The Harris Campaign Runs into Reality

From the moment Joe Biden announced his departure from the race on July 21, the American public was subjected to a political science experiment on an unprecedented scale. The liberal establishment set out to determine whether a combination of near-infinite financial resources, broad media complicity, and a relentless branding operation backed by leading figures within popular culture could gaslight voters into believing that up is down, left is right, and Kamala Harris, California Attorney General, U.S. Senator, and Joe Biden’s vice president had a record entirely unburdened by what had been.

That experiment has failed, and its failure has left Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party struggling to put together a coherent campaign and message with less than a month left, hoping to run out the clock as their support slips away.

The election is by no means over, and it would be a mistake for anyone, especially Republicans, to mistake a trajectory for the final result. Harris currently leads by 1.7 points in the latest RealClearPolitics average and has remained locked in a tight race all summer. That number is a reflection of the totality of polling, which ranges from ties to single-digit leads, as well as demographic trends, and where recent election results indicate the floor for any viable Democratic candidate lies. If the election were held this Tuesday, Harris would stand a very real chance of winning a narrow victory.

However, it is clear that victory, if it was a victory at all, would be substantially narrower than if the election had been held a week ago, and narrower still than if it had been held two, much less three weeks before that. Democrats are able to see the trend lines. When that line is almost straight and has been heading in the same direction for weeks, they know there is a problem, which explains the anxiety that has gripped many left-leaning outlets. When the reasons for that line pointing in the direction it is are inherent to the candidate and the path she chose, the panic and erratic efforts to test out new messaging from the Harris campaign make more sense.

The 2024 Harris campaign inherited both liabilities and assets from the Biden administration. On the liability side of the ledger, there was the legacy of years of high inflation, a foreign record of disaster (Afghanistan), failure (the Middle East), and stalemate (Ukraine), and Harris’s own record both as Biden’s vice president and as a California politician.

On the asset side, Harris had access to nearly limitless resources, could contrast her age with Biden, and most importantly, had unchallenged dominance within her own party. What is impressive is the degree to which Harris and her campaign managed to squander their assets, while assuming they could will their liabilities out of existence.

The first error was Harris’s belief that she could erase Biden’s record from the memory of the electorate. There was no effort to frame Harris’s own view of Afghanistan, and Harris seemed to assume that the sacrifice of Joe Biden should, on its own, have been enough to satisfy pro-Palestinian voices, while her husband’s Jewish background would somehow appease those concerned about Israel’s security. She never outlined what her plans were with Ukraine. Inflation was ignored.

Perhaps the most striking illustration of this approach lay with immigration, where Harris supporters tried to wipe her status as Border Czar right off of Wikipedia.

The problem with this approach is that it meant the Harris campaign neither felt the need to defend Biden’s record nor to differentiate her from it. The former in effect conceded that Biden was a failed president. If Biden’s border policies were effective, why would Harris be so eager to deny ever having been his Border Czar?

In August, it would have been costlier for Harris to have clearly decided to defend Biden’s record on some issues while breaking with it on others, but it would have left her with a clear message in October. By implicitly breaking with Biden’s record with her rhetorical pivots to the center, she condemned Biden’s presidency, increasing the costs when she ultimately decided not to break with it at all in October. That is what made the interview response where she could not name a single thing she would have done differently from Biden both inevitable and so damaging.

Worse, this risk-averse strategy led Harris to neutralize many of her other assets. Harris inherited a party in a state of desperation after Joe Biden’s withdrawal. It needed her more than she needed it. She could have broken with Biden on any combination of issues, and most importantly picked whomever she wanted for vice president.

Doing so, however, would have required making choices. Whatever she might have said at the debate, Harris declined to change the Democratic Party’s position on the Second Amendment, crime, the economy, or the border at the Democratic Convention. Most importantly, in her desperation to avoid taking any position on the Middle East, she passed over Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania for her vice presidential pick, instead going for Tim Walz.

Like many of Harris’s decisions in August, the choice of Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro provided a short-term political payoff but was rapidly revealed to be a political loan that came due in October with a ruinously high rate of interest.

