Kamala Harris is in the final stretch of the 2024 presidential campaign. She is holding daily rallies and extending an army of surrogates across the country. She is constantly hammering home the most popular message her and her surrogates can come up with. Harris’s program of helping first-time homebuyers and fighting inflation is in nearly every positive ad. She has taken enormous caution not to make a misstep in the last few days of her lightning campaign.
Despite this monumental effort, many Democrats fear she is not doing enough. The candidate does not hold as many events as Trump in swing states. She failed to make an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast this week, the most popular podcast in the country. She spent one of the final Fridays before the race campaigning with Beyoncé in Texas instead of in a swing state. In response to the announced rally, one Democrat said, “Her press operation is that of a first-time congressional candidate running as a sacrificial lamb.”
An unpopular incumbent
Harris’s campaign has been hampered by Joe Biden and his presidential legacy. She is fighting against extraordinary headwinds and an unpopular incumbent. If she wins, it will be a validation not only of her approach but of her predecessor’s.
Kamala Harris is running as Joe Biden’s successor while he is still in the White House. This position greatly hampers what she can do as a campaigner. She cannot clearly run for change and against politicians because she is currently in office as Vice President. She cannot attack the politician whose influence made her this year’s nominee. Every candidate likes to take on a mandate for change, but hers must be in many ways a continuation of Biden’s post-2022 policies.
Another reason that Harris cannot fully abandon the Biden legacy is that it was so clearly a formulation of the Democratic Party’s approach to governance. Biden is the consummate leftist Democrat of the 2020s. He pushed for massive stimulus spending in response to an economic downturn and an expansion of childcare. He withdrew troops from Afghanistan when Barack Obama never could. While Obama and Trump complained regularly about the scourge of student loan debt, Biden actually cut its impact significantly in an act blocked by the Supreme Court.
The Kamala Harris conundrum
This conflicted nature has helped to explain the two core themes of the Harris campaign. It shows why the campaign seems so bland and adrift in some ways. Harris cannot run a traditional Democratic campaign because the American people do not want many of the policies of a traditional Democrat. They do not want anything that will raise prices or increase taxes. They are clamoring for a return to Roe v. Wade and not a drastic program of expanded abortion rights. Voters also want a return to stability around the world without many of the tradeoffs required for peace in Ukraine or Gaza.
The national mood has both dulled Harris’s campaign while also making it more Trump-centric. Harris is constantly hammering Trump not only because of his obvious unfitness for office but also because she does not have much room to maneuver on her own. She can open up and go down numerous rhetorical paths whenever she talks about the former president. This subject gives her leeway to test multiple arguments and find a message that will resonate in a way that modest subsidies for home-buying will not.
Kamala Harris will forever be attached to her predecessor and the reelection campaign she was forced to take over. Biden remains at a 39.4% approval rating, a mark that would have ruined any chances he had at winning reelection on his own. His party hopes that his many accomplishments, combined with Harris’s nearly flawless campaign so far, will be enough to overtake multiple headwinds and defeat Trump on Election Day. Despite all of the panic Democrats have felt over the past month, that hope remains strong.
