In 2020, Joe Biden ran a campaign by not actually running. Instead, he was kept out of sight for most of the campaign and strategically deployed in ways that would minimize his negatives while the chaos of COVID-19, a sudden and sharp economic downturn, and Trump’s undisciplined messaging.
It was a valid campaign strategy. We may have been critical of the implications – that he was already too old and feeble to handle a campaign, so he can’t possibly be in good enough condition to run the country – but as a campaign tactic it was valid.
Kamala Harris is not old and feeble, but her ability to speak publicly without prepared remarks is astounding. She has done a few interviews but has otherwise remained pretty silent where the media is concerned. Her speaking time is limited at her limited public events and she is rarely, if ever, allowed to speak off the cuff. She also doesn’t like to speak off the cuff.
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She is being protected much like Biden was four years ago, but the problem is that she is younger, more energetic, and (allegedly) capable of doing the job. Yet, she is not out there convincing the country she needs to be its next leader.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, is seemingly everywhere. Republicans are collecting more money than expected in the last stretch of the campaign, and Democrats are starting to get worried.
Democratic operatives, including some of Kamala Harris’ own staffers, are growing increasingly concerned about her relatively light campaign schedule, which has her holding fewer events than Donald Trump and avoiding unscripted interactions with voters and the press almost entirely.
In interviews with POLITICO, nearly two dozen Democrats described Harris as running a do-no-harm, risk-averse approach to the race they fear could hamper her as the campaign enters its final 30-day stretch.
With early voting by mail and in person already underway in more than half of the country, Harris spent just three days of the last week of September in battleground states. On Sept. 28, when Trump gave a speech in Wisconsin before flying to Alabama for the Georgia-Alabama football game, Harris was attending a fundraiser in San Francisco. And beyond concerns about her schedule, Democrats argue that Harris would benefit from venues that allow her to introduce herself to voters in a more authentic way, such as town hall events, more sit-down interviews and unscripted exchanges with voters.
The problem with that last line – about the more “authentic way” – is that Kamala Harris can’t be authentic. In 2020, it was pretty obvious that while she was labeled the “Most Progressive Senator” in the Senate, she was actually just adopted a bunch of far-left beliefs in order to make the online left happy.
Harris is actually way more dangerous than someone who could be the “Most Progressive Senator.” She is a blank slate and will adopt the positions she is told to. To an extent, she has a core, progressive ideology, but she has no driving principles and simply adopts whatever is most convenient at the time.
It’s impossible for someone like that to be authentic when she has no base personality and no driving ideological belief.
But still, she should probably be out there, people who have actually won campaigns, like David Axelrod, say.
“There’s a time at which you just have to barnstorm these battlegrounds,” said David Axelrod, the longtime Democratic operative who helped lead Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and was an early critic of President Joe Biden’s campaigning style. “These races are decathlons, and there are a lot of events, and you have to do all of them because people want to test you.”
“It’s the most difficult oral exam on the planet for the most difficult job, and part of that is just that spontaneous — town halls, all kinds of interviews, and not just friendly interviews. OTRs where you interact in a substantive way with people, all of those things are valuable,” he continued. “And I would be doing them if I were her.”
Yes, she absolutely should be visible right now, and she isn’t. That’s a big problem when the primary complaint of the electorate is that the government doesn’t see them and feel their pain (inflation, economy) and that the government isn’t actually interested in helping solve their problems (crime, illegal immigration).
Harris needs to be out there making her case to the people, and she isn’t. Instead, she is relying on the old Biden strategy when the conditions on the ground are completely different. And it very well may cost her.
