Donald Trump and his campaign have been caught short. The landslide victory they were contemplating at their convention just days ago was plausible only with President Biden as their rival. If many Biden votes were anti-Trump votes at heart, a lot of marginal Trump voters backed the former president primarily because they decided Biden was too old to serve another term.
Yet the Trump apparatus seemed entirely unprepared for the ticket shift that already seemed like a strong possibility within a week of Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate performance. As a result, said Kristen Soltis Anderson, a GOP pollster, its initial response to Harris was “very disjointed,” with the candidate and his partisans jumping from one attack to another without any clear focus.
Republicans embarrassed themselves with blatantly racist and sexist tropes against Harris. Trump himself sent a signal of weakness on Thursday by backing off his commitment to appear at a debate in September. The many self-inflicted troubles of Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, add to the GOP’s angst.
Nonetheless, Anderson argues that Harris must be ready for more effective attacks from Trump. She pointed to an advertisement from Republican Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dave McCormick tying his opponent, Sen. Bob Casey, to Harris as a preview of coming detractions.
The ad casts her as a leftist largely using statements from her unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign — when she saw herself as competing with candidates to her left — on fracking, policing, immigration, health coverage, guns and even the food pyramid. Conservative commentators have offered their own parade of alleged Harris horribles, and Trump is certain to go after Harris on crime, immigration and prices, as he did Biden.
But by being so slow off the mark, Trump has already given Harris a critical week to define herself and to bask in Democratic elation, including spontaneous memes and online outpouring that began even before Biden left the race.
Harris’s early speeches brought home the theme of generational change — now it’s Trump who has the “age problem” — redefined the campaign as a choice between “the future and the past,” and, in words and song, raised up the theme of freedom. Early polling showed her quickly narrowing the lead Trump had over Biden.
Her success so far has vindicated the party’s rapid consolidation behind Harris that foiled the dreams, especially within the commentariat and among donors, of an “open convention” or some other process in which Democrats could battle each other for the nomination.
The rallying to Harris was no accident. Biden’s immediate endorsement mattered, but Democrats say the desire to come together quickly was also a response to bitter intraparty divisions over whether the president should remain at the head of the ticket.
“It came out of the turmoil of those three weeks,” said one House member close to the party’s leadership. “If we kept fighting between now and the end of August, we’d lose everything in November. We could not afford another day of this disunity, this disarray.” Only Harris, the reasoning went, could grab hold of the Biden campaign machinery and instantly put the party back on offense against Trump. Whatever else happens, Harris’s champions were right about that.
There are signs that Harris is using her honeymoon run to prepare for the less blissful times when Trump will weaponize issues such as crime and immigration in an effort to block her from hitting the numbers she needs among White and Latino working-class voters.
Her surge among Black voters and the young suggests she is more likely to rebuild the Obama coalition of 2008 and 2012 than the Biden coalition of 2020. But it’s often forgotten that Obama’s success required sufficiently strong showings among working-class White voters in Midwestern swing states. Harris’s extensive treatment of economic issues in her debut speeches shows she knows this — even if the nature of her constituency could open an alternative path to an Electoral College majority that runs through the Sunbelt.
She stressed affordable health care, paid family leave and support for unions. She was also more explicit than Biden has been lately in pledging to renew his battle for enhanced child and elder care. Her address to the American Federation of Teachers on Thursday included extended populist riffs against Trump for “trickle-down economic policies,” “union busting,” “tax breaks for billionaires” and charges that he would “cut Medicare and Social Security.” Scranton Joe would approve, and if Harris can force Trump to play defense on these questions, the honeymoon might keep going.
Scratch most Republican strategists right now, and you’ll unleash a torrent of skepticism about Harris’s prospects. But they never expected her boffo debut. How long will they underestimate her? She only needs 100 days.
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