Vice President Kamala Harris is leading former President Donald Trump in national polls but is struggling to maintain the momentum she enjoyed early in her candidacy.
Compared to President Joe Biden, Harris is running a successful campaign. She has turned her party’s fears on their heads and leads Trump by 2 points nationally. She is either tied or holds a narrow lead within the margin of error over Trump in six of the seven swing states.
But compared to Biden’s polling numbers at this time four years ago, Harris’s lead over Trump is half of what Biden’s was. Equally concerning, her lead is a full point lower than Hillary Clinton’s was at this same time in 2016.
Despite enjoying a surge immediately after she replaced Biden, Harris’s team has not done much to change the playbook it was using for the president. Out of fear he might trip over his words or lose his balance onstage, Biden was kept out of the spotlight as much as possible.
Harris, with a history of fumbling answers to questions herself, has similarly been shielded from the public, and her policy plans have been opaque. A torrent of statements from campaign staffers and surrogates suggested the vice president was running on a platform cut from an entirely different cloth than her 2020 campaign.
She has offered few policy proposals in the handful of appearances she has made, and the lack of a plan is starting to spook Democrats.
“It’s been a mistake to shield Walz and Harris from interviews,” a Democratic lawmaker told NBC News about the lack of exposure Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) have had. “It’s like playing basketball — if you don’t play for weeks, you’re not going to get it into a game and do well. You’ve got to be on the court.
Without concrete plans to offer voters, Harris is struggling to convince undecided voters in swing states that she is a better candidate than Trump.
Just a month out from the election, 20% of likely voters say their votes are not set in stone.
In 2020, Biden held a 15-point lead over Trump among independent voters, which contributed to his razor-slim victory in Arizona, making him the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since President Bill Clinton in 1996.
Trump holds a 4-point lead over Harris with undecided voters.
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens criticized Harris for being evasive to the press late last month on Real Time with Bill Maher.
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Stephens said voters “don’t know her answer to anything.”
“The campaign is taking a chance that they can run out the clock and Trump’s weaknesses will be enough to win,” Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist, told NBC News. “But the danger in that is if you don’t define your own candidacy well enough, people will start defining it themselves.”