The Harris campaign is getting desperate

For Kamala Harris, the ‘joy’ is gone. As we enter the final two weeks before the US election, Harris’s laugh has given way to a scowl, as she delivers one angry diatribe after another against Donald Trump at her rallies. It’s still all ‘vibes’ and no policy for Harris, only now the vibe is rage. Watching her recently, you can see why she has lost 92 per cent of her staff as vice-president.

Kamala’s frustration is easy to understand. Her campaign has stalled, while Trump is gaining momentum. Where once she held a small lead in the polls, now Trump is slightly ahead in the battleground states and the all-important Electoral College tally. The race is essentially tied, but Harris’s campaign is stumbling towards the finish line. Even Democratic Senate candidates in key states, like Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, are distancing themselves from Harris and running ads that say they will work well with Trump.

The Harris campaign is so desperate that it is welcoming around 100 Labour Party supporters to parachute in from Britain and canvas for her in the swing states. This move alone tempts me to place a bet on a Trump victory.

Heading into the final stretch of the campaign, Harris is trying to stoke fears about what a Trump return to the White House would mean. When radio host Charlamagne tha God said, in an interview with Harris, that Trump’s campaign was ‘about fascism’, she agreed: ‘Yes, we can say that.’ At her rallies, she calls Trump a ‘wannabe dictator’ and says he’s ‘unhinged’. Pro-Democrat writers are echoing her message. ‘Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini’, says Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic.

In truth, Harris’s banging of the ‘Trump is Hitler’ drum is a sign of weakness. It’s all she’s got. Rather than tout her achievements or promise new policies that will help Americans going forward, Harris is anti-Trump, all the time. That’s it. She was handed the Democratic nomination without a single primary vote, and many must now be feeling buyer’s remorse. She really is a terrible candidate, running a dreadful campaign.

The state of the US under Joe Biden’s presidency is a bad hand to have to play, but Harris shares responsibility for this, having been at his side as vice-president. The Biden-Harris record is a dismal one, especially regarding the economy and the border. Americans are still stinging from the damage high inflation has done to their living standards. And they’re unhappy about the seven million (if not more) migrants who have entered the country illegally, with many states now experiencing the crime and chaos previously limited to border states. Harris has no answers to these issues, and has not been able to distance herself from Biden. When asked on The View earlier this month what she would do differently, she replied: ‘There is not a thing that comes to mind.’

There is hardly anything about Harris that appears authentic, which only compounds her lack of policy depth. Vox-pop interviews on the street find people saying they don’t know who she is or what she stands for. Worse, many use ‘phoney’ as the word to describe her. It’s understandable. She has flip-flopped on positions she promoted for many years, like banning fracking, defunding the police and decriminalising border crossings. Yes, politicians change their views, but she has given no explanation for her shifts. It’s evident she knows her former stances are now unpopular, so she’s opportunistically changing her tune – but not convincingly. Her deer-in-headlights looks to interviewers, and her word-salad responses to questions, stem from her never being sure what she is ‘supposed’ to say. She really is an empty vessel, spouting whatever her handlers have coached her to say on the day.

What has become striking in this election is how Kamala’s record, as well as her woodenness on the campaign stump, have made Trump look more normal in comparison. It’s Kamala’s administration that has brought disorder and craziness – from violent crime to pro-Hamas protests to her party’s drive to spread harmful gender ideology to minors. And it’s Trump who clearly says he will put a stop to all that. He’s pushing hard on the trans issue, promising to ban males participating in female sports, while running constant ads during NFL games that highlight Kamala’s support for government-paid transgender surgery for prisoners.

In just the past few days, the contrast between the personalities of these two candidates has been sharp. On one side, you had Trump turning up at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, donning an apron, making fries and serving customers, while throngs lined the street to get a glimpse of him. Trump looked human: he was out in public, cheerfully cracking jokes with the staff in this most working class of restaurants. That he was also trolling Kamala only made it more fun (she has claimed she once worked at McDonald’s, but some suspect that’s a lie).

On the other side, you have Kamala, who rarely mixes with the public, and often looks awkward when she does. She is the Queen of Cringe, as her attempts at humour typically fall flat. The latest example is the lame ‘comedy’ video she submitted to the Al Smith charity dinner (the very fact that she broke tradition and failed to appear in person at the event evinced her fear of interacting in public). On the day after Trump’s McDonald’s appearance, Harris held a town-hall event that was entirely scripted and did not allow audience participation. When one voter asked, ‘Are we going to be able to ask a question?’, the host, Maria Shriver, said, ‘You’re not, unfortunately. We have some predetermined questions.’

