Vice President Kamala Harris is returning to a familiar theme in the closing weeks of the presidential race: making the election about former President Donald Trump.
On the heels of her own contentious interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier, Harris was in Wisconsin drawing attention to a Trump town hall instead.
“The American people are exhausted with his gaslighting,” Harris said of Trump referring to Jan. 6, 2021, as a “day of love” on Wednesday night. “Enough. We’re done. We’re ready to turn the page.”
After taking over the top of the ticket from President Joe Biden, Harris moved away from her boss’s heavy focus on “democracy” and Jan. 6. While Biden aides were convinced this was what spared Democrats a worse fate in the midterm elections two years ago. The top voter concerns were consistently the economy, high prices, and immigration.
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Harris tried to erase her own connection to the border crisis, with a generous amount of help from the media, and started rolling out plans she said would combat elevated consumer prices. She was less defensive about Bidenomics than the sitting president, despite her own history touting the same policies.
But as Election Day approaches, Harris has returned to hammering Trump’s temperament and character. She is drawing attention to his raucous rallies and bombastic ways of expressing himself. She is campaigning with Never Trumpers, some of them lifelong Republicans supporting a Democratic presidential nominee for the first time, though many more of them have been off the GOP reservation since at least 2016.
The race is effectively tied. Harris has little she can say to the remaining undecided voters who are unhappy with the Biden-Harris administration record or concerned about her numerous policy flip-flops. On immigration, her only real argument is that Congress should have passed an amnesty sooner. She can emphasize she is a different person with different experiences than Biden, but she can’t risk a rift with him while he remains the president.
What Harris might be able to do is convince enough waving undecideds that they cannot let Trump back in the White House. She also seeks to offset defections from the Democratic base, such as private sector union households and minority men, by running up the score with the college-educated suburbanites who elected Biden in 2020.
Harris can potentially use the message of generational change to implicitly create some space between Biden and herself while overtly attacking Trump. She can present herself as the young candidate of change, even though she will be the 60-year-old incumbent vice president. She is not “weird,” the argument goes, or angry, save for a bit of righteous indignation on Fox News in Prime Time.
Then, Harris doesn’t have to answer unanswerable questions about the border, when she knew Biden’s advanced age was catching up to him, or how much of her circa 2019 progressivism she plans to pursue if elected. For her, Trump is the only answer.
“If Trump were to lose, it suggests that concerns about his style, character, temperament, felony charges and convictions, and age outweigh Americans’ anxieties about the state of the nation,” Gallup’s Jeffrey Jones wrote in an analysis of the firm’s polling that showed a national environment highly favorable to the GOP.
In an election that will possibly be decided by tens of thousands of votes in a handful of states, and have established that handfuls are a very small number, there could be enough Liz Cheney Republicans to make a real difference. Anti-Trump voters show up to the polls, casting zombie primary votes for Nikki Haley weeks after she ended her campaign, while the former president is relying on low-propensity voters.
“American politics is increasingly shaped by chance in a nation sharply divided between two political parties with a large chunk of people disgusted by both of them,” writes John Halpin.
Making the election a referendum on Trump worked well enough in 2018 and 2020, when he was in office. It helped keep the Democrats’ midterm losses manageable. The second presidential debate, which was about Trump rather than Biden, was a better outcome for Harris. But this tactic failed in 2016 and looked on track to fail when Biden was still the Democratic candidate, both situations where Trump could plausibly position himself as a change agent.
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The risk is that not every voter sees the stakes of the election in such a Trump-centric fashion. It becomes difficult for voters who don’t understand how anyone else can see it any other way, which blinds them to the salience of inflation, crime, or illegal immigration.
It may still be the best closing argument Harris has, as joy once again gives way to fear.