After Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election in 2016, many on the left criticized her campaign for making a variety of mistakes, including not campaigning in Wisconsin. Of course, back then, the polls all showed her comfortably ahead. You almost couldn't blame her entirely, since the narrative at the time was that she had anywhere from a 75% to a 99% chance of winning the election.
But 2024 is nothing like 2016. The Kamala Harris campaign has zero reasons to think it has this election in the bag.
13 days until Election Day! Here’s how the 2024 presidential race compares to the same point in the 2020 and 2016 elections, according to the RCP poll averages. pic.twitter.com/hazUBIZctw
— Matt Margolis (@mattmargolis) October 23, 2024
Everyone is saying this race is going to be close, and that's what the polls are showing. We're now just two weeks until Election Day, when every moment is critical, and the Harris-Walz campaign is very much aware of Clinton's mistakes in 2016 and has no intention of repeating them.
Yet it's starting to look like they are. Kamala's campaign schedule has been blasted for being light compared to Donald Trump's — despite her campaign's claims that Trump is the one who is canceling events due to exhaustion. On Tuesday, she wasn't on the campaign trail at all. She was in Washington, D.C., preparing for two interviews.
14 days to go. Zero events in battleground states. Hunkered down in interview prep. pic.twitter.com/u8BCTkeK8B
— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) October 22, 2024
Why wasn’t she out campaigning? Why did she put her campaign on hold just to prep for two interviews? After three months on the trail, she shouldn’t need extra preparation. This comes right after Trump’s highly successful visit to McDonald’s, making her absence even more glaring.
If that wasn't bizarre enough, Kamala is once again off the campaign trail.
Harris: For the second day in a row, and with 13 days to go, zero rallies. Just travel and prep for a CNN appearance this evening. pic.twitter.com/DC9LBlJ858
— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) October 23, 2024
It's easy to make jokes about Kamala being the exhausted one, not Trump, but I think that distracts from the real issue here. On Tuesday, Tim Walz was campaigning with Barack Obama in Wisconsin and is expected to be in Kentucky on Wednesday. Kamala is also going to Texas on Friday.
Related: EXCLUSIVE: Rasmussen Reports Talks Polling in the Final Weeks of the Presidential Campaign
Why are Harris and Walz wasting time in red states they have no chance of winning, especially during such a tight race and after Kamala has already spent two days off the campaign trail? Yes, Trump visited Montana — a state he’s sure to win — back in August, but that trip was to boost Tim Sheehy, who is now leading in the polls and poised to unseat Democrat Sen. Jon Tester. There’s a clear difference in strategy here. We're too close to an election for Kamala and Walz to be spending time boosting down-ballot races.
Meanwhile, Mark Cuban is going out there to push Kamala's economic plans, and Bruce Springsteen is now planning to headline rallies in swing states.
Are you noticing a pattern? It looks like the campaign strategy in the final weeks is for there to be less Kamala, more Obama, Bill Clinton, and more popular surrogates and celebrities. Her rally in Detroit had a whole slate of people speaking, including Lizzo, and then Kamala showed up and spoke for less than seven minutes. She's not even the star of her own campaign.
One might think the campaign has realized that the problem it has closing the sale with the American people is Harris. This, of course, makes sense since she was the most unpopular vice president in the history of polling before her undemocratic ascension to the top of the ticket artificially inflated her approval ratings.
It looks like the Harris-Walz campaign is hiding her. They're relying on celebrities to generate interest in her rallies, and she's spending her time doing a few select interviews that she's spending all day prepping for. The campaign knows the biggest obstacle it has in this campaign is its candidate.
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