The Harris Campaign Needs to Get Real

My thoughts on the state of the race on the eve of the debates.

With almost exactly two months left to go, the 2024 Presidential election has entered a strange place. After one of the most chaotic periods of American political history—which included, but was far from limited to, two candidates leaving the race, two last-minute VP selections, and the biggest polling shift over the shortest span of time in decades—things have settled into something of an equilibrium. After vaulting into a narrow lead just prior to the Democratic National Convention, Kamala Harris has seen her support stagnate over the past few weeks. One might think that this stability would create a greater sense of certainty around the race, but the exact opposite has been true. As fate has had it, the election has settled into a dead heat, with every single potentially decisive state polling within the margin of error.

On paper, there’s still a lot here to be happy about for Democrats. Just one month and a half ago, the party was saddled with a candidate who couldn’t campaign and staring down the barrel of a Trump landslide. Quite a lot has gone right since then. As things stand now, Kamala Harris is a candidate with a national lead and break-even personal favorables. Her party is on a near-decade-long winning streak in the exact states she needs to win. Even the most Republican-slanted poll aggregators have still found her leading in enough swing states to make up 270 electoral votes; in her absolute worst swing state, she only trails by just over a point.

If you told the party two months ago that this is what they race would look like after Labor Day, they would be overjoyed. But over the past few weeks, those who wish to see Trump defeated have started to feel quite down on themselves. The excitement and hype that defined the early Kamala campaign has given way to a feeling that things are not going as they should. And while it feels temping to just call these people overly anxious or just too hard to impress, it’s not hard to see where this feeling of unease has come from. This period of stagnation and/or slight decline for Kamala hasn’t happened just any time. Instead, it has occurred right after her party’s national convention, when history tells us she should be seeing at least something of a boost. Instead, her numbers have gone down marginally—an unexpected development that has seen Trump’s odds improve everywhere from leading election models to betting markets.

Does this mark the beginning of the end for the anti-Trump cause? Not at all. It just means that we have reached the end of the beginning. If there ever was a chance that Kamala could ride to victory just off of vague feelings of excitement and hope, that’s clearly not possible now. The campaign has entered a new stage—one where voters are looking at her with a closer, if not necessarily critical, eye. And it has been at this stage of the campaign where her operation has started to look worryingly out-of-depth.

In an unfortunate sequel to how these same staffers ran Biden’s doomed re-election campaign, Harris 2024 has adopted a hyper-defensive approach: hiding their candidate from the media, eschewing policy specifics, and generally acting as if they have something to hide about her. Not only is this causing them to fumble what should be a prime opportunity to improve their standing, but it might end up being actively harmful to their candidate’s reputation. Here’s why I think that this race, despite everything, is still Kamala’s to lose, and why she might end up doing just that if her campaign doesn’t change its strategy.

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To start, I’ll address the more controversial half of that statement first: that this race is still Kamala’s to lose. With her odds of winning the election plummeting into the mid-30% range on leading mathematical forecasts and top-rated pollsters putting out surveys with Trump leads, it can feel hard not to feel bearish about her chances. These developments are real, and they present some concerning signs. Still, I’d much rather be Kamala than Trump right now—and it’s for many of the same reasons that I thought that 2022 wouldn’t be a red wave.