Kamala Harris Has Surprised Everyone Who Wasn’t Paying Attention
Not listening to diverse voices is a choice.
Two new high-quality polls dropped on Sunday that showed Vice President Kamala Harris pulling ahead of adjudicated rapist and convicted felon Donald Trump. It’s still a contest because a majority of white voters don’t consider rape and felonious conduct disqualifying in a Republican presidential nominee. It’s not like Trump’s a Black woman.
A CBS News/You Gov poll has Harris leading Trump 52 to 48 percent nationally and 51 to 49 percent across battleground states. A NBC News national poll finds Harris with a five-point lead among registered voters, 49 to 44 percent. This is an impressive shift from July when Trump had a two-point lead over President Joe Biden.
There’s a reason that Trump whines that Biden was forced out in a bloodless “coup.” The NBC poll shows Harris undercutting Trump’s strengths against Biden in every possible category, including “competent and effective” (Trump +18 in July, Harris +5 now) and “ability to serve as commander in chief” (Trump +6 in July, Harris +4 now).
The NBC poll reflects an ever-widening gender chasm among the electorate. Men support Trump 52 to 40 percent, and women support Harris 58 to 37 percent. Apparently, Trump hasn’t won over women voters with his deranged stalker vow to fix all their problems whether they like it or not. “YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION …” he declares in all-caps, as if waving a pocket watch in front of their faces. Fortunately, the 19th Amendment still exists, though it wouldn’t surprise me if Republicans will try to change that last minute like they are with Nebraska’s proportional electoral vote system.
This continues a post-debate streak of strong polling for Harris, but some people have rained on this parade, in clear defiance of Barbra Streisand. They point out that polls were off in 2016 and 2020, which is true although there were significant exogenous factors at work. James Comey likely threw the election to Trump in 2016 with his own October surprise, and the momentum was starting to move against Biden and Democrats in 2020 due to COVID restrictions and “defund the police” backlash. So far, Harris is running an excellent campaign, which I assume also involves keeping Comey away from any letter-producing apparatus.
Underestimating Harris
Kamala Harris didn’t just get behind the wheel of a jet that was cruising on autopilot. She pulled it out of a lethal tailspin. The political press and punditry have uniformly expressed their shock at her performance. After all, a good number of them blamed Joe Biden’s political woes on Harris herself and many went so far as to suggest that Biden replace Harris on the ticket with almost any other Democrat … and even Republicans Nikki Haley, Mitt Romney, and Zombie John McCain.
Former White House counsel Greg Craig said Biden should have a new running mate picked at the Democratic National Convention (people were desperate to make the event a West Wing-inspired reality show). Douglas MacKinnon at the Hill said that Biden should replace Harris with California Gov. Gavin Newsom and then resign, handing the presidency over to the younger white man. Bill Kristol proposed putting Harris on the Supreme Court in 2022 (the political equivalent of sending the VP to live on a farm). New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz penned “The Case for Biden to Drop Kamala Harris” (it was not a good one). Arguing that “Harris’s role as a draw for black voters is more theoretical than demonstrated,” Josh Barro advised Biden to bench Harris in favor of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Just this March, Kathleen Parker at the Washington Post declared, “For the country’s sake, Vice President Harris should step aside.” Even after Biden’s debate collapse, the Washington Post ran letters to the editor suggesting that Biden stay on the ticket but he should ditch Harris, as if that would make him younger and more vibrant. She was his running mate, not the spouse he trades in for a newer model.
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius argued for benching Harris because “she is less popular than Biden, with a 39.5 percent approval rating, according to polling website FiveThirtyEight. Harris has many laudable qualities, but the simple fact is that she has failed to gain traction in the country or even within her own party.”
Of course, Ignatius was wrong. Now that she’s running her own race, freed from Biden’s shadow, Harris’s favorability has increased 16 points since July. The last politician to register that significant an increase in NBC News polling was George W. Bush after 9/11.
Naysayers claim that Harris’s surge is primarily anti-Trump, even though he was still an existential threat when he was consistently leading Biden in the polls. They also suggest, without evidence, that any normal Democrat who wasn’t Joe Biden would’ve produced similar results. Voters were just desperate for someone under 75 and non-fascist. They can’t accept that Harris always had the goods and they overlooked her, like when Saturday Night Live producer Jean Doumanian thought Charles Rocket was the future of the show and not some Black kid named Eddie Murphy.
