With two months left in this election, Kamala Harris is facing a serious challenge: she wants to sell herself as a fresh start, yet she’s struggling to separate from the baggage of the failed Biden-Harris administration. She keeps pushing her potential “new way forward,” but what does that even mean? It’s not clear. Where exactly does she differ from Biden? What policies would she change? So far, Harris has failed to adequately explain how her presidency would deviate from Biden’s failures.
How can she when she’s been his vice president for almost four years?
Ian Sams, the Harris-Walz campaign’s senior national spokesperson, tried really, really hard during a recent CNN interview, but his performance left much to be desired. When asked by host Kassie Hunt why Harris was breaking from Biden on key policies like the capital gains tax, Sams dodged and immediately pivoted to attacking Donald Trump.
This is Team Kamala's go-to strategy to deflect from the reality that they have no idea how to sell Kamala and what she's proposing. Even when they do have something to say about her policies, we get the same old recycled talking points we’ve been hearing for years about how Republicans want to give tax cuts to the rich and Democrats want to give tax cuts to the middle class.
Of course, this conflicts with the fact that, as Hunt pointed out, working-class voters—white and minority alike—are flocking to Trump. And it is hardly surprising that Sams had no real answer to this.
Instead, he brushed off the question, implying the campaign wasn’t concerned with analyzing demographics. “What the vice president does as a candidate is take her message to the voters,” he claimed.
Sams couldn’t explain why Harris’s economic pitch is falling flat with working-class Americans, so instead, he resorted to platitudes and empty rhetoric, evading the critical issue of voter dissatisfaction.
Recommended: Election ‘Nostradamus’ Predicts Kamala Victory, but There’s a HUGE Problem
The real kicker came when Hunt pressed Sams again on what exactly made Harris’s economic proposals different from the Biden-Harris administration’s policies. Hunt laid it out clearly: Democrats have been in charge for nearly four years, yet these working-class voters are now siding with Trump. She asked, “Why—what is it about what you guys have been doing for the last three-plus years that explains that?”
Sams’ response? He admitted they don’t have time to “sit around and think about why” things haven’t worked out because they’re too busy trying to win the election. Seriously? The campaign can’t be bothered to reflect on its failures, but we’re supposed to believe Harris is going to offer something new?
Then, there was the laughable moment when Sams tried to convince viewers that Harris’s platform was “really different” and stumbled over himself.
"And it's—and it's really different. It's really different. It's a new way forward, not only for the Democratic Party but for the country. It's the—that the—that the—"
But when Hunt asked how it was different and for specifics beyond the capital gains rate, Sams could only mention Harris’s so-called ban on corporate price gouging—a policy mocked by experts across the political spectrum.
Harris-Walz Spokesman: We Don't Have Time To Think About Why Certain Things Happened Over The Last Few Years pic.twitter.com/m9IpZrDYP1
— RCP Video (@rcpvideo) September 5, 2024
It’s clear the Harris campaign is hoping they can slide into the White House on “vibes” alone, without any real substance. They want us to believe she'll be different without really explaining how or why.
