The election is extremely close

Harris is winning — but her strategy still seems a little complacent

Kamala Harris has pulled off a virtuosic political performance this summer. In the immediate aftermath of Joe Biden’s debate fiasco, the Democratic Party was paralyzed by two conflicting convictions: One was that if Biden was not the nominee it had to be Harris, and the other was that Harris would be a terrible candidate.

I wrote last December that Harris would plausibly be a stronger choice than Biden and in July that she was clearly the stronger candidate. Still, relative to my expectations, she has over-performed. In a matter of weeks, she’s managed to:

• Wrap up intra-party support with striking speed (not so surprising, this is the political skill she’s always shown)

• Neutralize an emerging Donald Trump financial advantage, which is consistent with her past record, but still impressive

• Immediately address her most glaring potential weaknesses

• Launch several strong biographical ads

• Not only dig out of Biden’s post-debate polling hole (easy though still important), but break out a polling lead

Going back to before the debate, Democrats spent the winter of 2023-2024 in a weird amount of denial about the fact that Biden was on track to lose the election.

Under Harris, that is no longer true. If you were asked to bet on who would win the election if it were held tomorrow, Harris is clearly the right choice. People who are, in fact, gambling on the outcome in November are betting that Harris will probably win. Nate Silver’s state-by-state rundown of the transformation is stunning. Before the swap, Trump was more likely to win Virginia than to lose Florida, while Harris is now more likely to win Texas than to lose Minnesota.

Still, heading into the convention, I think it’s important to be realistic about these odds. As impressive as the turnaround has been, we’re talking about a situation in which Silver thinks she has a 57 percent chance of winning the election. On Polymarket she’s a bit weaker at 54 percent. On PredictIt, she’s a bit stronger at 58 percent.

These are good numbers (above fifty percent!) but not great numbers like the ones Biden was putting up during the summer of 2020. She could still easily lose the race, and there are a lot of known potential pitfalls. The 2020 DNC was strange primarily because of Covid, but I also thought it was full of odd programming decisions — a little complacent, self-indulgent, and self-congratulatory from a party that knew it was on track for victory and lost discipline. I’m hoping we see a convention that is laser-focused on persuadable voters — on retaining Romney-Biden voters and regaining Obama-Trump voters — rather than on placating intra-party dissent. Trump is really bad, and I’d really like to see him lose, ideally quite badly, in a way that helps us turn the page on this era of American politics.

Don’t fall for Harris’ momentum

I’m citing the gambling figures because I think most people intuitively place a lot of weight on momentum. The news has been almost uniformly good for Harris over several weeks, and Trump’s campaign is floundering. If you assume 12 more weeks of this, he’s going to get crushed.

On an emotional level, I don’t think it’s even possible to not feel that kind of directionality to events.

But neither modelers nor gamblers think that’s how politics work, and I think they’re pretty clearly correct. For all that Harris has achieved thus far, it’s mostly been consolidating the votes of people who really don’t like Trump. The great news for her campaign is that Trump is an unpopular figure and always has been (though he’s actually become less unpopular over time), but there’s a natural cap on the moment. Biden’s age was generating a non-policy drag on the ticket, and in retrospect, I think it was also generating a psychological drag on key surrogates. Now, all kinds of talented Democrats and Democratic-aligned public figures are comfortable making the case for Harris. Even if Harris says something they disagree with or takes a position they don’t like, they’re comfortable saying, “Well, we disagree about that, but we agree about A, B, C, and D, so I’m enthusiastically voting for her.” That’s normal politics — no one gets universal assent on anything, every candidate needs a diverse coalition of support.

People didn’t really want to defend Biden against the charge of being old, especially post-debate, so he did not have as wide or deep a stable of enthusiastic surrogates.

To the extent that “vibes” means anything, I think it’s this, except scaled to a world in which social media means there are thousands of micro-surrogates on Twitter and TikTok. The sheer quantity of people willing to make the case for you in public matters more than ever.

But this source of gains will predictably run out. Biden was badly underperforming the expected level of “people who are Democrats vocally supporting the Democratic ticket.” Once you swap him out for someone who has normal political vulnerabilities, you return rapidly to baseline levels. Harris has been picking this low-hanging fruit and making rapid gains, which is great, but it would be foolish to expect that to continue, not through any fault of her own but because there is only so much low-hanging fruit. Meanwhile, Trump is spending a remarkable amount of time sulking rather than executing a banal campaign playbook against a candidate they regarded as weak six months ago. That might never turn around — sometimes people just mess up — but I think we should assume that Trump will find his footing at some point before November.

The future, not the past

The Harris campaign’s “we’re not going back” rhetoric and overall future-orientation has been, I think, an underrated strategic move.

For starters, it aligns with the normal way that Democrats have traditionally campaigned in a way that Biden’s message didn’t. It’s a total coincidence that the main Democratic Party presidential Super PAC is called Future Forward — that name was picked before the outcome of the 2020 primary was known and has nothing to do with Harris’ 2024 campaign tactics. But the fact that this is what people trying to name a generic-sounding Democratic SuperPAC came up with is a reminder that this really is the message you expect to hear from Democrats. From the New Deal to the New Frontier to the New Democrats to “hope and change” with Obama, a kind of nonspecific novelty is often the sweet spot. This is related to my point about Jed Bartlett in the West Wing — like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, he was an outsider but not a radical — in contrast to the dichotomy between Hillary/Biden and Bernie Sanders. Harris is not exactly an outsider (she’s the vice president!), but she is relatively new to the national political scene and only needs to present as a fresh face relative to Trump.