Unable to connect with voters on the grounds of ideas or personality, Harris is left with ‘at least I’m not Hitler’. But the effectiveness of that pitch this year is very much in doubt. Not only is the talk of Trump’s fascistic tendencies overblown – it is also tired. We have heard this same message since 2015. Trump has already spent four years in the White House, and the sky did not fall in. More importantly, the illiberal and undemocratic actions of Biden, Harris and the Democrats to demonise and bring down Trump have neutralised, in many people’s eyes, anything Trump has done. The lawfare waged against Trump – the questionable legitimacy of so many civil and criminal cases – has been unprecedented against a former president and present candidate, and makes the US look like a banana republic. The Democrats’ attempts to remove him from the ballot were breathtakingly undemocratic as well. Add to this the dirty tricks against Trump, from the Steele dossier to the quashing of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Harris calling Trump an authoritarian is projection.

Indeed, what is one of the most striking features of this 2024 election, in contrast with 2016 and 2020, is that there seems to be much less of a stigma for publicly announcing support for Trump. More S&P 500 executives, like JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, have come out to praise Trump’s policies or record in office. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is eagerly backing Trump. Then there is the voting public, whether on social media or the street, who are now proudly voicing their support for him. It’s a different mood, for sure, and it’s evidence that Kamala’s ‘threat to democracy’ line about Trump isn’t working with a good portion of the electorate.

Yet, for all of Kamala’s mediocre performance on the campaign trail, the truth is that she and Trump are effectively tied in the polls, and so she still has a good chance of winning. For that, she must be thankful that her opponent is Donald Trump.

If you consider where Americans stand on the issues at stake in the election, Trump should be way ahead of Harris. About 60 per cent of voters think the country is on the wrong track, and the Biden-Harris administration is to blame for that. Trump leads Harris on the issues voters say matter most. He has a 12-point lead on who would do a better job on immigration, and a four-point lead on both inflation and crime, according to the October 2024 Harvard CAPS / Harris poll. Trump is also more aligned with majority opinion on many cultural issues. On transgender politics, 69 per cent told Gallup last year that ‘transgender athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender’.

With his advantage on the issues, plus Kamala’s lame campaigning, Trump should be coasting to victory, but he isn’t. And that is because many voters don’t trust him. Yes, he faces tremendous establishment opposition and demonisation, and many have succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome. But he is also his own worst enemy, from his crazy claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him, to his erratic behaviour and outbursts (including his nonsense about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs). As vacuous as the Harris campaign has been, she came out ahead in their only debate, thanks to Trump’s inability to stay disciplined and articulate his case.

Trump’s populism has led to impressive gains among the working-class voters. While Trump maintains a large lead among those without a college education, a newer feature is how he is winning over more black and Latino voters. Another unique feature of this 2024 race is how Trump has widened his advantage among men – again, especially among black and Latino men. Men joining the Trump train is not a surprise when you consider how Democrats view any expression of masculinity as ‘toxic’, and their idea of a ‘real’ man is Kamala’s bumbling running mate, Tim Walz.

Yet, while it is fascinating to watch Trump realign party politics, with the Republican Party assembling a multiracial, working-class coalition, this doesn’t appear to be helping him that much in electoral terms, at least this year. That’s because for every black or Latino male worker he’s gaining, he seems to be losing a white college-educated woman. This latter group tends to turn up to vote more than others. This year, many are especially motivated by the issue of abortion to get behind Harris, especially in the blue Democratic states.

Maybe this election will be like 2016, and Trump will garner enough working-class support in the swing states to defeat a Democratic woman who fails to excite voters. Or maybe it will be more like the 2022 Midterms, when the Republican lead in the polls evaporated on election day, as an energised Democratic base turned out to vote against Trumpist contenders. It does seem like it will come down to ground game and base mobilisation. We shall see.

It remains amazing to me that the candidate of the establishment, the best the elites can offer, is a politician as empty and incompetent as Kamala Harris. The American elite really is in a state of deep decay. At the same time, it’s a shame that working-class Americans don’t have a more coherent and trustworthy fighter than Donald Trump. The country deserves better than these two.

Sean Collins is a writer based in New York. Visit his blog, The American Situation.