Despite all the positive signs for Donald Trump, the presidential election isn’t over. That said, it looks like everyone is starting to realize that Kamala Harris isn’t the savior that Democrats hoped she’d be. Oh sure, there were a lot of positive vibes and joy in the early days, but where has that gone?
Frankly, we all knew this was going to happen.
Joe Biden won the Democratic Party nomination in 2020 because he was branded a centrist who could actually win in a general election. Kamala Harris, on the other hand, ended her presidential campaign before the Iowa caucuses because her party rejected her. And why wouldn’t they? She’s a San Francisco liberal they weren’t willing to trust at the top of the ticket. If I were a Democrat, I wouldn’t have trusted Kamala either.
And the vice presidency didn’t help her overcome her weakness. Before the palace coup that ousted Joe Biden from the race, Kamala was the the least popular vice president in history. If she loses, you can expect her approval rating to return to the pre-Biden dropout norms. The only reason Democrats rallied behind her is because Joe Biden endorsed her off the bat, and they had a binary choice: rally behind her or endure a divisive process to select Biden’s replacement.
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So, Democrats were stuck, and despite a surge in approval and a boost in match-up polls, the race is fundamentally no different than it was when Joe Biden was the nominee. Trump is still more popular than he’s ever been, and Americans are sour on the economy and the border crisis. The conditions were never favorable for the Democratic Party in this election—hence why none of the Democrats who clearly are planning a presidential campaign even tried to challenge Kamala’s ascension to the top of the ticket.
At the time, it seemed like Democrats had written off the presidency, and Kamala was a sacrificial lamb. It made a lot of sense. Unlike Joe Biden, Kamala has zero ability to connect with blue collar voters in the Rust Belt states that form the “blue wall”: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
Lo and behold, Kamala is not only running behind both Joe Biden in 2020 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, she is now trailing in all of the battleground states that will decide this election.
17 days until Election Day! Here’s how the 2024 presidential race looks compared to the same date during the 2020 and 2016 elections, according to the RCP poll averages. pic.twitter.com/WJxbqq3Ugd
— Matt Margolis (@mattmargolis) October 19, 2024
Trump’s lead in the polls may be marginal, but when you consider how much the polls were off in 2016 and 2020, it would only take a fraction of a similar polling error to put Trump comfortably ahead in the states that will decide this election.
This shift was inevitable. Kamala is a terrible campaigner who thought she could get away with not doing any interviews for weeks, and she still hasn’t done a single press conference. Yet she's trying to accuse Trump of being too "exhausted" to do media appearances. She spent weeks avoiding unscripted media appearances, and when she finally started doing them, they were with friendly networks with interviewers who openly support her. She's trying to hit Trump on his age and stamina now because, frankly, the issues aren't working for her.
The reason why Kamala changed her media blackout strategy to a media blitz strategy is that the polls were telling her that the voters wanted to know more about her and her vision. Voters know Donald Trump and have already made up their minds about him. Yet, she hasn't figured that out yet. She won't get anywhere trying to give people reasons to vote against Trump, she needs to give voters a reason to support her, and she's proving once again she has no idea how to do that.
