With only about 25 days until this damnably necessary act of democracy descends into recriminations and conversations about 2028, Donald Trump is barnstorming across the nation while Kamala Harris sits for interviews designed to generate turnout from her base.
Where are Barack and Michelle Obama? Does democracy not matter? Where is Hillary Rodham Clinton? Where is Joe Biden? Trump is the only star on the Republican side that people want to see. But the Obamas outshine everyone in the Democrats’ political pantheon. The Clintons can still draw a crowd, too. Where are they? The last Democrat to leave Bill Clinton off the campaign trail was his vice president, who lost.
Trump has gone to New York and California. Hatred and hagiography of Trump both break brains. Democrats think Trump is wasting his time. Some of his most ardent supporters have concluded he just might win California and New York. The reality is the House Republican majority exists because of swing seats in Southern California and Long Island. Trump going into those areas has the potential to increase turnout.
Political science is not an analytical, hard science like chemistry. But data has long shown that a candidate going into an area for a personal visit generates increased enthusiasm and can lead to increased turnout of his voters. In 2016, Democrats lost not because of the Russians, but because Hillary Clinton’s Brooklyn, New York-based team chose to ignore her husband.
Bill Clinton insisted Hillary needed to get to Wisconsin, Michigan, and Erie County, Pennsylvania. Her campaign team disagreed. They did not need those kinds of voters, and those kinds of voters understood. They cast votes for Trump instead, who did pay them attention with personal visits.
The House Republican majority is in a precarious position. It is possible Trump could win the presidency and the Republicans capture the Senate, but then see their House majority go down in flames. Trump campaigning where the map matters for House Republicans—and not for Trump—shows he is going for the trifecta of government control, the executive branch and both houses of Congress.
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Sen. Jon Tester of Montana will not campaign with Harris. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio is keeping her at a distance. The former is expected to lose his Senate seat. The latter is starting to worry Democrats. Despite rumors of Texas and Florida in play, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer has deployed zero dollars to either state, but has now dumped $10 million into Ohio.
With West Virginia going to the GOP and Montana heading that way, the Republicans will have at least 51 seats in the Senate. The GOP is worried about Deb Fischer of Nebraska, who is being challenged by an independent candidate, but most feel confident she will win.
That leaves Harris. The big names of the Democratic Party are not campaigning for her. Plenty of House and Senate members do not want to be seen with her. When she went on “The View” and was asked if she would have done anything differently than Joe Biden over the past four years, she said she would not. Her loyalty is commendable, but it just might cost her.
On Stephen Colbert’s show, Colbert asked Harris how the next four years will be different from the last four, and she gave the most convoluted word salad uttered by a presidential candidate since Ted Kennedy got asked by Roger Mudd in 1979 why he wanted to be president. “Ummm,” Kennedy began before giving a two-minute nonanswer. Then, when asked how he would be any different from Jimmy Carter, he acted like the question was in an impossible-to-understand foreign language.
Harris, after much criticism, decided to do more interviews. All were with friendly interviewers except for the “60 Minutes” interview. It did not matter. She offered only word salads that would send a professional sentence diagrammer off to an insane asylum had they tried to chart the prepositions, nouns, and verbs.
It is a terrible sign for her candidacy that she offers no straight answers on her quest for the presidency and no major Democrats want to barnstorm the nation with her.
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