He's Winning This Right Now
And Harris' fawning media blitz didn't help much. It might even have hurt.
Andrew Sullivan
Oct 11

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(Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
A billion dollars is a lot of money, and Kamala Harris has reason to be extremely proud of raising that amount in less than three months. It’s roughly what Joe Biden raised in the entirety of 2020. Harris has also just completed a tour of fawning television interviews — from The View to Howard Stern to Stephen Colbert, who nudged, coached and celebrated their mutual idol. She had a terrific convention and, by everyone’s judgment, won the sole debate. The entire legacy media is behind her, at times embarrassingly so.

And yet, she’s obviously struggling to close the sale. At this point in 2020, Joe Biden, with far fewer resources than Harris, was 10 points ahead of Trump, and finished around 8.4 points ahead in the polling. Biden won the actual election by 4.5 percent, almost half the margin the polls predicted. At this point in 2016, Hillary Clinton was 6 points ahead, finished 3.6 points ahead in the polls, and ended up 2.1 percent ahead in the popular vote.

Run the numbers on Harris and you can begin to realize why smart Democrats are browning their whites. Today, Harris has a lead of just 2.6 percent nationally — much weaker than Clinton and Biden at this point. It’s the same in the swing states. Cillizza notes that in Pennsylvania at this point, Biden was +7 and Harris is barely +1; in Michigan, Biden was + 8, and Harris is tied. If the polls underestimated Trump's national support by 2.5 points in 2016 and by 4 points in 2020, and the skew continues, then we could well be looking at the first victory in the popular vote that Trump has ever won. More to the point, nothing is really shifting. If anything, there’s a slight drift back toward Trump right now.

The big infomercial push was obviously a response to this. So I dutifully sat down and listened to or watched Harris’ media appearances, to see if she had found a way to close the deal with undecideds. I wanted to hear her answer two baseline questions that are still unresolved in my own mind. Why do you want to be president? And what change would you bring to the White House and the country?

These are not hard questions. They’re the most fundamental to a presidential campaign, and having listened to her closely in these interviews, I still don’t know. She has quietly dropped many previous positions on the border, fracking, Medicare. And, yes, she has offered some new policies. It’s unfair to say she hasn’t by this point. But giveaways to first-time homeowners and entrepreneurs, and help with aging parents and money to new parents, have not exactly seized the public’s attention. She flounders when asked how she’d pay for them, and over all, they remind me of Churchill’s remark: “Take away this pudding! It has no theme.” “I was born in a middle-class family” doesn’t cut it.

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The closest Harris has gotten to articulating her agenda is the following, from the 60 Minutes interview:

In the last four years, I have been vice president of the United States. And I have been traveling our country. And I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground. I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people. Geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds. And what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus. Where we can figure out compromise and understand it’s not a bad thing, as long as you don’t compromise your values, to find common-sense solutions. And that has been my approach.

This is a classic Harris quote. It’s impossible to disagree with, but it’s also so empty that it’s hard even to agree with it either. It doesn’t tell us what she personally would push for before she’d compromise, what she really has conviction about, what she really believes in. In fact, the more I listened to her in these interviews, the more worried I became that she doesn’t actually believe in anything.

She’d have a Republican in the cabinet. Fine. Good, actually. But without substantive examples of possible compromises, apart from the Lankford bill (which was about expediting mass migration, not stopping it), it’s weak sauce compared to Make America Great Again, Cut Your Taxes, End the Wars, and Deport All The Illegals. Trump knows how to sell — in fourth grade language. Harris only knows how to charm elite liberals — in language only elite liberals use. It’s the only political skill she’s ever needed to have. And it’s not going to be enough.

And when directly asked what change she would bring compared with Biden, she actually said none. Twice! When only 28 percent of Americans think the country is on the right track! On The View, Harris said she’d have done nothing different in the last four years; on Colbert, she said the change was that she was “not Joe Biden” and that she was “not Donald Trump either.” When asked by 60 Minutes whether she regretted unprecedented levels of illegal mass migration and abuse of asylum laws, she said: “It’s a longstanding problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.” She doesn’t answer the questions in a way that makes it very clear she is not answering the questions.

Asked by 60 Minutes what her end-game would be in Ukraine, she said: “There will be no success in ending that war without Ukraine and the UN charter participating in what that success looks like.” Here’s her response to a question about Netanyahu: “We are not gonna stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.” FFS.

She also utters these platitudes as if she is revealing some profound and previously unheard-of truths. Perhaps in her mind she is, which is somewhat disconcerting. And I’m not sure that showing her being feted by Howard Stern, who acted like an over-excited fangirl, or by Stephen Colbert in front of a rapturous Manhattan audience, is going to win over the few undecideds in the Midwest.

In fact, choosing these pliant tools, far from dispelling the notion that Harris is scared of robust questioning, just reinforces it. “I don’t want you being made fun of,” Stern confessed. Colbert gushed, “I want to talk about the debate for a second, which was one of the greatest debate performances I had ever seen anyone do.” In my view, what Harris really needs to do is a Fox News townhall or a rollicking, risky press conference, where she takes command. (She has just agreed to a CNN townhall, which is encouraging.) Buttigieg can do it. So can every candidate in living memory. So why can’t she?

Because — let’s be honest — her team either fears or knows she may not be up to it. And this is bleeding obvious. A presidential campaign where you rarely face the press, never deal with a hostile interview, and never hold a presser is a campaign defined by fear. You can smell it from miles away. The same explains the one decision she says she made alone: picking Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro. Walz didn’t make her feel insecure. Shapiro did. So she went with Tim. Not a great sign for a future president.

Look: I’m voting for her. Or rather, I’m voting against Trump. (The most striking aspect of the various endorsements of Harris — from The New Yorker to The Atlantic — is that they were almost entirely about Trump.) But I’ll tell you this: catching Trump’s various podcast and radio spots gives a very different impression. He is as reckless as she is careful; as conversational and natural as she is stilted and scripted. He is much more comfortable in the new media universe than she is.

Check out his interview with Theo Von, and watch him and Theo talk about cocaine addiction; or see Trump’s appearance on comic Andrew Shulz’s show. Here’s Schulz bursting out laughing when Trump says he’s “a basically truthful person” — and Trump carries on. And here is Trump explaining his stream-of-consciousness rally speeches:

I call it the weave. What you do is you weave things in ... What you need is an extraordinary memory because you have to get back to where you started. I can go so far here or there. And I can come back to where I started. And some people think it's so genius. But the bad people they say he was rambling. It's not a ramble. It’s a weave!

Then he talks about his talent for giving his enemies nicknames, like “Tampon Tim.” He doesn’t use some because they don’t trip off the tongue, like “Comrade Kamala.” “You’ve got to be able to peewm,” he explains. The interview was less fawning than Call Her Daddy’s. At one point, Schulz interrupts Trump when he badmouths America now: “It’s always a great country.”

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Can Harris take a risk? Can she break out of this defensive, insecure crouch? Can she borrow just a smidgen of the fierce game Obama was showing last night? I hope so. But this, I fear, is who she is: reactive, insecure, with no real inner core. And the more you are exposed to her vacuousness, the more the whole fakery of it all sinks in, and the less conceivable she becomes as a president. She has to change that dynamic with something bold and risky. And she has around three weeks to do it.