After Harris’s debate triumph over Trump, Jill Lawrence wrote a piece at The Bulwark titled, “The Remarkable, Unexpected Competency of the Harris Campaign.” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman delivered some equally faint praise: “Kamala Harris exceeded my expectations in her debate with Donald Trump on Tuesday. I knew that she was smart, but for whatever reason, many insiders have questioned her political talent. I assume that her remarkable skill at baiting Trump into one trap after another has ended those questions.”
Harris’s career is a list of impressive firsts, from California’s attorney general to the vice presidency. That doesn’t come easily, unless you are inclined to believe the “DEI hire” smears. What these journalists should question is why they ever questioned Harris’s political talent and basic competency in the first place.
‘But for whatever reason’ …
Yes, Harris’s first presidential campaign faltered in 2019, but it obviously wasn’t a total failure. She ended 2020 with a promotion. What’s important to remember is that Harris has the humility, emotional intelligence, and personal drive to actually learn from the mistakes made during her first attempt at the White House. These are traits a malignant narcissist like Trump utterly lacks. His ego can’t process failure. He either pretends it never happened or blames everyone else.
The political press and punditry still won’t entirely give Harris her due. They simply offer a paternalistic pat on the head and claim that she defied expectations. I don’t see any hard conversations occurring about why their expectations for Harris were so low. After Donald Trump’s upset win in 2016, an entire journalism genre emerged devoted to “understanding” his voters. Mainstream publications rushed to hire conservatives and elevate their voices (and help advance the career of hillbilly charlatan JD Vance). There was no similar push to understand Harris supporters. The first Black woman vice president somehow didn’t lead to a flood of opportunities for Black women journalists. The people covering Harris and judging her every move, including her headphone preferences, were mostly men and almost all white. It’s hardly a twist reveal to point out that none of the columnists who pushed for Biden to dump Harris were Black.
Harris’s talents as a candidate were never a surprise to her ride-or-die supporters (mostly women and people of color). Baltimore Banner columnist Leslie Gray Streeter (a consistently great read) wrote last November about “the haunting familiarity of ignoring Vice President Kamala Harris.” The political press didn’t just ignore Harris, though. They ignored women of color in general. So few political publications have Black women on staff, and there’s no evidence that their mostly white male staff reads Black women’s work at all. Even now, I’ve seen liberals post their recommendations for who to follow during the campaign and there are no Black women on the list! A Black woman is the Democratic presidential nominee and white men still monopolize the coverage. I’m also not impressed by the fair-weather liberals who now want to write about Harris now that she has the Taylor Swift endorsement. Like Streeter observed, they previously ignored her, just like they do so many other very talented, extremely “competent” women of color.
Kamala Harris might just save democracy from Donald Trump, and when she does, anyone who’s surprised wasn’t paying attention.
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In that time from the June debate until Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris, I was livid anytime someone suggested anyone other than Harris taking Biden's place at the top of the ticket. She's the sitting VP, if Biden had died, she would have become president. So why wouldn't she be the obvious choice to take his place if he withdrew from the race? My assertion was that Harris was the only person I would accept if Biden dropped out. The transition was so smooth, I wonder if any talk by Dems of others at the top of the ticket was a tactic to lure the repubs into complacency. The timing of Biden's announcement, and then his endorsement of Harris, was pitch perfect - right after the RNC, where they seemed to think that they had the election in the bag. And a big part of the success of that is Harris herself - making calls, and being sure of enough support to secure the nomination.
The pundits, and the legacy media in general, are a different matter. They were serious about wanting Harris out - first as the VP candidate, and then, should Biden drop out, at the top of the ticket. And she should be replaced by a white person, preferably male. They were salivating at the thought of Chicago 1968 2.0. Good point about how the legacy media went all in on cons and trying to understand trump voters after 2016. They never cared about H. Clinton voters, Biden voters, and don't care about Harris voters. The legacy media is well on the way to becoming irrelevant. Maybe if they fired some of those white men, hired some Black women, and hire real liberal opinion writers to balance out the cons, they would become more relevant.
And this is exactly where McCain's Law (there can not be good news for Democrats) really shines. Kamala Harris running a virtually perfect campaign starves a great many of these glorified access-driven gossip columnists of oxygen. They really don't like that.
But the Republican ownership of many of these outfits really want those tax cuts President Klan Robe promises, despite the damage he'd do to the nation. So they thought they'd repeat the same successful playbook they used on Joe Biden. Magnify the detractive voices, maximize the coverage of mistakes and minimize the good news with McCain's Law so that Democrats get dispirited and stop supporting their champions.
But Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are going all-offense and executing perfectly. It is an indictment of this media ecosystem and really—the organization of the United States itself—that this election is so close. And by organization I mean the unwarranted, unbalanced power given to large swaths of unreconstructed territory.