Harris is in danger of losing the election

Shirking her political instincts for conventional wisdom, she's become her own worst enemy

Kamala Harris peers at Donald Trump (off-scene) during their debate, September 10, 2024.

A lot of people were dogging Vice President Kamala Harris, sneering that it’s not possible to run a campaign on vibes. They scoffed at Tim Walz, her VP choice, calling the GOP weird and saying that Harris brought the joy. These sourpusses were incorrect: Harris had hit the ground running and was expanding her lead during this part of the campaign. A vibes campaign could have won it for her.

As it stands, the wind has shifted, and the folks who had been most excited for her, or at least open and hopeful, have grown despondent or have retreated back to their previous levels of despair. Those, too, are vibrations, and they are reverberating throughout the Harris electorate.

As I see it, Harris has made a series of mistakes. These have cost her in a race where it was so time-compressed that she never would have had the time to make a course correction.

➢ She succumbed to conventional wisdom, making her run a “standard” Democratic campaign. At least some people would describe it that way. I would describe it as Republican-lite. It’s utterly discouraging for folks like me who have been in the Democratic fold all of our lives. I’ve never seen a campaign run like this.

Emma Vigeland of The Majority Report is still apologizing for Harris, saying that Harris is running the same play that had been in Biden’s playbook before he dropped out. Clearly she’s attempting to woo Nikki Haley voters. This is a mistake. Harris could never afford to abandon the base of the party for possible votes in the center. That’s a gamble in normal elections where you have two years in a campaign calendar. Here, there’s no room for error. Harris is not winning the middle and is actively alienating the very people she initially had excited.¹

➢ She abandoned the emerging theme of her campaign, which was all-inclusive. This was most starkly illustrated by her refusal to allow Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian-American Georgia state representative, a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention. This act symbolically shut out the very people who had melted away from the Democratic coalition but had started to return. 

Why had they faded? In large part, their withdrawal was due to Biden’s calamitous decision to unconditionally support Israel in its genocidal campaign against an occupied people. Harris retracted the welcome mat, turning to blood-and-bullet-laden rhetoric during her acceptance speech for the nomination.

All of those tepid or hesitant supporters — those of Muslim faith or Middle East descent, as well as students, peace activists, and broad swaths of people of color — saw for themselves that Harris invited some of the most conservative elements in American politics onto the stage but had shut them out.

Uncommitted delegates sit outside the United Center at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, August 2024. Photo source: WBEZ.org.

You want to talk about vibe-changing. The tenor of the Democratic electorate turned overnight.

➢ She didn’t stand up for those under attack, neither herself nor those less powerful. And yes, I’m speaking of the pivot of the Trump campaign to go full-bore into racism. It was clear that this would be an issue even before Harris got into the race, which is why it was a mistake to elevate her in this particular election cycle; but, after Biden’s maneuver to get Harris installed as the nominee, it was incumbent upon Harris and her team to be ready to counter the nakedly racist attacks that were sure to emanate from the Trump camp.

They didn’t. They haven’t. Apparently, someone in the Conventional Wisdom camp told Harris et al. that the best defense was no defense at all. Just ignore the race-y stuff, because otherwise it would make her race more noticeable. This was clearly the strategy behind Harris’s refusal to answer CNN’s Dana Bash when the anchor asked the candidate to remark upon Trump’s suggestion that she had “turned Black.” Harris didn’t address the venom in his remarks at all, which I’m sure pleased her campaign operatives but did little to defuse Trump’s strategy at its root.

This came into crystal-clear focus when she stood beside Trump at the debate and he trotted out the xenophobic, hidebound idea that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating household pets.

Racist meme.

She laughed, sure, and ridiculed the idea that way, through body language. But she never addressed the actual claim he was making. She never stood up for the immigrants who were being smeared and slurred in real time. She didn’t even give the meta-argument that immigration is the lifeblood of this country, that we’re largely a nation of immigrants and that they contribute mightily to the fabric of the nation, economically and otherwise.

Harris could have said all of that. But she didn’t. She avoided it, even as white nationalists descended upon Springfield, Ohio, and began marching openly in the streets, terrifying residents. She declined, even as Haitians, interviewed by the various news outlets that had gathered in Ohio’s ground zero, said that they were afraid to leave their homes. Others in the city described an exponential increase in racist language they themselves had encountered. All of this, Harris let go to the wayside, because she didn’t want to touch the issue of race.

Klan flyer being distributed in Springfield, Ohio, September 2024.

That’s a mistake, one that has compounded over time. Harris and her advisers should have had a rapid response team dedicated to just this one issue, that of Trump’s predilection toward racism. They had to have known that he would grow more odious on this score as the campaign unfolded. They should have had people ready to counter his poison, to give the antidote. Instead, they’ve stood by, barely able to find it in themselves to point to the culprit and say, “Yeah, he’s poisoning people.”²

➢ She has sent mixed messages as to the composition of her core constituency. She chose Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, as her running mate, bypassing the Conventional Wisdom pick of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. This may have gone unnoticed by some on the right or in the center, but there was a palpable sigh of relief at this pick on the left of the political spectrum, as it showed that Harris not only was attending to traditional progressive concerns (as encapsulated in Walz’s record on a bevy of policy wins) but also that she was willing to buck convention and follow her own inner compass.

