Will Al Smith Blunder Trigger Harris Campaign Shakeup

Kamala Harris’s shocking 92 percent staff turnover in her first three years as vice president highlights her habit of blaming others for her missteps. Don’t be too surprised if shortly this pattern reemerges.

In deciding to skip the Al Smith Dinner, Harris’s staff made an overwrought, perhaps even panicked decision that will increasingly be seen as a snub to the crucial bloc of Catholic voters – and in presidential campaign lore probably will be remembered as an historic error. Harris will become the first presidential candidate since 1984 to skip the iconic event, a charity dinner named for New York Governor Al Smith, the first Catholic presidential nominee of a major party. The dinner was famously attended in 1960 by Democrat nominee John F. Kennedy, who shortly became the first Catholic president.

After the meteoric up and downs of last week, it’s difficult not to sympathize with Harris’s campaign handlers (who, after all, may already be suffering from Kamala’s Nurse Ratched attitude toward her staffers). Having celebrated a supposedly commanding debate performance, where Harris dutifully recited all of the corporate media’s and Democrat Party’s talking points against Donald Trump, the campaign saw devastating polls showing no real gain for her—and even losses among undecided voters. If anything, Trump seemed to be gaining ground (more about those polls in a moment).

The polling setback as well news reports citing TV spots in five states accusing Democrat Senate candidates of anti-Catholic bigotry spooked her staff into the classic campaign mistake of relieving anxiety by attempting a quick fix to a dilemma that had not yet even occurred. The thought of Donald Trump confronting Harris at the Smith dinner over her own anti-Catholic record as a state Attorney General and U.S. Senator was apparently just too much for Harris campaign leadership.

There is no better indication of the kind of tension at the Harris campaign that caused this misstep than in Sunday morning’s “Politico Playbook,” which, in its role as the Harris HQ tip sheet, celebrated a supposed Harris surge by citing a recent NBC poll. But in reality, the NBC poll wasn’t recent at all: it showed the network—like the Chicago ward healers of old holding back their vote results until they knew how much they needed to boost the election night numbers—had waited five days to release it.

More to the point, this mysteriously delayed, badly needed Harris boost starkly contradicted another poll that wasn’t delayed and covered roughly the same period of time. Unlike the NBC poll—which is notoriously pro-Democrat—this highly regarded New York Times/Siena poll showed the race tied with no appreciable movement toward Harris after the debate. (And this is not to mention an even more timely Rasmussen poll—rated more highly by The Washington Post than others like NBC—showing Trump gaining ground and up by two points.)

But the Harris campaign will take what it can get. Like the equally biased and even more notorious Quinnipiac poll, which dials up favorable results whenever Democrat candidates are endangered, the NBC poll has a history of always featuring good news for Democrat candidates. A headline from The Wall Street Journal two days before the 2020 election tells the story: a WSJ/NBC News poll reported a 10-point Biden victory, which means that if NBC’s built-in five or six points premium for Democrat candidates is applied to the current poll, Trump is even with or slightly ahead of Harris.

This kind of gaslighting will go on. The Harris campaign and the corporate media have a strategy similar to Hillary Clinton’s in 2016—a Potemkin strategy relying on manipulated polls and broadcast networks taking their cue from Democrat political operatives, blaring about a surging Harris and her eventual inevitable victory.

The recklessness here is risky though. The political world is not likely to completely forget the realities of the last two weeks. On debate night, for example, even as the media celebrated what they saw as a big win for Harris, a Reuters focus group revealed that undecided voters found her performance unconvincing, and a New York Times focus group showed that most Independents leaned toward voting for Trump. In the days that followed, both the New York Post and Rasmussen polls indicated that Trump had actually gained a point or two from the debate.

But nothing demonstrated the failure of the media’s coverage, or the Harris campaign’s mistake, more than the CNN poll taken the night of the debate. It showed that while many viewers thought Harris had “won” the debate, she actually lost two points on the economy—the very issue she most needed to address. This dynamic is reminiscent of past presidential debates where candidates like Jimmy Carter were said to have won, yet suffered significant political damage in the aftermath of the debates.

More recently , Harris’s staff was forced to process talk of a Trump “landslide” due to a working class profoundly “scared” about the state of the economy outlined in articles like one by Douglas MacKinnon in The Hill, where he cited his own working-class background and pointed out the union endorsements Harris failed to receive and the famous CBS interview in Las Vegas restaurants where virtually no Harris supporters could be found. The Harris campaign also had to endure remarks from the likes of Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) about the hold Trump has on Pennsylvania voters, and Roger Kimball’s arguments about why the Harris campaign seemed doomed. (Kimball’s point seemed well borne out in last week’s painful Harris interview with Oprah Winfrey in Michigan.)

Again, the analogy in all this to 2016 is worth revisiting. While Harris’s team was right to fear that Trump would eviscerate her in front of that audience, much like he did to Clinton in 2016, they have not fully realized how their Potemkin strategy of jiggered polls and corporate media adulation can backfire.

At the 2016 Al Smith Dinner, Trump had just debated Clinton the night before (and the media declared her the runaway winner). During the dinner, Trump claimed Clinton hated Catholics and was booed by the audience. The media played this over and over on morning news programs, believing that the sight of Trump getting booed would damage him in national polling just weeks prior to Election Day. That weekend, the corporate media celebrated polls showing Hillary leading by as many as 13 points.

What they didn’t realize, however, was that Trump had connected strongly with Independents—particularly by standing firm in the face of criticism from wealthy elites. By the middle of the next week, Trump was leading in Florida for the first time—and closing the gap in key Rust Belt states.