The more subtle aspect is that all of Trump’s best issues are actually about things that happened in the past:

• The crime rate in the United States is low right now.

• Unauthorized border crossings are also very low.

• Both overall inflation and food price inflation is currently low.

But there’s a reason these are good issues for Trump. Crime soared in 2020 and rose further in 2021 and only eased slightly in 2022. There were a ton of people exploiting loopholes in the asylum system in 2022-2023. And there was a surge of inflation in 2021-2022 that’s been slowly easing since then. These events pushed up the salience of a suite of issues that are associated with the right, and many people feel that Biden was too slow to act to address them. On crime, I think that’s unfair on the merits, but on immigration I think it’s right (inflation is kind of a mixed bag). Either way, these are good topics for Trump.

Harris, though, is not the incumbent and has adopted a forward-looking frame that is helping her evade some culpability for things people are angry about that happened earlier in Biden’s term. And I tend to think the best possible path for her isn’t “like Joe Biden but younger,” but actually achieving separation from Biden, who has become very unpopular.

Harris’ risky low-risk strategy

At some point, Trump is probably going to start delivering what is I think the most straightforward possible attack on Harris: Remember Joe Biden the unpopular president you hated? You might have thought dementia was the only possible explanation for his policy decisions, but Kamala Harris apparently agrees with all of them, so if you think he stinks you shouldn’t vote for her either.

I think Harris has made a lot of smart decisions over the course of her very brief campaign, but it’s clear that she and her team decided against the kind of hard shake of the etch-a-sketch that I was hoping to see.

Instead, she is very much running as a quasi-incumbent. Her campaign is based in Wilmington, Delaware, because that’s where Joe Biden’s campaign was based and because it’s mostly the same people. She has a group of policy advisors working with the campaign, and it’s mostly people who worked in the Biden administration. Or, as they call it, the Biden-Harris administration. And in a way, I think this makes sense as a kind of low-risk strategy. Harris moved very decisively to break with some of her old positions from 2019 and align herself with more moderate Joe Biden positions. Doing what I recommend and breaking with Biden positions to become even more moderate would have come across as weird to many people. And, of course, there would have been intra-party controversy and various groups would have been upset.

What Harris did instead is more straightforward. They swapped in a new messenger who is more capable and charismatic. And they really did tweak the message in a way that (as I understand it) fits her values and her personality better, and she’s delivering it with a more aspirational, more upbeat vibe. But the policy agenda is basically the same and the framing of the race is that Kamala Harris was a major player in the Biden-Harris administration and the Harris-Walz administration will be substantially continuous with it. This is a lot easier to explain than my approach would have been. That said, just like picking Walz rather than risking intra-party controversy with Josh Shapiro, this whole approach is, I think, a little complacent.

White knuckling to November

All the pre-speech previews of Kamala Harris’ economic address on Friday suggested she was going to uncork some wild stemwinder about corporate greed and call for a system of national price controls. To her credit, she did not do that, and instead delivered a smart, aspirational speech that called out supply-side constraints in key areas, while nodding pretty gently toward the “greedflation” idea in the context of what was mostly a discussion of antitrust enforcement. But then after the speech, her team (or some faction of it) seems to have come out and re-iterated the leftist spin, characterizing it as a sharp break with Joe Biden’s commitment to economic orthodoxy.

I don’t really know what’s going on here, but it’s a reminder that Harris has not chosen to position herself as more moderate than Biden. If anything, she is retaining a somewhat Biden-like obsession with avoiding any kind of intra-party controversy, even (or perhaps especially) while she’s in her honeymoon phase.

The good news is that while Biden was losing with this strategy, Harris is winning.

But she’s not winning by that much. Current polls have her doing slightly worse than Biden did in 2020 and a lot worse than Biden polled in 2020. Which is to say, it’s fine if the polls are right, but if we see the same kind of polling error that we saw in 2016 and 2020, then she’ll lose. Another way to say it is that the oddsmakers and the modelers have her favored, but very narrowly. She’s done a lot to re-consolidate the Biden electorate. But I don’t think we’ve seen her really try anything to persuade the former Obama voters who pulled the lever twice for Trump, or reluctant Trump voters who just think Democrats are too liberal.

To their credit, I do think the Harris team is running a smart, broadly popularist version of a progressive campaign, one where she is emphasizing progressives’ most popular ideas (largely on health care) while ruthlessly jettisoning weak points on crime and immigration. Still, I think it is somewhat risky to pass up the opportunity to break with the Biden record on economics and turn in a more Clintonite direction of deficit reduction rather than new spending. And I don’t really understand what she would be giving up by dialing back her policy ambitions. The only way to pass any kind of progressive legislation in 2025 is for Democrats to recapture the House (hard) and hang on to the Senate (very hard), so Harris ought to be asking what kind of agenda maximizes the odds that Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown and Jared Golden and Mary Peltola and John Avlon can win. What puts Senate races in Texas and Florida in play? On the one hand, yes, a campaign like that would look more moderate. But on the other hand, a campaign like that would stand a better chance of getting (progressive) things done.

Of course, she gets multiple bites at the apple, and this is what I’ll be looking for at the convention: Do we get any programming that seems aimed at persuading skeptics?