Kamala’s Basket of Deplorables

Democratic presidential nominee, US Vice-President Kamala Harris, speaks during a campaign rally at the James R Hallford Stadium on October 24 in Clarkston, Georgia. Picture: Getty Images

Those Democratic “bedwetters” are out in force, alarmed by poll movement toward Donald Trump, critiquing Kamala Harris’s every recent comment and decision. Yet if Democrats lose this election, it will be because of a choice her team made long ago: to replay the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Harris spent her week alongside former GOP representative Liz Cheney, courting disaffected Republicans and making herself more available to the press. This, in theory, is a sound use of valuable closing time.

Polls show a narrow slice of undecided voters in swing states could decide this election, and many are independents and moderates who harbour deep reservations about Trump. Polls also show voters still don’t know enough about Harris’s intentions.

Yet they aren’t learning anything new. Cheney spent the entirety of a Birmingham, Michigan town hall excoriating Trump for his misdeeds, complete with the following thesaurus: “depravity”, “misogyny”, “vicious”, “vitriolic”, “erratic”, “unstable”, “venom”, “dangerous” and “cruel”. She lectured audiences that they must vote with their “conscience”.

Vice-President Kamala Harris fields questions during a town hall-style campaign event with former US representative Liz Cheney on October 21 in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Picture: Getty Images

Harris filled in the blanks. Her opening remarks at the event consisted of two sentences noting she’d been a prosecutor and lived outside Washington, before pivoting to what was at “stake” in an election in which her opponent has contempt for both the constitution and “the rule of law”. The next 40 minutes: Trump is “unserious”, “unfit”, “exhausting”, “harmful” and easily “manipulated”, and stands for “fascism ‘to his core’ ”.

Americans have heard all this before – thousands of times. Clinton battered Trump in 2016 as more toxic than botulism, utterly unfit for the Oval Office. The press and Democrats spent the next four years accusing him of conspiracy, fraud, self-enrichment, authoritarianism and ineptitude, after which President Joe Biden turned “MAGA Republicans” into a pejorative. This is so familiar by now that the definition of an undecided voter is someone who is aware of Trump’s problems yet unpersuaded to vote for his opponent.

Harris is giving them nada. Undecided participants in this week’s CNN town hall pleaded with her for details. She responded with the barest of platitudes.

What “specific” actions would you take to bridge the partisan divide? Harris: I’ll be “a president for all Americans” with “commonsense” and “practical” solutions. What one policy goal would be your priority in congress? Harris: There’s “not just one”, and we need to “get past this era of politics and partisan politics”, and I will “invest” in “the industries of the future”. After four years of Biden, please (Please! Please!) “differentiate” your policies from his. Harris: I represent a “new generation” with “new approaches”, and I bring “my experience, actually taking care of my mother”. All the space in between these nothingburgers was, of course, filled with casting Trump as the root of all evil.

Former US president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures as he arrives to speak during a campaign rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, on October 24. Picture: AFP

Her bigger problem: This portrayal of Trump as an unconscionable pick is potentially turning voters away – as in 2016. Even Clinton in retrospect admitted that her description of would-be Trump voters then as a “basket of deplorables” – “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it” – might have lost her the election. Her attempted clean-up was just as bad, when she allowed the next day that not all Trump voters were loathsome – many were just losers or dupes who didn’t understand Trump was conning them, and if anything deserved liberal empathy. This smug arrogance turned off millions of voters.

Harris hasn’t been so stupid as to revile openly the great Trump unwashed, but the Harris/Cheney tour amounts to the same. How else to think of anyone voting for – or more to the point, thinking of voting for – a “toxic”, “unstable”, “fascist” “threat” to the constitution?

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks on the first day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on August 19. Picture: AFP

Americans like to be treated as if they have a brain – in this case, to assume they are well aware of Trump’s risks and shortcomings but also understandably worried about electing a vapid Biden retread. Harris’s closing argument amounts to: Good people vote for Democrats.

A last problem: Americans are sick of rehashing the past eight years. A campaign obsessing on what Trump did or didn’t do years ago is a campaign failing to scratch the huge public itch for a candidate with a plan for the future.

Harris’s stall (decline?) in polls neatly coincides with her decision around debate time to ditch her focus on “joy” and the “future” in favour of making the race all about her opponent.

It also coincided with a growing public and press demand that she offer more policy specifics. She doesn’t want to go there, since that agenda remains a super-sized version of Biden’s, which is unpopular. Her campaign seemed to hope that a pivot to Trump would further spare it the conversation. It isn’t working.

The Wall Street Journal