Looking back on the final weeks leading up to Election Day, one of Kamala Harris’s biggest problems was that voters felt they didn’t truly know who she was or what she stood for. But the more Harris put herself out there, the less voters liked what they saw.
According to polling averages, the high-water mark for Harris’s campaign was in the days following her only debate against Donald Trump, when she opened up a two-point national lead in the RealClearPolitics average by mid-September. That lead slowly evaporated over the following six weeks, and Trump now holds a slight edge on Election Day eve.
Looking back, there is a clear correlation between Harris’s efforts to define herself to voters and her sinking polling numbers. Far from reassuring voters, the vice president’s media tour, where she attempted to define something of a policy agenda, led to declining support.
Leading up to the debate, Harris was already under intense scrutiny for her unwillingness to answer questions off-script. After Biden was forced out of the race in July, Harris became the Democrat nominee in glaringly un-democratic fashion, without a single Democrat primary voter casting a ballot for her.
Harris subsequently refused to give interviews and rarely appeared in public outside of campaign rallies. It took her over 50 days to add an “issues” page to her campaign website.
During the debate, Harris struggled when pressed on actual policy. But with an assist from the debate moderators, she was able to avoid the disaster moment that befell Biden just a few weeks prior. The media predictably shouted her praises, declaring her the unquestioned winner even as several voter panels indicated a belief among everyday Americans that Trump had won.
Before and after the debate, the Harris campaign leaned into a “vibes”-based strategy. In essence, they seemed to suggest, Harris could be carried to the White House purely by manufacturing positive feelings around her candidacy. Her campaign embraced obscure online memes like “coconut army” and “Kamala is brat” in an effort to build the aura of a hip, successful campaign.
Still, however, Harris’s failure to define a policy agenda was a festering problem. Without anything to go on, news outlets began referring to her 2019 campaign, when she backed Defund-the-Police, supported abolishing private healthcare, and suggested that Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be dismantled, among other far-left policies that are deeply unpopular with voters.
In response, Harris made two major changes to her campaign strategy that may ultimately have only helped sink her candidacy.
The first was to begin declaring that she had suddenly changed her most controversial policy positions from when she ran in 2019. After opposing fracking and border security while supporting Medicare for All, defunding the police, abolishing ICE, EV mandates, gun grabs, the Green New Deal, and every other item on the progressive agenda, Harris now claims to hold the opposite view on all of those issues.
Then Harris launched an ill-fated media tour that has led to a cascade of negative headlines leading up to Election Day. Despite appearing on seemingly “safe” shows like The View, 60 Minutes, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Harris couldn’t help but loft up prime material for Republican attack ads.
On The View, host Sunny Hostin asked Harris, “would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” In response, Harris said she couldn’t think of “a single thing” – a line she repeated multiple times in subsequent days when asked the same question.
On 60 Minutes, when host Bill Whitaker asked Harris how she planned on paying for her agenda, she responded, “My economic plan would strengthen America’s economy” – prompting Whitaker to retort, “But pardon me Madam Vice President, the question was, how are you going to pay for it?”
More embarrassment followed that interview when it was revealed that CBS doctored the footage to make Harris’s responses seem more coherent.
Then came Harris’s disastrous interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier, where she showed up late, stumbled through 26 minutes of non-answers, and then was rushed away by aides complaining that Baier had been too tough in his questioning.
Late last month, Harris tried again with an appearance on a CNN Townhall. Despite the liberal network doing everything it could to make Harris look good, a panel of bipartisan commentators all concluded that Harris’s policy answers lacked substance and she was evasive when asked straight questions.
On her performance, CNN’s Dana Bash stated, “What I’m hearing from people who I’ve been talking to… if her goal was to close the deal, they’re not sure she did that.” Former Obama Chief Strategist David Axelrod, meanwhile, blasted Harris for her habit of going to “word salad city” when “she doesn’t want to answer the question.”
In some cases, the bad headlines for Harris have been out of her control. Just last week she gave a major “closing argument” speech on the Ellipse at the White House that was entirely overshadowed by President Joe Biden’s comments calling Trump supporters “garbage.” But Harris subsequently made the problem worse by refusing to disavow or condemn Biden’s inflammatory remark.
Harris may yet win the election, but the flood of self-induced negative headlines in the critical final weeks of the race does not provide reason for confidence with just hours to go until ballots begin being counted.
To be sure, there are still plenty of media voices out there working to prop Harris up and bash Donald Trump. But no matter how hard they try, it may not be enough.
Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.
