The Kamala Harris campaign adviser was baffled. After two months of largely avoiding major media interviews, the Democratic presidential nominee had been slogging through a series of them. Harris’s performances have ranged from fine-if-underwhelming (on 60 Minutes) to bumpy (on The View). “Why are we making our closing argument by focusing on something that she’s not as good at?” the adviser asked me. “David Plouffe’s and Jen O’Malley Dillon’s theory is about getting her in front of as many eyeballs as possible until Election Day. I don’t know.”
The final days of every close presidential race generate a glut of second-guessing from the sidelines. “Every chef wants to be in the kitchen,” says Cornell Belcher, a strategist on both of Barack Obama’s successful White House runs. “Yeah, Pennsylvania is close. That’s why it’s a battleground like it was in 2020.”
This year, though, the criticisms seem especially numerous and pointed—because of the threat of a second term of Donald Trump, because of sexism, but also because of the unprecedented circumstances of Harris’s bid, in which she’s had barely 100 days to present herself as a top-of-the-ticket contender to much of the electorate. An initial burst of relief and excitement carried Harris through the Democratic National Convention. Since then, however, she has too often appeared passive, with only one public campaign event on many days.
Now the energy and schedule are ramping up. Harris officially begins her closing argument on Tuesday, with a speech at the Ellipse in Washington. The site was chosen to remind voters of Trump’s 2021 speech in the same park, which instigated the January 6 attack on the Capitol. But the substance of Harris’s remarks will likely focus on her larger theme of pushing the country forward and finally moving past Trump.
Still, the fact that Harris has waited until one week before Election Day to aggressively make her own headlines has stoked anxieties. “Playing clips at her rallies of Trump doing ridiculous things—whose idea was that? You’re just feeding into his news cycle,” says Ashley Etienne, a former top communications aide to the vice president and, before that, to then speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. “Show clips of January 6 or of him standing next to Putin! She lost a whole week of news cycle and internet cycle to him dancing on stage. Trump is winning because we’re distracted.”
Maybe. The race has been essentially unchanged all fall, with the candidates generally separated by one or two points in polls of the seven swing states. Belcher adds some (optimistic) analysis of the Democrat’s poll numbers. “The criticism has been, ‘Well, she’s not at Biden’s 2020 Election Day performance with younger voters and African American voters.’ Okay—neither was Biden four weeks out from the election! Do you think Obama was at 90-plus percent with Black voters at this point in 2012? No. Get off the poller-coaster!”
Democrats are hopeful about early voter turnout despite some signs that Republicans are cutting into their edge. “In terms of things that we find encouraging, we’re tracking the irregular voters who turn out in large numbers,” a Harris operative says. “And right now, we are outpacing them on that, meaning more Democrats who are newly registered or who only vote every four years are turning out than Republicans in that category.” Another top Democratic strategist, however, is alarmed by something he’s observed in focus groups. “Everything we’ve seen internally, people are not punishing this guy,” the strategist says, referring to everything from Trump’s first-term failures and to his felony convictions to his more recent incoherent ramblings. “They are more worried about her being a liberal and her economic policies raising prices than they are by his behavior or by Project 2025.”
The Harris campaign has tried to tackle this vulnerability with specific policy proposals—talking up plans to offer grants for first-time homeowners and extending Medicare coverage to help cover the cost of home care aides. The campaign has also tried to appeal to moderate Republican voters by having former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney vouch for Harris. The recent flurry of interviews is supposed to contribute to the picture of Harris as sane and moderate. Her closing argument won’t contain any drastically new notes, but it will launch a concentrated effort to draw a stark contrast to Trump.
The high-stakes question is whether all this adds up or comes across as scattered, and whether making the race about defeating Trump, instead of choosing Harris, resonates enough to get disengaged voters to the polls. “What has Kamala been doing to drive a clear narrative?” the campaign adviser says. “One day, it’s the economic speech; one day, it’s the border. I would much rather she were driving a focused contrast on democracy and abortion. But the through line is, ‘I’m not a crazy lefty.’ That, to me, is the case she needs to prove again. That’s the endgame here.”
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