By the end of the same week, the first ABC tracking poll showed a collapse in Clinton’s lead, with a stunning 11-point drop in just four days—largely due to an unprecedented double digit swing among independents. Much confusion followed, as the poll was released on the same day as FBI Director Comey’s letter about Clinton’s email investigation. Though many voters wrongly attributed Clinton’s polling drop to the Comey letter, the poll had of course been conducted prior to the letter’s release. What the poll demonstrated was that Trump—who came across as an the non-Romney and a Republican who actually “meant it”—had scored heavily in the debate even as the pundits cooed over Hillary.

Similarly, this cycle, Harris’s handlers likely didn’t want her subjected to the same fate at the Smith dinner, especially given her vulnerability on an issue that has been in the news and is now hurting Democrat Senate candidates. A simple Google search of Harris’s record on Catholic issues brings her severe vulnerabilities with Catholic voters to light. Moreover, her party’s unique vulnerability among Catholic voters—particularly Hispanic voters in key battleground states like Arizona and Nevada—was recently put on display in a series of TV ads produced by Frontiers of Freedom Action, which are now running in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

The information-laden, fact-heavy ad kicks off by highlighting Democrat Senate candidates’ “cruel war” against the Little Sisters of the Poor (it notes that the senators provided the deciding votes in the Senate confirmation of Biden-Harris Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, a key player in the left’s persecution of the Catholic group.

“Sherrod Brown joined the Democratic Party’s cruel war against them by giving the winning vote to the 23 Attorney Generals trying to force the sisters to violate their faith and pay for abortion pills,” the ad’s narrator states in the Ohio version of the TV spot.

The ad also notes prominent Democrat senators’ attempts to impose an “unconstitutional religious test” against Catholics nominated to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court and other roles within the federal judiciary—a move that caused even prominent secular figures—including the president of Princeton University—to speak out. In September 2017, Princeton president Christopher L. Eisgruber issued an unprecedented letter to Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, urging them to “refrain from interrogating nominees about the religious or spiritual foundations of their jurisprudential views.” The president of the University of Notre Dame, the Harvard Law Review, and the Anti-Defamation League echoed Eisgruber’s sentiment, also releasing statements condemning the rhetoric.

The ad then goes on to catalogue some of the progressive left’s most shocking acts of anti-Catholic prejudice—from their embrace of transgender ideology to their flagrant persecution of Catholics who assent to the Church’s teachings on the sanctity of life.

The ad also makes note of Kamala Harris’s and Joe Biden’s celebration of the so-called “Transgender Day of Visibility” on Easter Sunday, the holiest day of the year for Christians, as well as their administration’s initial refusal to allow the Knights of Columbus to celebrate a Memorial Day Mass at Arlington National Cemetery.

Yet for all of Harris’s vulnerabilities on the Catholic issue in making its Al Smith decision, her campaign needed to look beyond the possibility of a Trump attack and understand that the far better course for her was a conciliatory and gracious speech that would give her a chance to tactfully escape the evening. Instead, the painful image of a future Trump attack was too much to bear during a week that had gone wrong—and Harris handlers bailed on an iconic American political event.

Don’t expect the media to notice. At least not yet. From the very moment Harris replaced Biden as her party’s standard-bearer in July, they have been a nonstop “hallelujah chorus” for the Harris campaign. Yet even they have noted some significant missteps. The selection of Walz as Harris’s running mate, for instance, was a grave error—and the recent loss of the Teamsters and Steamfitters Union endorsements was a painful blow to traditional Democrat politicians. Additionally, the decision to put Harris on stage in the debate may have thrilled Trump haters, but it failed to accomplish the one crucial task for the Harris campaign: winning over undecided voters by presenting an economic plan that addressed the struggles of families.

But last week was a particularly bad one for the Harris campaign—possibly even devastating. Kamala’s handlers capped off their previous errors with the disastrous decision to pull out of the Al Smith dinner, leaving the campaign open to charges of being in serious disarray and committing blunder after blunder, much like the 1972 George McGovern or the 1988 Michael Dukakis campaigns, which, once they entered a spiral of failure, couldn’t pull out of the crash and burn.

The real problem with the Harris campaign is the same issue plaguing the entire Biden administration. Unlike Bill Clinton, whose famous policy of “triangulation” aimed to attract moderates and even conservatives (famously, the Clinton campaign ran ads on Christian radio condemning abortion while simultaneously holding events at the White House for women who had undergone partial-birth abortions), the Biden administration has acted as if its only goal is to appease the far-left wing of the party, basking in the praise of CNN, MSNBC, and other networks for each extremist move.

While this dynamic should have spelled disaster for the Democrats in the 2022 midterm races, a skillful use of tens of millions of dollars in six key states—and without Trump on the ballot to counter their radical agenda—allowed the Democrats to stop the red wave that was evidently building. However, having learned nothing from that close call, the Harris campaign has followed the same strategy—focusing on thrilling the left, Trump haters, and the Democrat Party cheerleaders in the media, thinking this will be enough to win the presidential election.

But Harris’s strategy has never been a winning formula—and based on every indication, she is about to find out the hard way.

That doesn’t mean, however, that towards the end of the campaign, her team—at least those who have survived the Kamala purges—won’t be recommending another quick fix for what may become an even more pronounced problem with Catholic voters. As Fox’s Martha MacCallum recently pointed out, the candidate who wins the Catholic vote wins the election—and Harris is already trailing Trump by 10 points among the group.

In another fit of nerves, then, the Harris handlers—who put all their faith in the ephemeral reality of media events and hype—may make a move reminiscent of the Dukakis campaign’s now-much-laughed-at decision to reassure voters on national security by outfitting their candidate with a ridiculous tank commander’s helmet.

It will be something to see: Kamala before a late-campaign crowd, spouting empathy at Catholic voters while wearing a nun’s habit, or maybe even that distinctive shield-shaped episcopal headwear called a bishop’s mitre.

Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.