Keeping the enthusiasm of a new campaign going for the full 90 days leading up to Election Day is a massive task for Vice President Kamala Harris, who has had incredible momentum over the past three weeks. On behalf of HEADLINESFOREVER, Jamie Kelter Davis
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign launch was unprecedented in its success, garnering hundreds of millions of dollars, climbing the polls, and energizing the base. As the Democratic ticket swung throughout the country, it drew enormous, noisy crowds, and the Harris campaign added $36 million in the 24 hours after unveiling Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate.
Harris now confronts the enormous and unprecedented task of maintaining the vigor of a new campaign for a 90-day sprint into Election Day, following three weeks of incredible momentum. As she adapts to her new position, she must contend with economic instability, a politically unstable Middle Eastern scenario, and doubts about her own capacity to handle the demands of a challenging campaign.
Here are five important problems that the ticket will have to address in the next months, ranging from important policy matters to the campaign’s media approach.
Is Harris ready to ditch the script?
Reporters and columnists have been complaining about Harris’s refusal to answer questions from the media for the past few weeks. Republicans are making their stance loud and clear by holding press conferences of their own, with former president Donald Trump and his running partner, Sen. JD Vance, doing the same.
As the anniversary of the Dobbs decision approached on June 24, Harris gave her final formal sit-down interview to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to commemorate the occasion. Following President Joe Biden’s poor performance in the debate, she appeared with CNN’s Anderson Cooper mere days later.
No other interviews or press conferences have been added to her calendar. It would indicate that her group is not in a hurry to finalize anything.
Harris spoke with reporters for a short period after Trump and Vance’s news conferences on Thursday, during which she mentioned that her staff is hoping to arrange an interview for the month’s end. In the days leading up to the August 19th convention kickoff in Chicago, a possible joint interview between Harris and Walz has been discussed.
Like Biden’s much-maligned inner circle, Harris’ senior communications advisers are incredibly pessimistic that doing large interviews with national newspapers or TV networks can reach the swing voters they need in November.
If you want to know why Harris might be hesitant to do an interview, you could review her interview from June 2021 with Lester Holt of NBC. On the one hand, she was undoubtedly hurt by the Holt interview, which questioned her decision not to visit the southern border.
However, Harris appears to have taken a stronger stance since then; other party members utilized her on-air defense of Biden in the minutes following the debate as a talking point to attempt to stem the political tide. Those close to Harris took it as a sign of her progress.
Is she prepared to face Trump again? That is another unanswered question. During a free-wheeling press conference on Friday, the former president not only rallied behind the previously agreed-upon debate scheduled for ABC on September 10, but he also proposed two additional contests. Harris has said she is willing to consider other debates, but she hasn’t said whether she’ll actually accept one.
What chance does Harris have of winning over voters if she runs the economy?
Concerns about the economy and inflation continue to weigh heavily on voters’ minds. During her remarks this week, the vice president gave us a taste of her economic message, in which she framed the election as a “fight for the future” and admitted that prices are still too high.
At a recent rally in Atlanta, Clinton hinted at her intentions to take the economic offensive, pledging to tackle price gouging, reduce costs, prohibit financial institutions from charging hidden fees and late penalties, limit rent hikes that are “unfair,” and cap the cost of prescription drugs. She claimed that these measures will “reduce expenses and save numerous middle-class families thousands of dollars annually.”
Still, Democrats have a problem with how the public views the economy. In addition, Harris is short on time to recover from setbacks. According to a recent poll, Americans still think they would be financially better off under Trump, while Trump continues to crush Harris by a 2-to-1 margin when it comes to the economy. Despite this, recent polls show that Harris is making progress on the topic.
An alarmingly large percentage of Republicans (79 percent) have this view, according to a new poll released this week by CNBC. On the other hand, Harris still has a ways to go before she can win over Democrats; only 48% of Democrats think things would improve for them if Harris is elected.
Stock market crashes throughout the world on Monday signaled a sharp departure from the steady growth and easing inflation that analysts had been predicting for weeks, and they served as a sobering reminder that voters’ pessimism about the economy may be detrimental to Harris’ campaign. By week’s end, markets had settled down, but the following weeks would be keenly monitored; the Federal Reserve might not budge from its high interest rate stance until September.
Will Trump’s border attacks be too much for Harris to handle?
Just as the border was a weak spot for Biden, it is now for Harris as well. Since Biden requested that she collaborate with Central American nations to tackle the underlying reasons of migration, Republicans have unfairly labeled her as the “border czar” because of this.
This is an issue where Harris’s campaign has been more vocal recently; on Friday, they released another ad in which they defended Harris’ record on border security, which is something you wouldn’t have heard from the vice president during her 2019 presidential campaign.
Like the policy the White House announced earlier this summer, Harris is running on Biden’s assault on asylum seekers while also promoting solutions for long-term undocumented immigrants in the United States. Campaign staff think she will win over voters by criticizing Trump for vetoing a bipartisan border agreement in the spring.
Harris may feel she has little choice but to seek an edge in utilizing the border issue, given its prominence among Americans’ top concerns. It might get much more complicated if the number of border crossings starts to rise this fall due to the cooler weather.
In her stance on Israel, will Harris seek to set herself apart from Biden?
With the disruption of her Michigan rally this week and the request for a secret meeting between advocates and the vice president to negotiate changes to armaments policy, it became evident that Harris would not be able to avoid the polarizing Israel-Gaza issue inside the Democratic Party.
There is much back-and-forth among activists on how to put pressure on the Democratic ticket, but generally speaking, they see Harris as being more sympathetic to their cause than Biden. Protests are still scheduled for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and there is a chance that disturbance will return to campuses this month, despite the protest movement’s internal divisions.
Because of this, Harris is in a precarious political position. In spite of her efforts to win over Democratic supporters, she maintains her position as Biden’s vice president. She must now choose between playing to the progressive faction of her party, who are likely to fall in line by November, and sticking to Biden’s strategy, or appealing to Arab American voters and young people who are demanding limits on weaponry given to Israel.
In response to Trump’s plethora of attacks, how would the Harris campaign behave?
Using his 2016 campaign strategies of holding unfettered press conferences and making hateful remarks on social media, Trump is once again sucking the political oxygen out of the room.
As the Trump campaign strives to establish a coherent message in opposition to the Harris-Walz campaign, the former president has unleashed a torrent of insults on Harris. Harris and Walz have been called by him “the most Radical Left duo in American history,” among other things. He even went so far as to accuse Harris of having a “low IQ” and used sexist and racist language.
This tactic was put into full play following Trump’s appearance at last week’s NABJ convention, in which he cast doubt on Harris’ Black identity and said that she was selected for the position only as a “DEI hire.”
Democratic campaigns, including Harris’s, have condemned Trump’s insults before swiftly returning to their own lines of argument. Prolonged hostilities, in their view, would be more beneficial to Trump than to themselves.
Given the challenges posed by Trump, the current question is whether the Democrats can maintain their current course of action.