I’ve been saying for some time now that the Republican presidential ticket, Donald Trump and JD Vance, need to plan to fight to the finish, to beat the bushes for every single vote, to campaign like they are 20 points behind in every current poll. Honestly, the Harris/Walz ticket should be doing the same thing, but Kamala Harris appears to be playing it safe — avoiding live events, open press conferences, town hall events, and so on. Why? Some Democrat strategists are getting a little worried about that, but they may be missing the obvious problem with their candidate.
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Even as polling shows the presidential race is a toss-up, Vice President Kamala Harris has been running with a measure of risk aversion that some Democratic strategists and activists worry has failed to fully capitalize on the excitement surrounding her entry into the race in July.
Until this point, Harris has largely eschewed freewheeling interactions with voters like town hall-style events or interviews with the media that could offer a sense of her authentic self and make people more comfortable with her abrupt emergence at the top of the ticket, these Democrats say.
And that’s the problem. Kamala Harris’ liability isn’t that the voters don’t have a sense of her “authentic self.” It’s that voters do have a sense of her “authentic self,” and it’s proving to be a hard sell.
“They’re trying to keep her away,” Steve Shurtleff, a former Democratic speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, said of the Harris campaign. “It’s like seeing your favorite Hollywood actor and then they’re on a talk show and they can’t even speak.
“The president of the United States has to be able to be on their toes all the time and answer questions,” he added. “It’s so obvious she’s been avoiding the one-on-one interviews, and the voters deserve better.”
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She’s been avoiding the one-on-one interviews because every time she’s attempted one, no matter what softball questions were ever-so-gently lofted her way, she’s descended into irrelevancies and nonsensical word salads. Steve Shurtleff is right; the president of the United States has to be on their toes all the time, briefed, informed, capable, and prepared to answer questions. Kamala Harris is none of those things. She has been phoning in her job since she was Attorney General of California, and it’s proving too hard a habit for her to break.
See Related: Has Kamala Harris Ever Actually Answered Even One Direct Question?
Democrats Have Gotten This Big Endorsement for Nearly 40 Years; Kamala Just Lost It
While the polls show a dead heat between Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, if there’s any one good reason to look at the polling with suspicion, this is it. Donald Trump will stand in front of a group of reporters and answer unscripted, unscreened questions. Agree or disagree with his answers, but he answers, and never shies away from the press. Ditto for his running mate, JD Vance; maybe even more so.
But Kamala Harris and Tim Walz? Their public appearances, even the carefully scripted ones, are like watching a train full of dynamite crashing into a dumpster fire. The apparatchiks running the campaign know this, as most of them have been in this spot before.
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Harris’ guarded public posture may be a carryover from President Joe Biden’s defunct campaign. Worried that Biden, 81, might make a gaffe, his campaign carefully controlled and limited his public appearances. Many of the people who ran Biden’s campaign are working to elect Harris.
They kept Joe Biden out of sight because he was befuddled and confused. Many of the people who did so are keeping Kamala Harris out of sight because she’s incompetent.