’s average. And in some of the polls regarded as most reliable, she leads by more—4% according to ABC News and YouGov and 6 % according to Morning Consult.
Moreover, the percentage of voters who view her favorably now is equal to those who view her unfavorably. In July, the month President Biden handed the Democratic nomination to her, she was under water by 16 points. Trump is still under water by almost 10.
And she’s been raising gobs of money more than Trump and got endorsed by conservative Republicans Dick and Lynn Cheney and then by super-celebrity Taylor Swift, but not by the Teamsters. Swift’s endorsement produced a more than 400 percent increase in signups at the government’s voter registration site. Trump, after posting a fake video showing Swift endorsing him, erupted “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” following her Harris endorsement.
All this is good news for Harris. The not-so-good news is that in all seven swing states where the election will be decided, the race is within the margin of error. And in all of them, Harris is running behind where Biden was in September 2020, when he ended up winning by tiny margins. Moreover, Trump still has sizable leads on who’s better at handling the issues voters care about most—20 points on the economy, 23 points on immigration and 6 on foreign policy. She has a 21 point lead on abortion and 9 on protecting democracy. And 45% say she’s too liberal.
So, Harris still has work to do. Smiling winningly, speaking positively, and exuding good vibes won’t cut it, even if Trump is growling, lying and often sounding incoherent.
A YouGov poll showed that 52% of people who watched the debate said they learned little or nothing about Harris. Supporters, critics, and neutral commentators say there were loads of questions she’s ducked or just hasn’t answered that she needs to.
Right-of-center blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote: “To my mind, Harris has three big policy vulnerabilities as an actual incumbent: she presided over a collapse of the southern border, admitting millions of illegal immigrants, almost all of whom will never leave; she was in power when we had a spike in inflation worse than anything since the 1970s; and…she has a political record on the far left. On Tuesday, for all her debating chops, she did nothing to dispel public worries about all three.”
Sullivan added that in the debate, “She needed those 90 minutes to rebut the critiques of her past opportunism, to introduce herself clearly, to spell out how she will grow the economy, keep inflation under control, and stop illegal immigration. And, by and large, she failed.”
In a surprisingly devastating column not only about Trump’s getting “creamed” in the debate, but of “deterioration in his ability to publicly present himself,” Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan also said that Harris won the debate “shallowly,” without “fully answering even questions of major importance such as immigration, the Afghanistan withdrawal, and her changes in political stands.”
Worse, The New York Times’s David Brooks wrote that “during the debate, I thought Harris did a poor job of laying out her vision for the next four years.”
I think some of this is unfair. Harris’s campaign website contains a detailed list of proposals on controlling inflation, growing the economy, taxes, health, and child care—all parts of her vision of creating an “opportunity economy” that helps struggling middle class people “not just get by, but get ahead.”
Still, the vice president has explaining to do about why she’s shifted away from such leftist positions in 2019 to pay for illegal immigrant detainees to receive gender-altering surgical procedures, ending all detention for illegal immigrants and “starting from scratch” to reform ICE, favoring Medicare for All and abolition of private health insurance. She was once ranked as “the most liberal Senator.”
Some of the charges being levelled against her are downright extreme, such as Sullivan’s that “She believes in systemic public and private discrimination against whites, Asians, Jews, and men.” That’s presumably a reference to her opposition to the Supreme Court’s banning affirmative action in university admissions, though Sullivan doesn’t say so.
Moreover, she didn’t support “defunding the police”—rather repurposing some of its funding to pay for social workers, not cops, to handle some non-violent situations. Of course, Trump’s allegation that she is a “communist” or “socialist” or “fascist” is just nuts. Also loony is Trump’s consorting with arch-conspiracist Laura Loomer. That said, Harris has yet to fully answer how her policies differ from Biden’s. And her website says nothing about her approach to the immigration crisis or foreign policy.
Trump had one good moment in the debate—his closing one in which, referring to Harris’s various proposals, “why hasn’t she done it” in her 3.5 years in office? There are answers to that: she wasn’t president and Congressional Republicans would block it.
But if she’s going to take Republican guff for what’s gone wrong in the Biden years, she ought to be able to take some credit for things that are right—all impressively documented by Bloomberg. These include record job creation, plummeting inflation, salaries outpacing the cost of living, narrowing inequality, the medically uninsured at an all-time low, booming equity markets, and investment in green energy. The Fed has now added an interest rate cut that will lower the cost of borrowing and mortgages.
Biden never got credit for any of this, and Harris doesn’t seem able to garner it either. She does need to grant more media interviews and press conferences, as the media are demanding.
A better approach was suggested by Republican Never-Trumper Bill Kristol on a podcast with Democratic guru James Carville: give major policy addresses on foreign and domestic policy and then answer questions about them. This would help clear up doubts about where Harris stands.
I may not know enough about Kamala Harris and her positions on public policy, but I know more than enough about Donald Trump and his intentions. I will be voting for Harris.
Mort, the right-of-center critics you quote critical of Harris’s alleged lack of specifics are all Beltway insiders, policy wonks whose view of the campaign is thus colored to make lack of specific policies more of an issue than it is with the voters. Indeed, given their preferences toward the right, they are making arguments, defining a “problem” to weaken Harris. They’re not analysts, they’re partisans.
Dick Lilly: The right-wing pundits and wonks and insiders always frame Vice President Harris in similar way to the headline on this piece:
Kamala is trending positive BUT.
That conjunction sets up the reader for a string of reasons why the vice president isn’t doing well. Although she’s leading in Pennsylvania, a swing state last time I checked.And “A headline in the NY TImes this morning:
Harris Has a Polling Edge in Wisconsin, BUT Democrats Don’t Trust It
What the hell? There was nothing in the story that said Democrats don’t trust that poll.