Kamala Harris hasn’t been here before.
The ABC News debate on September 10 will be the first time she has ever stepped out in front of the country to represent the Democrat Party as nominee.
It comes at a critical time for her campaign.
The media doesn’t want to admit this, but Kamala is currently behind.
“Trump and Harris Neck and Neck After Summer Upheaval,” The New York Times headline read over the weekend. Indeed, it’s a close race.
The New York Times headline could read “On Eve of Debate, Trump Surges Ahead,” because that’s what has happened over the last three weeks. In their most recent national poll from September 3 to September 6, Donald Trump is ahead.
Now the Times could counter with “it’s within the margin of error,” and that’s true.
But it also ignores the history of the last two elections. Simply put, Donald Trump is in a stronger position with voters today than he was in 2020 or 2016. And as we all know, he won in 2016.
Adding to the woes of the Democrat apparatus is liberal pollster Nate Silver. His latest analysis puts Trump’s chances of winning the electoral college at 63.8%, leaving Harris with only a 36% shot. He has Trump currently ahead in all of the major swing states. If his current predictions prove correct on election day, Silver sees 312 electoral college votes for Trump against 226 for Kamala.
This is all a big turnaround. Silver saw a Harris victory as likely up until August 29.
My take? The Kamala thrill is gone.
The more the American people are exposed to Kamala Harris, the less impressive (or competent) they find her. She isn’t good on the campaign trail. She has no talent for speech-giving. When she tries to seem authentic, it comes across as phony. And when Kamala tries to charm an audience, she looks as uncomfortable as they do.
She’s not a talented politician. The Democrat base recognized this in 2020 when they resoundingly rejected Kamala via polls that kicked out of contention before the first primary ballots were cast in Iowa. Her most infamous moment from that era of debates came not on the debate stage, but during a post-debate spin session in 2019 with CNN when she smugly told the anchor,
This is going to sound immodest, but I’m obviously a top-tier candidate, and so I did expect that I would be on the stage and take hits tonight because there are a lot of people trying to make the stage for the next debate.
A few months later, Kamala had to drop out. She didn’t even make it as a candidate into 2020.
But that was then, we are told. The new, improved Kamala is incredibly brilliant, charming, and talented. She’s ready to lead, poised to break the ultimate glass ceiling, and can be trusted with the nuclear codes.
The biggest problem with this pile of malarkey (as Biden might say) is that the entire strategy of the Harris/Walz campaign is to hide the candidate from the American people. This is something of a 2020 redux, when Biden ran his infamous – but effective – “basement campaign.” The Democrats were able to successfully shield a senile presidential candidate from sufficient public scrutiny to pull of an improbable win in 2020.
But there was a global pandemic underway at the time. What’s the excuse for hiding Harris from the public?
There is none. And the American people are wising up to this.
It’s condescending – even insulting – to the intelligence of any American voter that Kamala Harris has only done a single media interview since becoming the presidential nominee. There is no reasonable explanation for this, other than the people making decisions at the DNC want Harris to let the media run her campaign for her.
As the vice president, Harris even has a press pool that travels with her, and they don’t get any access to her. No questions can be asked or answered. For anyone paying attention, that could well be the Harris/Walz slogan.
This all changes for at least one night on Tuesday, though.
Harris will be on stage with likely tens of millions of viewers. She won’t be able to drone on endlessly from a prompter. There won’t be an army of handlers and propagandists to run interference for her or scurry her away from questions.
This will be Trump’s moment. For a man who seems to have met everyone in public life at some point, Donald Trump has never met Vice President Harris. The first time, it will be a duel of words before an American public that is likely to see the proverbial empress has no clothes.
Trump will need to keep his poise. Against Biden, his most important tactical decision was adhering to Napoleon’s maxim, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” The centerpiece of that debate was the obvious cognitive collapse of Joe Biden. It had been hidden for months, arguably years, in a fraud against the American people made possible only with Kamala’s collusion. When it began to come apart in full public view, Trump stood back and let the Biden train derail itself.
Kamala will try to bait Trump. This is obvious. For all Trump’s political gifts – biting humor, entertainment value, fearlessness – his ego can still be his weak spot. If Kamala gets under his skin, it’s conceivable she will throw Trump off his game when it comes to tone.
On policy substance, there’s really not much of a contest to be had. Kamala is a leftist progressive from the San Francisco Bay Area. Other than Bernie Sanders – an open socialist – she may well have been the most left-wing member of the Senate. But she was picked – as a win for diversity – to be vice president.
And now, similarly, the party elites have picked her for the same reasons to be their presidential nominee, Democrat voters be damned.
They could soon regret this choice. Kamala is losing ground, and likely to cede even more on the debate stage.
It’s not clear if Kamala will agree to another debate after this. She has left open the possibility, which seems to be a hedge based on what the polls show after this one. If she has a just-good-enough night, it’s unlikely she will take the risk of more.
But she can only hide for so much and for so long from the American people this cycle.
It’s Kamala’s right to make this her one and only presidential debate appearance.
It will be the voters who decide if it’s her last.
Regards,
Buck Sexton
Editor, Message from Buck