Kamala Harris and that new car smell

If you felt the ground shaking, it was Democrats jumping for joy after dumping Joe Biden and settling on a new, more energetic replacement. Joe was the old clunker. Kamala has that new car smell.

The switcheroo raises three fundamental questions for the election. First: how long will Harris’s novelty last? Answer: until Labor Day, but probably not longer. Second: how does Harris deal with the Biden administration’s policy failures? Answer: by emphasizing a hopeful future with few details and avoiding talking about her role in the administration’s mistakes. Third: how does Harris deal with her record of very progressive positions, on tape from her last presidential run? Answer: by downplaying most of them, backing away from a few and emphasizing other issues: abortion rights, identity politics and “preserving democracy.”

Will she succeed? Answer: unlikely, and only if Republicans are slow to define her for voters as a “San Francisco socialist,” with few achievements and the kind of radical agenda that has destroyed California. She will be racing to define herself before Republicans can do it for her.

Down-ballot Democrats are delighted to ride shotgun for the nominee, less because they are convinced Harris will win and more because they were certain Biden would lose — and lose badly. Their own elections were jeopardized by Biden’s dismal prospects at the top of the ticket.

All Democratic candidates were being pulled down by Biden’s low poll numbers, his unpopular policies and his obvious health problems. How low were his poll numbers? Around 38 percent, the lowest since modern polling was developed, and an anvil around the ankles of other party candidates. That’s why none of them would stand on stage with Biden in Michigan, in what turned out to be his final campaign appearance. He was toxic.

Although Vice President Harris had been polling even lower than Biden before she replaced him, there are at least four strong signs Democrats see hope with her atop the ticket.

The first is the swift alignment of all Democratic officials, campaign operatives and mainstream media behind Harris for President. No human with a working brain still believes Will Rogers’s old joke, “I am not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” James Clyburn showed that efficient party organization in 2020 when he secured the nomination for Biden instead of the front-runner, Bernie Sanders. Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama showed it in 2024, when they worked behind the scenes to force Biden out of the race. The party’s nomenklatura showed it in July when they swiftly lined up behind Harris, not only as the nominee but as the uncontested nominee. An “open convention,” they knew, would destroy any chance of victory in November.

The media joined the party — their party — with full-throated support. True, as reporters, they should have relished the drama of an open convention. But their professional responsibilities pale beside their partisan commitments. They thirst for Democratic victory. It showed in their support for Biden when he was the near-certain nominee. It showed when the party elders and major donors turned against Biden and worked to oust him. The media fell in line behind Pelosi and Obama. And they are showing it now. They’re hanging out in the honeymoon suite with the new bride and ordering Champagne.

The second indicator of the Democrats’ fresh hopes is a significant bump in Harris’s initial poll numbers. Nationally, she is in a statistical tie with Donald Trump. In swing states, she is within the margin of error. If those poll numbers persist, she has a path to victory. Biden’s path had disappeared by the time he withdrew. Indeed, that’s why he was ousted. He didn’t jump. He was pushed.

Third, Harris’s polling has been reinforced by a surge of new campaign donations, including tens of millions from small donors. Even before those donations rolled in, she would have had enough money to run an effective media campaign. The new money, some $200 million since Biden withdrew, will pay for even more advertising and shows just how enthusiastic rank-and-file Democrats are.

Fourth, since Harris became the likely nominee, over 175,000 people have signed up to help her campaign. Multiple Democrats involved in swing-state campaigns have told me about a dramatic upturn in volunteers and enthusiasm. That’s also true of her Zoom calls to supporters. Those have been filled to capacity.

All these signs are real and undeniable. They will persist through the Democratic convention in late August and perhaps longer. Republicans ignore them at their peril.

Whether this newfound enthusiasm turns into victory depends on the answer to one overriding question: does support for Harris take firm hold among undecided voters or does it fade before the election as they learn about her policy positions?

Current polling cannot answer that question for two reasons. The first applies to all candidates: the election is still too distant to know who will actually vote. That’s why pollsters wait until Labor Day to begin focusing on “likely voters,” as opposed to “registered voters.” By then, people are more likely to know if they will actually vote. The second reason why poll numbers are “soft” applies specifically to Kamala Harris. Although she has great name ID, voters still don’t know much about her. Undecided voters certainly don’t. They know plenty about her opponent.

Because Harris is still ill-defined in voters’ minds, both parties will try hard — and fast — to shape that definition and lock it in. It’s unclear, for the moment, how Democrats will depict their candidate, beyond “fresh and new.” Republicans will depict her as a hard-left San Francisco socialist and try to lock in that perception before the nominee can define herself, or rather redefine herself (since she already has a public profile).

