Kamala Harris hits the election homestretch… but who is she?

The first presidential debate of 2024 changed history by killing off Joe Biden’s career. The second presidential debate was nowhere near as dramatic, for the simple reason that it did not feature the president.

Instead, Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice president and now the Democratic Party’s nominee, stood on stage at the National Constitution Center in Pennsylvania on Tuesday night and presented herself as a sort of change candidate for continuity, or perhaps a continuity candidate for change. This audacious move ought to be highly implausible, yet so far she seems to have got away with it. Certainly, by any fair measure, she won the debate and was duly rewarded with an endorsement from Taylor Swift and her cat on Instagram.

Republicans had dared to hope that, having avoided proper scrutiny since she suddenly emerged as the nominee over the summer, Harris would at last be exposed. They forgot that when it comes to one-on-one intellectual sparring matches with candidates who aren’t senile, Donald Trump tends to be very bad indeed.

A skilled politician could have unpicked Harris’s act, but Trump couldn’t

Harris was fluent. Trump was not. He talked about Haitian immigrants eating dogs. She stuck to well-rehearsed lines about the need for America to “turn the page on the same old tired rhetoric” — and, as if to prove the point, succeeded in baiting him into a silly rant about the greatness of his rallies when he should have been talking about his strongest subject, immigration.

Naturally, Trump and his spokespeople are now grumbling about the flagrant bias of ABC, the channel which hosted the debate. And it’s true that ABC’s moderators repeatedly fact-checked Trump’s more dubious assertions, whereas Harris’s false claims went unchallenged. But whining about a “three versus one” contest rightly strikes non-Trumpists as sour grapes. A skilled politician could have unpicked Harris’s act, but Trump couldn’t.

Still, his failure was not a complete Biden-style meltdown. The Trump train will chug on, and one bad night will no more derail his candidacy than his terrible performance in the first debate against Hillary Clinton did in 2016. Then, as now, the presidential election is a toss-up which will be decided by a very small number of voters in several key battleground states. Then, as now, an “October surprise” — a dramatic news event in the run-up to election day — could sway the election one way or the other.

Before Tuesday, Harris’s campaign had appeared to be losing momentum. Over the weekend, a big New York Times poll suggested that despite Harris’s recent success, Trump is more likely to win in November. Team Harris will have been distressed to learn that only one third of respondents think he is “too far to the right,” whereas nearly half believe that she is too left-wing.

“Talk about extreme,” Harris said repeatedly on Tuesday, in an apparent attempt to address that disparity. Her problem is that she appears unable to understand why so many voters don’t accept the Democratic view of Trump as a purely malevolent force. Hillary Clinton had the same mental block, which is one of the reasons that the race is as close and as tense as it was in September eight years ago.

That said, Harris does have advantages over Trump which Clinton did not. To the electorate she’s a fresh candidate, unlike Trump, who is now on his third run for the White House. She has been vice-president for almost four years, but the surprising and sudden way her campaign began gives her candidacy a certain freedom. To adapt her gnomic catchphrase, Harris can be unburdened by what she has been — at least as far as committed Democrats are concerned. She benefits not only from the enduring power of Trump hatred but from the widespread relief that poor, dysfunctional Biden is no longer running.

It’s worth noting, too, that Election Day matters less now than it did in 2016. Thanks to the growing prevalence of postal and early in-person voting, America in 2024 has more of an election season. Voting will start in earnest this month in several of the most important swing states.

In 2020, because of Covid, some 72 percent of US voters cast their ballot in advance of the November deadline. That number should go down this year — though nobody knows by how much. What’s almost certain, however, is that more early voting will be good news for Democratic candidates. Biden would never have reached the White House in 2020 if the only votes that counted were cast on Election Day. In the case of Harris, mass early voting also means her superior debate performance will matter more than it might have done in the past. Trump’s on-screen flailing will be in the minds of many voters as they cast their ballots.

None of that exactly makes Harris a strong candidate, however. “You’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me,” she told Trump, schoolmarmishly, on Tuesday. But who is she, what does she stand for, and how might her presidency differ from Joe Biden’s? Trump may have failed to pin her on these questions, but they remain unanswered.

We know that Harris has been an unpopular vice president. We know that just a few weeks ago, Democratic insiders were insisting that the hopeless Biden must stagger on because Harris would be even worse. We know that she ran a disastrous presidential campaign in 2020, in which she supported highly unpopular positions such as government-funded sex change surgeries for illegal immigrants and a ban on oil and gas fracking. What we don’t know is whether she has ever said anything she means, or whether she can succeed in convincing enough voters to suspend their disbelief and accept her as something new, which she clearly isn’t.

