After all the “joy” of summer, Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has reeled in recent weeks, with her slight lead in the polls melting away as Donald Trump’s fortunes have considerably revived. With less than a fortnight to go before the November 5 election, most analysts now estimate that Trump has a greater than 50 per cent chance of returning to the presidency.
According to RealClear Politics, a news organisation that compiles daily polling averages, Trump currently leads Harris in all seven “swing states”, where neither Democrats nor Republicans command a reliable majority, with some of his leads rising above the statistical margin of error. Trump may also be on track to overtake Harris in the national popular vote.
Some Republican pundits predict a landslide Trump victory. His rising momentum rests on significant leads on the economy and immigration, which are by far the two most important issues for many American voters. He also benefits from a powerful popular sense that he has been unfairly targeted by overt media bias, and by criminal prosecutions that are widely believed by conservatives to be politically motivated.
The dumbfounded Left is likely to be already forming a circular firing squad to assign blame for Harris’s probable loss, while many of her allied media outlets can only meditate in puzzlement on Trump’s remarkable endurance.
Harris herself is grasping at straws. She has fallen flat in her attempts to blame Trump for the immigration crisis, which she dismally mismanaged in one of her very few assignments over nearly four years as Joe Biden’s vice president. Rhetorically challenged and chronically unable to articulate policies in detail, she is now desperately trying to convince voters that she will create an “opportunity economy”, a vacuous concept meant to appeal to the country’s suffering middle class but sorely lacking in detail.
Harris has also proposed a weird patchwork of radical Leftist measures that will have done more to remind American voters that her father is a Marxist economics professor than convince them that she can handle the economy better than Trump. Her latest proposal is a ruinous measure – for an economy still suffering from inflation at twice the rate it faced during Trump’s first term – to more than double the national minimum wage to $15 per hour, a longstanding demand of the so-called “democratic socialists” who dominate the Democratic Party’s controlling progressive wing.
Last week, Harris proposed a massive government programme to subsidise business loans and credits specifically orientated toward black males, a policy that could violate federal civil rights and anti-discrimination laws. She has also flirted with the possibility of government-funded slavery reparations payments to black Americans, a policy that 68 per cent of Americans oppose but that Harris signalled she favoured when she was a senator and 2020 candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Harris’s radical proposals have a certain electoral goal – Trump is drawing an increasing percentage of minority voters, with polls suggesting that he enjoys the support of nearly one in five black adults, a figure rising to 26 per cent among younger black men. While that is far from a majority, it is a massive gain for a Republican presidential candidate, and could be decisive in states where only a few thousand ballots could decide the election.
With all else failing, Harris is pivoting to sheer demagoguery. In brief remarks given on Wednesday, she denounced Trump as a “fascist” who, she claims, is “unhinged and unstable”, wants to govern with “unchecked power” and “would invoke Adolf Hitler”. She returned to the “fascist” attack line at the CNN Town Hall with Anderson Cooper last night.
That is a bold claim from a candidate who has previously threatened action against social media companies that fail to “police” speech to her satisfaction. But reductio ad Hitlerum could well be Kamala Harris’s swan song on the national stage.
Paul du Quenoy is a historian and president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute