Democrats I talk to these days are in an “uncanny valley” about the election. The phrase comes from a famed Japanese robot researcher, Masahiro Mori, via Hayes Brown at MSNBC, about the revulsion people might feel towards robots as they become more human-like. Mori found very lifelike figures at wax museums unsettling as a child and noticed the same uncanny valley in his robotics work. Democrats also feel odd about Harris, with the presidency tantalizingly within her grasp and knowing it could easily elude her. They express deep unease, even dismay, about her chances.
While Vice President Kamala Harris is ahead by a sliver in all the states she needs to win, some Democrats feel she is running out of gas, her well-financed campaign hitting a wall of pain. This could be unnecessary anxiety—or not.
Consider this: Her jocose running mate, Tim Walz, can be more distracting than reinforcing. The other day, he called for the abolition of the Electoral College, which is a sound idea. Still, it’s not going to move voters in Savannah and Sheboygan, and it’s also not going to happen when a constitutional amendment requires approval of two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the states, many small and given outsized influence by the antiquated mechanism. So why get into it with just days to go?
Harris has gotten the big things right—the convention and the debate. She’s done fine in the interviews. But now she needs to tighten up on the best arguments to avoid the growing, perhaps misguided, sense that Trump can win and might even win handily.
Harris can’t rely on the traditional “ground game” in the swing states, a version of “shoemaker stick to your last.” This involves knocking on doors to get lethargic, uncommitted voters to go to the polls. According to the Harris campaign, they have already visited 600,000 voters personally and made over three million calls through 63,000 volunteer shifts. This may work. And Democrats are helped that Trump has outsourced most of his get-out-the-vote operation to conservative ideologues like Turning Point. But GOTV only moves so many votes, as the Washington Monthly’s Bill Scher has noted, maybe less than a point. That may be enough, maybe not.
The real challenge for Harris at this point is messaging. First, that means avoiding errors, which she’s done mostly. Saying she had no differences with Joe Biden save for putting a Republican in the cabinet was a lost moment. “I’m not Trump” and “I’m not Biden” aren’t enough. She must assert forcefully, “I am Harris.”
Her appearances on talk shows, interviews, and podcasts have showcased her undeniable charm and command of the issues, particularly her long “Call Her Daddy” session, which focused on reproductive and women’s rights. But her affect can appear nebulous in response to questions like the one from an undecided voter at the Univision Town Hall: “[I am] concerned about the way I feel President Biden was pushed aside. How can you clarify this?”
As a former federal prosecutor, I know a stirring summation can erase a reasonable doubt. A colleague once said to me: “summation is when you give the jury a kick in the ass.”
Harris still has time to kick ass with her closing argument. She recently made an excellent, forceful speech in Pennsylvania denouncing Trump’s plan to use the National Guard or even the military to arrest his political enemies and in the media. She needs to make more.
She did a radio interview with The Breakfast Club cohost Charlamagne Tha God and appeared on Howard Stern’s show to reach Black and young male voters. She’s done swell on Fox News and may do Joe Rogan. That won’t satisfy The New York Times, which will grumble until the Gray Lady sits down with Harris. But Harris has answered enough questions.
She needs to do more than reassure, which is what the interviews did. She must raise the alarms about Trump one last time but more forcefully. This can only be accomplished by major speeches in swing states making the case that the Trump of 2024 is more of a menace to the country than the Trump of 2020 and 2016.
Relitigating the past is not a winner. Too many voters are suffering from amnesia. Forgotten is Trump’s miserable record, which led historians to easily dub him the worst American president. Forgotten are those who served by his side who say he should be allowed nowhere near the Oval. Forgotten is the fact he has been convicted by a jury of 34 felonies and by two other juries as someone who sexually assaulted a woman. Forgotten are the events of January 6, when he sat in the White House for over two hours watching his supporters assault the Capitol to stop his electoral defeat. And forgotten is even the present. The economy is good, and Americans stubbornly think it’s sour and have a more favorable view of the economy under Trump than they did when he was president.
So, Harris should go all out on Democratic staples like health care and reproductive rights, showing how Trump will make things much worse if he wins a second term.
JD Vance gave Harris a gift with his bald-faced lie in the vice-presidential debate, saying that Trump saved the Affordable Care Act. He did everything he could to kill it, from opposing it in court, pressing Congress to overturn it, and defunding it by a thousand cuts. Trump has no plan, he said in the debate. Only “concepts of a plan.” The millions of Americans who rely on the Affordable Care Act or fear they might need to be reminded that Trump can take it away. And that includes the Medicaid expansion that makes health care possible for millions. Everything about the bad old days of getting denied for preexisting conditions can come flying back.
On the economy, Harris probably can’t shake the erroneous view held by many Americans that the economy was better four years under Trump. But she can make the case that a crazier Trump, the Trump of 2024, unchecked by normal Republicans, will make the economy much worse in two years. Trump’s tariff lunacy is a surefire recipe for inflation and recession. Recently, in Chicago, he talked of “automatic” tariffs of 10 percent to 20 percent on every U.S. trading partner, 60 percent levies on goods from China, and rates as high as 100, 200, or even 1,000 percent in other circumstances. His tax cuts and slashing programs to help the middle class, like student loans, augur economic ruin.
On abortion, she can’t allow any complacency in the swing states where reproductive rights seem safe for the moment—Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Too many voters may be thinking that things are safe where they live. She has to make it clear that all abortion rights are on the line if Congress passes a national ban and Trump signs it, despite his worthless protestations that he won’t.
There’s nothing more powerful or fearsome than the idea of losing something you have. Americans saw that with abortion.
Harris needs to remind voters that the Roberts Court could easily guarantee the right to buy contraceptives, famously established in Griswold v. Connecticut. And it could quickly empower states to forbid citizens from traveling to other states for abortions. It could come back and end the ability to purchase the so-called abortion pill through the mail, even though it punted on such a decision last term. And that’s a 6-3 conservative court. If Sonia Sotomayor were to leave the court for health reasons, a 7-2 Trump Court would be unstoppable.
On immigration, she needs to keep reminding voters that when a bipartisan bill could have been swiftly passed, Trump killed it. He was more interested in having the issue than accomplishing its solution, and she needs to remind wavering Hispanic voters that Trump’s massive roundups could send those who are here legally back just as quickly as those who are not. Many of the Haitians Trump wants to be deported for “eating” pets have resident status.
Harris often notes that in foreign affairs, Trump’s policy is to abandon Ukraine to Putin, whom he says can do “whatever the hell he wants” there. However, she can frame the issue more toughly as American power and interests than charity for beleaguered allies. The Trump of 2024 isn’t willing to push hard enough for America in the Mideast, Asia, and Europe. Foreign powers have his number.
Many lawyers I talk to who plan to vote for Trump argue that there will be guard rails, whatever that is, or “adults in the room” preventing Trump from going full fascist. Some guard rails! If the Republicans retake the Senate, keep the House, and get a 7-2 Republican extremist Supreme Court, there will be no “checks and balances,” no stopping Trump in his campaign to “terminate the Constitution” and replace democracy. “He would never do that,” my lawyer friends will answer. But the lesson of history is that autocrats do just what they say they will do and that conservative parties that think they can contain the fascists never can.
And, as for adults in the room, an adviser opposing what he wants will be fired or, as he threatens, arrested. No wonder Trump’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, called Trump a “fascist.” Quite an indictment from a distinguished military officer.
Harris’s approach does not need to be about Trump’s first term. It can be that he’s weirder, more disoriented, and darker than before. The approach should be that the 78-year-old’s current policies will be bad for you and America. They will cost you money, weaken national security, take your health care, and put the government in your bedroom.
Harris has already said, “We have so much more in common than what separates us.” But it is worthwhile to hammer home that alternate facts and lies should alarm us all; waging war on the rule of law and a free press weakens our society’s underpinnings, and delegitimizing elections undermines our national unity and tradition.
Harris can warn of the significant dangers of a Trump presidency, not because he has turned gaga but because his policies will sink us. Latinos, Muslims, and Black men who seem wary of Kamala Harris must have their faith restored. There’s no need to relitigate kids-in-cages. Looking at Trump’s current policies should be enough. Shouldn’t Latinos be wary of mass deportations that will separate families?
Black populations amount to 15 percent or more in swing states such as North Carolina, Georgia, and Michigan. CBS reports that 87 percent of Black voters favor Harris (equal to what Biden polled in 2020). However, there is the caveat that “the likelihood of turnout for Black voters lags that of White voters.”
So, Harris must put on what Politico calls a “black men blitz.” After all, shouldn’t Black men reject a candidate who speaks dismissively of “Black jobs” and has no plans to help them get ahead while she does? Voters must be prodded to go to the polls. But fighting to convince Americans that they were miserable under Trump isn’t going to be enough. In the four weeks left, Harris must show that Trump today is not a historical aberration but a clear and present danger.