Harris is trying to distance herself from her old radical positions and put herself forward as a politician whom moderate, even Republican-leaning Americans can support. She wants to differentiate herself from Biden even while she boasts about leading his administration on healthcare, infrastructure projects and tackling climate change. But when only 25 percent of Americans are “satisfied with the way the country is going,” can she really expect voters to reward her for these proud accomplishments?

On Sunday evening, the Harris campaign finally attempted to color in her clear lack of substance by posting an “issues” section on its website. This backfired when analysis of the page’s “source code” revealed that many passages were lifted directly from the old Biden literature.

It’s all pabulum, anyway, Harris promises to “safeguard our freedom” and build an “opportunity economy” by restoring tax cuts to benefit 100 million Americans. She’ll take on “Big Pharma.” She’ll “make rent more affordable” and provide $25,000 grants to first-time home buyers. She’ll “take on bad actors and bring down costs” by imposing “the first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging.” She’ll “support American innovation” and “do more” to improve education and “invest in affordable childcare.”

Political manifestos tend to be conspicuously vague and it’s not as if Trump has ever been a master of detail. When challenged on his confusing proposals for government “Medicare” on Tuesday, he said only that he had “concepts of a plan.”

But everybody knows, more or less, what Trump will at least pretend to stand for. Harris, on the other hand, is enigmatic to the point of absurdity, and the few specific-sounding new ideas she has put forward unravel on close inspection. Rent controls and federal attempts to force down prices strike many voters as un-American — and most experts as highly likely to drive inflation back up, not down.

At the weekend, a big poll suggested that despite Harris’s recent success, Trump is more likely to win

Harris’s best pitch as a “change agent” stems not from her politics or character, but from her gender and her ancestry. She is half-Indian, half-Jamaican and would, if victorious, be the first woman president. In identity-obsessed twenty-first century America, that counts for a lot. Millions of voters may be fed up with the hyper-progressivism of the Democratic elite, but millions more have been trained by the American education system to view the world almost entirely through the lenses of race and sex.

More women than men have voted in every election since 1980 and the majority of women vote Democrat. Among young women, according to one poll, Harris commands a staggering 67 to 29 percent lead over Trump. That divide can partly be attributed to the widespread sense that Trump is a vile misogynist. But it’s more down to the one issue Harris is clearest on: her commitment to protect what is euphemistically called “reproductive freedom.”

Ever since Trump-appointed justices on the Supreme Court helped overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Republicans have found themselves losing elections because huge numbers of voters support abortion and believe the Democratic argument that the bodily rights of women are under assault. Trump recognizes that the “life issue” has become a major electoral weakness. He has in recent weeks tried to distance himself from the more conservative Christian position of many in his party. He insists he is the moderate, since he believes abortion should be allowed in cases of rape and incest, or when the life of the mother is in danger. But even that sounds dangerously reactionary to today’s progressive mindset. Trump may eventually discover that, as with other culture-war debates, the middle ground is vanishing.

At the same time, the Trump campaign knows that the majority of American voters care far more about cost of living and immigration — and on those two subjects their man still has the edge, even if he failed to land any significant blows in Pennsylvania.

The Harris campaign can keep pointing to figures which show that inflation is slowing, but voters are still reeling from the massive post-Covid spike in prices, which was made worse by the Biden administration’s massive spending. Democrats can trumpet the resilience of the American economy as proof that “Bidenomics” has worked. But the markets are jittering and Americans consistently tell pollsters that they feel worse off now than when Trump was in charge.

On immigration, Team Harris will continue to insist that she wasn’t really in charge when an unprecedented surge in illegal crossings began at the start of the Biden administration. But the truth is that she accepted the role of “Biden’s border czar” and she failed spectacularly. Republicans have plenty of video evidence to prove their case.

Meanwhile, the election rolls on to its next big set piece, which will probably be the debate between Tim Walz and J.D. Vance on October 1. Vance has been criticized this week for recycling the same unverified story Trump told about Haitians in Ohio eating pets. Yet Democrats can hardly claim to be the grown-ups: Walz has made snide jokes about the even less credible rumors about J.D. Vance having sex with his sofa.

Anything goes in 2024.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.