The Democratic Party is increasingly embracing a strategy of hiding candidates in competitive races to avoid having to answer for the personal and political shortcomings of those candidates.
Vice President Kamala Harris is ducking the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, a Catholic charity dinner that both major presidential candidates traditionally have attended since 1960. This could be chalked up to Harris’s open disdain for Catholics, given that she thinks faithful Catholics should not be able to serve in the judicial branch, but it is also likely the result of Harris avoiding any public events that are not her own scripted rallies.
Harris’s campaign is hiding her as best it can from interviews and unscripted public interactions, both because her radical policies from her 2020 presidential run are unpopular and because she is incapable of speaking coherently without a script. Harris is even trying to get CNN to host a second presidential debate, ducking Fox News’s debate offer with hopes that CNN’s moderators will help her out just as ABC’s did.
This has become a popular strategy for Democrats in recent years. President Joe Biden’s team took full advantage of the pandemic in 2020 by running a basement campaign that limited Biden’s exposure to unscripted events to hide his rapidly deteriorating mental faculties. Biden’s team planned to do the same this cycle until his first debate was so catastrophic that Biden was forced to drop out.
This isn’t just a presidential game plan for Democrats either. In 2022, Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-PA) team hid him during his Senate run in Pennsylvania after his stroke left him incapable of carrying out conversations. Fetterman only debated GOP challenger Dr. Mehmet Oz once, five weeks after voting began in Pennsylvania. That same year, Gov. Katie Hobbs (D-AZ) ducked debates with Kari Lake in the Arizona governor’s race, and multiple House Democratic candidates did the same in competitive districts.
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That strategy is returning this year as well, with North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein declining to debate his GOP challenger, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson — Stein clearly hoping his polling lead and Robinson’s ongoing email scandal are enough to push him to win. In Stein’s case, and all the others mentioned above, Democratic candidates don’t want to explain their policies to voters, so they instead choose to hide behind favorable media coverage.
Democrats are going to continue to use this strategy of hiding candidates in competitive races precisely because the party’s policies are becoming more radical and more indefensible. Combine that with many of the candidates simply being terrible in off-script interactions (Harris, Biden, Fetterman, and Hobbs among them), and it is clear that Democrats would rather hide from voters than try to persuade them through basic human interactions.