To counter the Republican strategy, Harris needs to drench herself in that new car smell and overwhelm the stench from three sulfurous sources: her close association with the Biden administration’s unpopular positions; her role leading its failed immigration strategies; and her far-left stances, all on tape from her failed 2019-20 campaign.

Republicans will flood the airways with those messages, depicting Harris as a “San Francisco leftist” with no positive achievements, either as a US senator or vice president, and plenty of disastrous failures, most notably on the southern border. They will link her tightly to Biden’s problems, including inflation.

It’s easy to demonstrate Harris’s connection to inflation. She presides over the Senate as vice president and used her position to cast a series of tie-breaking votes to pass a massive spending bill, oddly named the “Inflation Reduction Act.” (The irony was unintended.) Republicans will try to imprint that message before Harris can rebut it or spin some positive image of her own.

Naturally, Harris will try to wriggle out of her old, unpopular positions. All politicians do — and she’s no different. She will downplay her role in the administration’s policy failures and count on the media to help. If she could convince voters that she’s never met Biden, she would. You can be sure that she won’t appear with him often — and then only in Philadelphia, if there. She’ll have to appear with him at the convention. Republicans relish that. They will feature pictures of Kamala and Joe together, their hands raised.

Harris will also try to ignore her years in the Senate, where she accomplished almost nothing and voted in line with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Instead, she will play up her status as an experienced public official and play down anything she did in Washington.

Republicans will respond that she supported, promoted and helped implement a string of unpopular and unsuccessful policies, from immigration to inflation to the Afghanistan withdrawal. She was intimately involved in all of them.

In her early days on the campaign trail, she has ignored those unfortunate events, denied she was “border czar,” skipped over the Washington years and hearkened back to her days as California attorney general. That time-travel allows her to focus on her role as a prosecutor and repeatedly characterize Trump as a “convicted felon.”

Harris’s prosecutorial stance means she is doubling down on the Democrats’ lawfare strategy. While that certainly appeals to true-blue Democrats, it is far less popular with independents, who believe Biden’s Department of Justice and partisan local prosecutors have used the courts to attack their chief political opponent. That strategy, they think, is worse than a misuse of the courts. It is a frontal attack on the country’s foundational legal principles, which are that prosecutions should go after crimes, not persons, and the rule of law should be blind and fair to everyone. It should never be used to go after political opponents because they are political opponents. Does Harris have a positive message? Not much, so far. It is mostly a gauzy and ambiguous vision that matches Barack Obama’s “Hope and Change” for vagueness. That was a great message for Obama — and Harris is implicitly repeating it with her constant references to the future. That focus paints Trump as the candidate of the past: an old man, a former president and the person responsible for January 6. Harris’s own vision for the future, like Obama’s in 2008, is a Rorschach test. You can read whatever you wish into it.

It’s hard to know what independent voters will see. Whatever it is, it won’t work nearly as well as “Hope and Change” for two reasons. First, Obama was a far better salesman and a far more appealing one. (Harris seems to have worked with media specialists and has improved as a campaigner, but she’s no Obama or Bill Clinton.) Second, Obama was running against the party in power. Harris is not. She is second-in-command of the party that holds the White House and the Senate.

When you’ve held power for four years, it’s hard to persuade voters you are the beacon of change, unless those changes are more radical and expansive than those of the Biden administration. That’s not a winning strategy. So, Harris will try to paint a hopeful future without many details.

The Trump campaign will respond by depicting her as an integral part of the Biden White House and an advocate for multiple failed policies. Their pitch: she is the most senior official on border issues, a champion of the Green New Deal, a proponent of “Medicare for All” (which would bankrupt that program) and an advocate of free healthcare for the millions of illegal immigrants she and Joe Biden let into the country. She favors an end to cash bail and wants felons in jail to vote in elections. The record is clear: she’s on tape for all of them.

All those positions are deeply unpopular with swing voters in swing states. Trump is sure to highlight them, especially inflation, illegal immigration and energy costs. So far, however, the Trump campaign has been sluggish in launching an attack. Republican candidates for Senate have already begun, linking their opponents to Biden and Harris. But Trump hasn’t done so nationally. He will.

It is a race between Republicans trying to permanently brand Kamala Harris with those unpopular policy positions and Harris rushing to portray herself favorably, stressing the prospect of the first female president and reminding voters of Donald Trump’s own long list of negatives.

The question is whether Kamala’s EV will lose that new-car smell before Trump zooms past in his gas-powered muscle car.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2024 World edition.