Democrats’ ‘underdog’ off leash, nipping at Trump’s heels

Kamala Harris is proving to be a more dangerous and less predictable opponent for Donald Trump barely a week after Joe Biden quit the presidential race.

Kamala Harris arrives to address the American Federation of Teachers' 88th National Convention in Houston, Texas, on Thursday. Picture: AFP

Kamala Harris is proving to be a more dangerous and less predictable opponent for Donald Trump barely a week after Joe Biden quit the presidential race.

While it is still early days, there are several key lessons that can be gleaned from this extraordinary week of upheaval in US politics.

The most important one is that the 59-year-old Vice-President is already a better and more potent candidate than the 81-year-old President.

That is not a difficult bar to clear. Blind Freddy can see Harris’s exuberant and so far coherent campaign speeches are far more effective in rousing voters than Biden’s stumbling prose.

The political benefit for Harris of being so much younger than Biden is already obvious. Now Harris is trying to turn her age against the 78-year-old Trump with her campaign theme that she is a candidate for the future while Trump is a relic of the past.

The first series of polls on the new Harris-Trump match-up are now rolling out and they show the two candidates in a virtual dead-heat. This is a significant improvement on Biden, who was around six points behind Trump in many polls and key battleground states.

None of this offers any reliable guidance as to what will happen over the next three months and into the November election, but it does suggest the Harris switch makes the Democrats more competitive than if Biden had remained their candidate.

In a week, the Democrats have gone from almost certainly losing the White House with Biden to a fighting chance for what would be an underdog victory with Harris.

Trump understandably wanted to contest the election against the beatable Biden and was initially frustrated by the switch. He complained that he had to “start all over again” and even attacked the Democrats for engineering a “coup” against Biden.

But Trump finally found his voice at his first rally several days later where he savaged Harris’s ideology and record, saying she was a “radical-left lunatic” who blundered on border security and inflation. In short, Trump will seek to blame Harris for all of the shortcomings of the Biden presidency by saying that as Vice-President “she owns it”.

This may turn out to be an effective campaign strategy for Trump. If anything, Harris’s record shows her as to the left of Biden on many issues.

Harris has only limited room to manoeuvre on policy positions. As Vice-President she cannot credibly criticise the policies of her President, the same policies she has also been selling for the past 3½ years. But at the same time she needs to distance herself slightly from Biden’s record and present herself as a fresh alternative.

The burning question is how will Harris pitch herself ideologically. If she uses this campaign to pander to the left wing of the Democrat base, including focusing on identity politics, she is doomed. The Democrat left is already voting for her because for that group a Trump victory is a much more frightening outcome.

Harris’s best chance is to direct her campaign pitch towards the political centre, focusing on the retail politics of jobs, wages, household income and the real-life concerns of working families.

This is the only way she will be able to win the hardscrabble conservative battleground rust-belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where the election will be decided.

But can she be a centrist candidate? As a California Democrat, is it in her DNA? So far neither Harris nor Trump have tested each other – they have largely just resorted to calling each other names.

The real test will come in their first debate, tentatively scheduled for September. How will Harris defend the administration’s disastrous border security failures that occurred under her watch? How will she explain the cost-of-living explosion of the past three years?

But Trump will also be tested. For the first time he will be debating a younger candidate who, as a former prosecutor, will have the ability to hit back and hold him to account in a way Biden never could.

This contest is only just beginning, but the Democrats will be pleased and relieved Harris has navigated this first turbulent week successfully.