Harris’ Threadbare Three-Month Campaign 

Kamala Harris’s campaign seems to be coming apart at the seams.  When viewed in its brevity, it has lacked a single defining episode.  Instead, many missteps taken together have served to define her.

As brief and meteoric as Kamala Harris’s ascent was, so quick and precipitous has her descent become.  After receiving the Democrats’ presidential nomination in Chicago on August 22, Harris turned Biden’s 3.1 percentage-point deficit into a 2.2 percentage-point advantage by October 4.  Yet just three weeks later, Harris saw herself trailing Trump by the barest of margins (0.1 percentage point) for the first time since August 4.

Harris’ rapid decline results from the sense that if she could not handle running for president for the last three months, she could not handle being president for the next four years.  Rather than defining her, the last three months have left Americans doubting her.

This began with her hiding from the media.  She did so, even as its establishment outlets fawned over and inflated her.  Rather than reciprocating their attention, she waited until it was clear she went only from necessity—her inability to open a comfortable cushion in the polls.  By the time she did, her bloom was already fading, and, having waited, the media were not as fawning as they likely would have been initially.

Once before the media, even in the friendliest of environments, Harris performed poorly.  On politically sensitive issues—like banning fracking, decriminalizing illegal immigration, and transgender surgeries for prison inmates—she claims to have reversed past positions without explanation.   Uncomfortable questions she evaded.  When she did answer questions, her responses often sounded unnatural and scripted.  Combined, her performances resurrected her history of past difficulties with the press.

Similarly, her only executive action to date, picking a running mate, was a flop.  Tim Walz stumbled at the starting line with an inflated military record.  Then came his false claim to have been in China during the Tiananmen Square uprising.  Next was his poor debate performance, his most memorable line being “I’m a knucklehead at times.”

There has also been transparent policy pandering.  Her first fiasco was to call for price controls, a policy so shallow even the establishment media took issue with it.  Harris’ pandering continued apace.  There was a nod to reparations to court the Black vote in general and a floated “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” for forgivable $20,000 loans for business startups.  For every political problem, Harris offered to throw billions at it.

Taking on more and more water (and less and less support), Harris has had to rely increasingly on surrogates’ star power to offer what she cannot: excitement.  They have also delivered a sense of elitism.  As political (the Clintons and the Obamas) and entertainment (from Beyonce to the Boss) glitterati have joined her cavalcade of compensating, they also underscored Harris’s separation from the average voter.  In a defining contrast, Trump worked a shift at McDonald’s.

Despite surrogate help, Harris has been unable to shake Biden.  Instead of distancing herself as she desperately needs to do, she said on The View that “there is not a thing that comes to mind” when asked, “If anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?”

The takeaways from all these episodes have been unflattering for Harris.  They remind Americans that she cannot speak in public except in tightly controlled environments and behind a teleprompter.  On her own, she comes across as vacuous and evasive.  On important issues, she has flip-flopped and refuses to take responsibility.

Just as she needs help in seeking the presidency, there is a sense that she would need help in handling the job if she got it.  This has resurrected the pervasive reports that she was overmatched in the role of vice president for over three years.

The seemingly clean slate Harris claimed to bring late to the race was not so clean after all.  An inexperienced, far-left senator, she was plucked from an ignominious 2020 presidential run to be vice president and then elevated to be Democrats’ nominee by default—two momentous leaps without having won a single vote or even faced a single voter.

While Harris has seemed to unravel in three months, she has simply been revealed.  She has not so much defined herself as confirmed herself.  Instead of telling voters who she is—an unprecedented opportunity so late in a presidential contest—she told them what she thought they wanted to hear.  Americans have come away realizing that it was not that they didn’t know Harris, but that they knew her all too well.

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J.T. Young is the author of the just-released book, Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left from RealClear Publishing and has over three decades’ experience working in Congress, Department of Treasury, and OMB, and representing a Fortune 20 company.