It is, to say the least, a weird election season. Kamala Harris, the incumbent vice president, is positioning herself as the “change candidate.” While at the same time impersonating the incumbent president by, for example, complaining that Ron DeSantis won’t talk to her–he talks to President Biden instead.
But of course she doesn’t mean it, and she doesn’t expect anyone to take her “change” theme seriously. Thus:
Imagine being outsmarted by … Sunny Hostin. My god. https://t.co/FfpavtQrea
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) October 8, 2024
Harris is stuck with Joe Biden’s record, which she doesn’t really seem to mind. Joe didn’t mind either, when he was the candidate.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that Harris is having trouble attracting blue collar voters:
Democrats have privately grown worried about Kamala Harris’s standing among working-class voters in the crucial “blue-wall” states—particularly in Michigan.
No surprise there. Some Democrats want her to demagogue the economy more by attacking “billionaires,” most of whom are Democrats. She has been doing this, but not very convincingly. She lacks the edge of meanness that effective demagogues like Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden have. No one imagines that “billionaires” will have any trouble with Kamala Harris.
Harris is criticized for flip-flopping, and it is true that she has abandoned (or at least no longer asserts) what were claimed to be her core political convictions a couple of cycles ago. But this criticism misses the mark. The salient point is that she is not Donald Trump. That is her platform, and always has been. Further: she can read a teleprompter with fair facility, and doesn’t fall down. Thus she will run a couple of points better than Biden would have.
That is a thin basis on which to premise a presidential campaign, but at the moment she has a 50/50 chance of being our next president. Nothing she realistically could have done would have changed those odds much.