Choosing Walz avoided a showdown with the left when Harris could have easily afforded it in August at a time when it might even have produced long-term benefits. It left her with an individual who ceased to be a credible national surrogate following his debate smack-down at the hands of JD Vance and without Shapiro’s network in Pennsylvania.

Two weeks into October, Harris, for all practical purposes, no longer has a vice presidential surrogate at the national level. Worse, Vance’s easy victory over Walz removed Democrats’ ability to use Vance to attack Trump.

Harris therefore finds herself burdened by Biden’s legacy and with a pointless running mate in October, at the very moment she has triangulated her credibility into the dustbin.

It was common to observe in August that Harris appeared to have learned the right lessons from her failed 2020 primary campaign, namely the dangers of pandering to the left. The problem is that this was not the lesson she needed to learn, and she has in fact repeated the primary error of her earlier bid. The problem with her 2020 campaign was not that she pandered to the left, but rather the manner in which she did so, something which revealed the contempt Harris and her inner circle appear to have for the wider electorate.

In 2020, Kamala Harris could credibly have posed as one of the most liberal candidates in the race. As Attorney General, she had followed California’s liberal orthodoxy religiously, and been ranked the most liberal member of the Senate. Had she wished to run as a young, establishment, down-the-line liberal it would have been credible.

However, what pushed credulity beyond the breaking point was her efforts to position herself as some sort of ally of the activist left against the establishment powers that be. People could believe that Harris was a loyal left-wing apparatchik. No one believed the protege of Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom was somehow an ally of those calling to abolish the police and borders. It came off not just as fake, but insulting, transforming her into a figure of mockery on the left while destroying her credibility with more ideologically centrist liberals.

Rather than learning from this experience, Harris has repeated the exact same approach in 2024. It might be credible, at least to militantly anti-Trump voters who are desperate to be told what they want to hear, for Harris to claim to have learned from the “mistakes” of the Biden administration; that excess spending can produce inflation, and that is why she no longer favors single-payer healthcare, or that open borders do not work.

This is not what Harris has done. Rather, Harris has tried to rewrite history, and in an implausible way to boot.

While voters would happily believe Harris believes Biden failed (after all, almost everyone believes that) the idea that Kamala Harris is some sort of Glock-carrying conservative who idealized John McCain and admires the “statesmanship” of Dick Cheney is laughable. It is insulting to those involved.

While Liz Cheney’s appetite for self-humiliation is expansive enough to allow her to campaign with Harris while praising her long neoconservative credentials, it was too much for Meghan McCain, who recently exploded on X, threatening to reveal what her father actually thought about Harris if the campaign continued using his name and image. After an initial spell in which anti-Trump former Republicans enjoyed the attention, Meghan McCain’s reaction is becoming typical.

At the same time, Harris has begun facing anger on the left. Ironically, this anger comes from both breaking too much from Biden (her appearances with the Cheneys and gestures to the center are clearly intended to win over those voters by insulting the left) and too little (Harris has overcompensated for not picking Shapiro by desperately trying to ratchet up her rhetoric on Israel). There is widespread concern that she intends to fire FTC head Lina Khan to appease her Silicon Valley supporters, while Silicon Valley believes she intends to censor them as she did Wikipedia’s references to her status as Border Czar.

Harris now finds herself in a situation where her outreach to the right is failing while she is also alienating the left, having sacrificed much of her political capital to avoid confronting Joe Biden’s legacy – only to be saddled with it nonetheless. She is now forced to run on continuing Joe Biden’s legacy having spent two months treating it as a record of failure. She also now must mobilize the left after having pandered to the right, while holding onto center-right swing voters. It is no wonder she is losing support from everyone.

Harris appears to be in the process of defeating herself. The question we should be asking is not whether she can turn this around, but whether, with early voting ongoing, her support has already been deflated too much for a recovery.

If the election were held on October 5, it seems likely Harris would have won. Were it held on December 5, it now seems almost certain Harris would lose. The question now is whether, on November 5, that crucial tipping point will have been reached.

Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.