Now it appears that compass is a windsock, because she’s just trying to determine where the political winds are going. It’s disappointing to see. Her capitulation to those staid advisers means that Walz can do all of the photo ops with him in his hunting gear as he wants, but Harris has already undercut the messaging she had in bringing him on in the first place.

It seems like a no-brainer that Harris would appeal to the middle class. That’s like a safety valve, a heatsink in American politics. But Walz’s background had given Harris an opening to make overtures to the working class as well, precisely because of this image of Walz being an everyman.

But Harris can’t do that and appeal to Republicans at the same time — not the ones she’s trying to attract (those voters formerly for Haley, wandering the political desert). This again leaves core constituencies out in the cold, huge swaths whose votes she can’t afford to leave on the table. 

This isn’t to say that she’s actively repelling such people, as she is in some sectors of the Democratic party, but she hasn’t spoken in a clarion call. Instead, she’s cobbled together some buzzwords to make her ideas sound fresh and entrepreneurial (“opportunity economy”). I’m not sure which part of the electorate she’s impressed with this language, but it’s standard boardroom presentation-speak, very corporatist.

➢ But mainly it goes back to Harris being unwilling to break with Biden over his Israel policy. That’s what’s bringing people down. There’s no way for anyone of the regular (let’s say Obama-style) Democratic coalition to view the images that emerged from Israel’s strike that burned people alive in tents outside of Al-Aqsa Hospital and feel hopeful that electing Harris will change any of that. That’s despair. That’s a feeling that, no matter what one does with one’s vote, it will change nothing — not on issues that matter.

If Harris were to come out and say that she will uphold international law, that would change the mood in the Democratic party overnight. Hope would return. And that’s not a radical position to take! It would just be Harris saying that she would enforce the law. She wants to be seen as a strong prosecutor? This would be just the way to do it.

Harris needs to create her own October surprise — one that affects not her opponent but herself. 

She needs to break with Biden in these last few weeks of the campaign. She needs to re-open her campaign to be all-inclusive. She needs to fight for the downtrodden and voiceless, the immigrants in the Midwest and the longshoremen in the East, the devastated, hurricane-weary in the South, and folks scorched and heatsick in the Southwest. Once she restores that sense of inclusion, she will regain a moral clarity that has otherwise grown muddy these last few weeks.

She needs to abandon the safe campaign and run a bold campaign. This attempt to “do no harm” is doing tremendous harm. As Jeet Heer of the Nation said:

Playing it safe and pursuing Never Trump Republicans might make sense if Harris had a healthy lead and the Democratic base were solidly on board and energized. But, sadly, this is far from the case.

Maybe she and her team are too close to the problem to see it. But it’s gotten to the point where people like David Brooks are openly opining that Harris may have made a fatal mistake in picking Walz as her running mate. That’s one of the things that she did absolutely right!

I once remarked that, after Biden’s mortal self-wounding in his debate with Trump in June, Biden was like a plane that had entered a roll — at a degree from which he could not recover. In terms of his poll numbers, they were dropping off like a craft out of the air; we didn’t see the crash and debris only because he vacated the race. We now have political commentators worrying that Harris has “stalled,” that her small national lead over Trump not only has ceased growing but has even begun to narrow.³

You know what happens when a plane stalls in mid-air? It’s not as spectacular as going into a roll, but the results can be just as catastrophic.

This is not a time for autopilot. This is a time that demands a striking change in tone and direction. If Harris wants to win, she can’t go on this way.

1. Vigeland recently spoke with Francesca Fiorentini, where the comedian and political commentator noted that she was “getting 2016 vibes” as she considers the current state of the race. The two then, inexplicably, spoke about whether Harris would be able to mount momentum for a second term, as though the one she’s running for is already in the bag. This was bizarre and to me revealed that they possibly have serious misgivings about this year’s contest but were projecting a Harris failure far into the future so as to gain psychological distance from the prospect that the worst outcome — a Trump presidency — may yet come to pass.

2. This was made worse by the fact that President Biden decided to come out at that point, when the Trump team was escalating its attacks on Haitians in Springfield, to say that Trump’s rhetoric must stop! That was toothless, demonstrated impotence, and allowed Trump to posture among his followers that he, a rebel, was not going to adhere to nicety and convention. It recalled Biden’s ineffectiveness in dealing with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, where he would admonish Netanyahu and then Netanyahu would ignore Biden altogether. Biden’s waste of words reinforced the idea that Democrats were powerless to restrain Trump’s worst impulses.

3. It’s been said that a 3% win nationwide will result in a loss in the Electoral College. To be safe, a candidate needs to secure a 5% nationwide lead. The graph of FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages at the Independent shows that the race is tightening, exactly the wrong direction for Harris: