From the Boiling Frogs on The Dispatch
Sarah Isgur and I have a bet.
It was foolish of me to agree to it, as she just missed taking Steve Hayes to the cleaners in their own wager. Last year, they diverged on whether Joe Biden and Donald Trump would be renominated by their parties in 2024, with Sarah betting yes and Steve betting no. If not for the president turning in the worst debate performance in American history, she would have hit the exacta.
A few days after that fiasco, she and I wagered on whether the September 10 debate between the nominees would take place as scheduled. Sarah said yes. I said no, convinced Trump wouldnât give Biden an opportunity to undo the horrendous impression heâd made on American voters on June 27. Trump has zero incentive to participate, I insisted, unless Democrats replace Biden and his successor starts running ahead in the polls.
Since then, Democrats have replaced Biden. And given the huge surge of enthusiasm this week for his successor, itâs possible that by early September sheâll be running ahead in the polls.
Itâs no wonder, then, that Trumpâs commitment to the September 10 debate has turned murky. His campaign released a statement on Thursday declaring that they wonât agree to anything until after the Democratic convention, just in case the party gets cold feet about nominating âMarxist fraudâ Kamala Harris and opts for someone else. They even cited the misgivings about her candidacy allegedly felt by âBarack Hussein Obamaââwho promptly turned around and endorsed Harris on Friday morning.
Trumpâs hesitancy makes sense. If Harris faceplants in August, logically he should do what he did during the Republican primaries by dodging the debates and denying his opponent a chance to catch up to him. If Harris takes off, heâll need the debates to try to erase her advantage and should challenge her to several. It wonât be clear which strategy is optimal until the dust settles from the Democratic switcheroo.
But thereâs another reason he and his team felt obliged to throw the debates into doubt on Thursday, I suspect. Theyâve lost control of the race. And Trump doesnât like not being in control.
He can barely tolerate not being the center of attention when the center of attention is occupied by his opponentâs frailty and unfitness for office. But when it shifts to how much younger and more lucid his new opponent is and how surprisingly excited her party is about her (and how terrible his own vice presidential pick was), itâs unbearable.
So desperate was he on Thursday to regain some attention that he was reduced to babbling about jail time for flag-burners, the nationalist political equivalent of âstupid pet tricks.â
We all expected a sigh of relief on the left after Harris replaced Biden on the ticket, as her ability to campaign with at least some proficiency instantly gives Democrats a puncherâs chance of winning. But Iâm surprised by how much genuine enthusiasm for her there is.
I continue to believe what I wrote on Monday, that the race becoming a referendum on Kamala Harris is unlikely to work out well for the anti-Trump coalition. But if youâre newly optimistic about her after the lavish honeymoon sheâs enjoyed this week, I understand.
Happy and ⌠competent?
Itâs been a minute since weâve had a presidential nominee whoâs young (by the Jurassic standards of American politics) and pleasant in their mien on the campaign trail.
In my younger adulthood, candidates like that were par for the course. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all fit the bill in their first runs for president. But since 2012, when Obama abandoned âhope and changeâ to go scorched-earth on Mitt Romney, itâs been a parade of po-faced attack dogs snarling at each other with accusations of wanting to destroy America. And apart from Obama himself, all of them were grandmas and grandpas.
Harris has been a throwback this week. At 59 years old, sheâs not that young, but the contrast with her predecessor and her opponent makes her seem like a Zoomer by comparison. And as youâd expect of someone whoâs just been given one of the biggest gifts in American political history, she simply canât contain her happiness about it. Every time weâve seen her lately, sheâs beaming.
Well, almost.
Democratic voters who spoke to the New York Times this week could scarcely restrain their own joy at suddenly having a nominee who can speak in complete sentences. âI realized today, while I was listening to my podcasts, that I spent the last few days without worrying and being depressed,â one chirped. âItâs gone from the dread election to the hope election, overnight,â said another. âIt was just going to be this horrible, slow slog between two old men that nobody liked,â added a third, and now âeveryone I know is happy.â
I donât know if itâs possible to remain a happy warrior in a campaign against Donald Trump, especially given the direction heâs likely to take on the stump, but Harris can only benefit by maintaining the current vibe. Politics in this country has become such a dour, dispiriting grind that the thought of spending four years with someone whoâs reasonably lively and upbeat is probably worth something to voters.
The messaging from her nascent campaign has also been deft, uncharacteristically. âMs. Harris has not, in five years on the national stage, shown competence,â Peggy Noonan wrote on Friday, with understatement. âShe is showing it now, and that is big news. Her rollout this week demonstrated talent and hinted she may be a real political athlete.â
Iâm not getting my hopes up, but itâs true that her early attack lines on Trump have been auspicious. âWeâre not going backâ is a clever one, not just as an answer to MAGAâs perpetual nostalgia trip but because it places some distance between Harris and her extremely unpopular boss. Half of America doesnât want to go back to Trump, the other half doesnât want to go back to Biden. âElect me if you donât want to go back,â sheâs telling the country, cryptically, aiming to seize the mantle of âchange candidateâ from the Republican nominee. Not bad.
âFreedomâ is another noteworthy message coming from the American left, which for most of my life has championed equality while leaving sloganeering about liberty to the right. Any party thatâs as enthusiastic about regulation as Democrats are has a highly nuanced idea of freedom, needless to say, but as a rallying cry it holds promise. And not just as obvious code for abortion rights, which the party is counting on to drive turnout in November.
Itâs a smart message because Joe Bidenâs big bet on trying to make the election a referendum on democracy wasnât paying off, and might even have been backfiring. âFreedomâ reframes the contrast with a GOP thatâs grown less libertarian and more statist in its nationalist incarnation, as Trumpâs âstupid pet trickâ reminds us. If, like me, you prefer Harris to him because sheâs the less sinister authoritarian between the two, youâre already voting for freedom in November.
The new message simply clarifies the stakes.
Finally thereâs the punchy emphasis lately on the âweirdnessâ of modern Republicans, a jab that began with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz but has migrated to the Harris campaign itself. A faction that condones transgender surgeries for minors and defunding the police (as Harris herself did in 2020) can do only so much to persuade the public that itâs the lesser of two weirdos on the ballot. But Trump and his most devoted acolytes are deeply weird people, including the acolyte who just became his running mate.
American voters conducted an experiment by electing Trump in 2016: âWhat if we dispensed with sober leadership for four years in order to radically shake up the system?â It went badly enough that they turned to establishment dinosaur Joe Biden in 2020, believing that heâd right the ship, and instead his presidency delivered inflation no one under 40 had ever seen and complete indifference to enforcing the southern border. After eight years, theyâre starving for normalcy.
Thereâs only upside for Harris in reminding voters how abnormal another four years of the weirdo-in-chief would be.
Expanding the map.
There are less vibe-y and more substantive reasons for this weekâs honeymoon too, of course. For starters, polling already shows the switcheroo paying off for Democrats.
The final RealClearPolitics national average of Trump and Biden head-to-head had the former leading by 3.1 points. The first round of polling between Trump and Harris has seen the Republicansâ lead cut to 1.5 points, and that figure is inflated by a survey from Trump-friendly Rasmussen Reports that puts him ahead by 7. In six of the eight most recent polls, he and Harris are within 2 points of each other.
Some individual surveys show more dramatic progress. Earlier this month, the highly regarded New York Times poll saw Biden fading to a 6-point deficit against Trump following his debate disaster. The paperâs first poll involving Harris after the president withdrew from the race has that lead down to 1. Ditto for the Wall Street Journal, which has the two statistically tied in a survey released Friday afternoon after finding Trump up six points on Biden earlier this month.
The turnaround in certain swing states is also meaningful. The last survey taken in New Hampshire, which Biden won by 7 points in 2020, had Trump jumping ahead to an ominous 2-point lead after the debate. But two new polls conducted there this week find Harris up by 6 and 7 points, matching Bidenâs margin four years ago. A key subplot for the rest of the campaign will be whether she can sustain Bidenâs support among white voters; early indicators in the very white state of New Hampshire are promising.
Same story in Michigan, a must-win battleground. Trump led Biden dependably there for weeks, bouncing out to a 7-point advantage in the last survey taken before the president dropped out. In two polls published this week with Harris as his opponent, Trump led by just a point in one and trailed by less than a point in the other.
Itâs not merely that Harris is polling better than Biden. Sheâs polling better with constituencies in swing states that had slipped away from him.
The presidentâs only path to reelection was to concede Sun Belt battlegrounds like Georgia and Arizona and throw everything at holding the Rust Belt trio of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. With Harris at the top of the ticket, though, the map has opened up:
Performing better than Biden with nonwhite voters wonât mean much if she performs worse with white voters. But if she can maintain that level of support, she could put states in play that seemed long gone a week ago. âThe historic nature of Harrisâ candidacy is likely to resonate louder in North Carolina than most other places, given that over 20 percent of the population is black,â Politico reported on Friday of a state Democrats lost by less than 2 points four years ago.
Barack Obama won there in 2008 thanks to 72 percent turnout among African Americans, a number that hasnât been matched since. If the first black woman nominee in U.S. history can flip North Carolina, perhaps with its governor as her running mate, sheâll earn more Electoral Votes than she would from winning Michigan.
Speaking of which: The Harris veepstakes thatâs playing out in public view this week has also given Democrats an unexpected shot in the arm.
A chronic problem for Joe Biden was that few prominent figures in his party wanted to vouch for him, as tends to happen with presidents whose job approval is terminally stuck at 40 percent or so. Thereâll always be people like Gavin Newsom willing to say anything for the sake of getting on camera, but for the average Democratic governor or senator, defending Biden required constant disingenuous chastisements that voters shouldnât believe the evidence of their eyes or ears about the presidentâs frailty.
Harrisâ ascension and the soon-to-be-filled vacancy on the national ticket has put a spring in the Democratic establishmentâs collective step. Turn on a news program this week and youâre apt to find some vice-presidential shortlisterâRoy Cooper, Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear, and Mark Kelly, among othersâauditioning by emphatically making the case for electing Harris. However self-interested their excitement might be, itâs surely helping to unify and motivate the rank-and-file.
And itâs given Harris something that Biden, in his decline, never quite managed to put together: An actual campaign, replete with surrogates. The presidentâs personal feebleness helped obscure how feeble his operation had become; the burst of support for his successor among party apparatchiks and the avalanche of grassroots money itâs unlocked feel less like a lifeless patient being revived than outright resurrected.
How long can it last?
When the honeymoon ends.
Harrisâ stock is overvalued, Noah Rothman argued today at National Review. I agree.
At some point, perhaps not until September if sheâs very lucky, the hype about her being the second coming of Barack Obama except with 50 percent more historic-ness will calm down and voters will consider her record. It wonât be pretty.
If Sarah wants to go double or nothing, I could probably be talked into wagering that the high point of Kamala Harrisâ polling will come a week after the Democratic convention and that itâll be all downhill from there.
But even here, I wonder if Iâm underestimating the extent to which the good vibes sheâs enjoyed this week might sustain her into fall.
The greatest political benefit Harris will derive from the swell of enthusiasm for her is leeway to run to the middle. Progressive voters have been granted a second lease on political life; theyâre excited about having a nominee with whom itâs easier to relate; and so theyâre not going to turn on her in a snit as she pivots opportunistically away from them and toward the center. Any chance they have of winning the election depends on Harris winning the race to define herself before Republicans define her, so theyâll give her room to run.
In fact, the pivot has already begun. Sheâs destined to spend the next 12 weeks touting her credentials as a tough-on-crime prosecutor in order to heighten the contrast with convicted felon Donald Trump. And only the dumbest, shrillest progressives will bother to make much of a stink about it.
Itâs also possible that the âfresh startâ goodwill sheâs earned this week will insulate her from some of Bidenâs liabilities.
On Tuesday, Semafor flagged an intriguing result from a Democratic pollster about Harrisâ liabilities. Americans trust Trump more than her on immigration, unsurprisingly, but they trust the two equally on the radioactive problem of inflation. Itâs strange that Joe Bidenâs vice president isnât carrying his heaviest policy burden into the home stretch of the campaign.
Maybe thatâs an inadvertent benefit of her low profile as VP. Sheâs not being blamed because no one believes she was actually helping to set policy in the Biden White House! But I suspect itâs more the case that voters came to view Bidenâs governing failures as functions of his age, with his cognitive decline supposedly rendering him incapable of addressing problems effectively as they developed. Thatâs not how inflation works, of courseâthere was no âswitchâ to maintain the 2019 cost of living that the president, in his dotage, forgot to throwâbut it sure helps Kamala Harris for voters to think that way.
Sheâs not old and asleep at the wheel and therefore she canât be blamed for the inflation over which she helped preside: She and her party will have no objection if Americans want to believe that.
Frankly, in a country that no longer takes major policy problems seriously, having the right vibes might be enough. Trump won in 2016 mainly on vibes that heâd drain the Washington swamp. Biden won in 2020 mainly on vibes that heâd restore stability. Why couldnât Kamala Harris win running on vibes that America needs a leader whoâs neither at deathâs door nor a glowering autocratic freak?
Harris 2024: Alive and well. Weâre not going back.
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