Jump ball, deadlock, coin flip, tossup. We’re running out of election metaphors.
Everyone’s texting each other, every interaction turns quickly to “Whaddaya think, what’s gonna happen?” You feel an urgency but also a sincerity: They honestly don’t know.
Kamala Harris holds a close lead in the nationwide polls, Donald Trump in several battlegrounds. I think there’s probably still an “undercover” Trump vote; I suspect a lot of the undecided are Trump voters who can’t admit it to themselves or are waiting to see something from Ms. Harris that makes them think: her.
We’re braced for October surprises and black swans. Maybe the swans—the Mideast, deadly, historic floods in neck-and-neck North Carolina—have already swum by. Maybe not.
Still, I have a sneaking feeling maybe the table’s set more than we know, that if the nation voted today, it would produce about the same outcome we’ll see on the morning of Nov. 6. And if you could jump ahead and be told the result, you would quickly be able to explain it to yourself. “I don’t think people liked her that much.” “They just didn’t want to go back to his chaos.” “She didn’t feel like a turning of the page but more of the same.” “He seemed at the end more insane than even my husband could tolerate.”
Were I a Harris supporter I would be concerned about these things:
The first is so obvious it barely needs saying, but with a month to go should be said again. She still hasn’t given voters a satisfying sense of what she is about, what the purpose of her political career is. She hasn’t fleshed out her political intent—what she stands for, what she won’t abide, what she means to establish, what she won’t let happen.
What is her essential mission? Is it national “repair,” is it to “stabilize” an uncertain country, is it “relaunch”? Is it “more from the top for the bottom, period”? Is it “America as defender of democracy in the world”? Is it about focusing—now, first, and until something works—on the high daily cost of living? When things can’t be reduced to their essentials it’s because they’re not real, there’s nothing to reduce. She so far hasn’t conveyed a sense of intellectual grasp.
Her campaign has placed too many chips on the idea of the mood, the vibe, the picture. “She’s bringing us a politics of joy,” Gov. Tim Walz said, again, in his summation the other night in the vice-presidential debate. But look, “the politics of joy” didn’t help Hubert Humphrey when he used exactly those words in his announcement for the presidency in April 1968. The country was becoming undone by Vietnam and he was talking about . . . joy? It made no one smile or feel inspired except his opponent, Richard Nixon.
It didn’t do Mayor John Lindsay any good in 1966, in the middle of a transit strike and other municipal strikes, with crime starting to creep up, when he called New York “fun city.”
He meant to sound upbeat. It came across as cheery mindlessness, a deep cluelessness. New Yorkers resented it. Doesn’t this guy know what time it is?
Americans feel surrounded by crises—inflation, the Mideast, Vladimir Putin, AI’s gonna eat your brain and no one’s gonna stop it, China. You can see this in the right track/wrong track numbers, which continue underwater—the whole country fears we’re on a losing slide in a dangerous world.
They feel like Brad Pitt as Billy Beane in the movie “Moneyball.” The Oakland A’s have lost another one, and the manager, Beane, walks by the locker room and hears music. He walks in, the players are dancing and joking, and he slams a bat against the wall to silence them. “Is losing fun?” he asks them.
They shake their heads. “What are you having fun for?”
That’s more like how people feel. Is losing fun? Then why are you proclaiming joy and having fun?
If I were a Trump supporter I would be worried about what Trump supporters have worried about since he came down the escalator, that he is squandering it away every day. Voters and observers have spent a decade saying “he’s getting crazier,” “he’s going too far,” and they’re always right and are right now. He’s selling $100,000 watches and having Truth Social meltdowns, free-associating about movies and dribbling away arguments. Ms. Harris insists almost to the point of credibility that the Biden-Harris administration didn’t let the border be overwhelmed, the Biden-Harris administration tried to control the border and put forward the toughest bill and Donald Trump stopped it. And she’s getting away with it! With the Jan. 6 filings released this week, his focus is sure to return to the endless murk and mire of personal grievance.
What should both sides be watching now? John Ellis, in his Political News Items Substack, notes an intriguing sidebar from a recent Gallup survey. “Nearly identical percentages of US adults rate Donald Trump (46%) and Kamala Harris (44%) favorably in Gallup’s latest Sept 3-15 poll.” But both candidates have higher unfavorable ratings than favorable. Mr. Trump’s unfavorable rating is 7 points higher than his favorable—and Ms. Harris’s is 10 points higher. Her favorable numbers have “moderated” since her rise to the nomination, while Mr. Trump’s are up 5 points since last month.
Look at the numbers involving independent voters, Mr. Ellis continues. Majorities of independents view Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris unfavorably, but he holds a favorability edge over her with independents, at 44% vs. 35%. More: “Assuming the poll is accurate”—he does—“the fact that 60 percent of independents have an ‘unfavorable’ opinion of Harris is surprising.” In 2020, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump among independents, 52% to 43%.
Back to the Harris campaign. It’s odd that some political professionals think nobody cares if she does an interview with some newspaper. When all the public sees is scripted stuff, punctuated infrequently by an interview with a highly respectful and sympathetic interviewer, they pick it up. They get a sense that something is being hidden from them. Well-produced rallies with good enough speeches and softball interviews won’t really cut it. In Hollywood they used to try to soften the picture of a star losing her luster by putting a coat of Vaseline on the camera lens, to soften the focus. The Harris campaign is using too much metaphoric Vaseline, and it feels not like an attempt to soften but to obscure.
It would be better if she’d done interview after interview from day one of her candidacy, and better if her campaign had accepted the wobbles, accepted the imperfections, gotten people rooting for her, and helped her get more at ease, more confident, and let her build. That they didn’t implies they didn’t think she could build.
Hiding in plain sight works for a while but not forever.
Is there time to make a change? There’s time to throw a long ball, and that would consist of greater exposure of their candidate. There’s a month to go. Everyone’s still watching, talking and texting.