Trump Can Still Win
Trump Can Still Win
The race has gotten tougher, but the Harris-Walz ticket has real weaknesses.
The Democratic ticket is now complete. It is an upgrade from attempting to persuade voters to ignore their growing doubts about President Joe Biden’s age and ability to serve right now, much less until he turns 86. But it is better than what Republicans could have hoped for in plausible Biden replacement scenarios.
Time will tell whether Republicans are right to be relieved that Vice President Kamala Harris chose Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz over Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro. But if it weren’t for the inexplicable details of federal campaign finance law and the Democratic racial coalition politics, both Biden and Harris could have been replaced by two Rust Belt governors or at least one relative moderate.
Instead, the Democrats are poised to nominate essentially a blue-state ticket, even if Republicans entertained some hopes about prying Minnesota loose from the blue column for the first time since Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide in 1972. (There are stories that campaign aides pitched Ronald Reagan on a 50-state shutout in his own reelection bid in 1984, but the Gipper said to let Walter Mondale have his home state—it stayed Democratic by fewer than one vote per precinct.)
Harris and Walz are probably the most left-wing ticket the Democrats have nominated since Nixon carried Minnesota. That doesn’t mean the former President Donald Trump is guaranteed the same kind of victory. The electorate is much more polarized now, and Barack Obama proved that some version of George McGovern’s coalition can win with the right candidate. Add in the fact that millions will vote for anyone but Trump and the task becomes more challenging.
But it should be doable. Harris is tied to an unpopular administration most voters deem a failure. There is a reason most of her campaign messaging makes it sound as if she is running for president as the incumbent California attorney general. Many of Harris’s positions are to Biden’s left. She espoused them in public and on camera, while they have mostly been retracted by anonymous staffers.
Harris’s attempt to scrub her record of inconvenient progressivism is itself fertile ground for attack ads. Her basic phoniness could be a turnoff to persuadable voters. Excessive flip-floppers face doubts about their basic sincerity. John Kerry—remember that Chris LaCivita, now a Trump strategist, was working for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004—and Mitt Romney were done in by much less.
Walz presided, if that is even the correct word, over some of the worst George Floyd riots in the country. Beneath his folksy demeanor, he is a product of the 2020 progressive fever dream that Harris now wants a do-over on representing during her first ill-fated presidential campaign.
But Harris and Walz are presentable. They are a stark improvement over an 81-year-old Biden in terms of communicating the basic Democratic message. They are newer than Trump, as well as younger, even if Walz himself doesn’t really look it. And they are much more disciplined than Trump, though a compliant media doesn’t really require them to be. J.D. Vance is learning quickly the difference between being an effective polemicist and an attractive political candidate, but this is a drastically shortened campaign.
If fantasies about a landslide have been dashed, the race is still basically as Trump’s campaign managers described it to The Atlantic: like running six or seven Senate races at once in battleground states against eminently beatable candidates.
That Harris and Walz are beatable does not mean they will be beaten, as Al Gore and Kerry can tell you about George W. Bush and Romney can tell you about Obama. Biden’s age robbed him of the ability to run from behind and meant an effectively tied race would probably not go to him. Republicans can have no such certainty about how such a close race would break with a new Democratic ticket.
There is also a strategic question as to whether Trump and Vance should run a conventionally conservative campaign against a left-wing ticket or a more populist one, even if the latter means they will have essentially no media defenders outside of important individual voices like Tucker Carlson. Walz in particular will be primed to try to out-populist the GOP ticket or at least argue that watered down Bernie-bro economics offers more tangible benefits to the working class than culture-warring.
But the basic argument that Trump has been making for almost a year still applies and there are signs the state of the country and world could get worse by the time voting begins. Trump managed to be just disciplined enough to compete against an imploding candidate. Can he stay on message long enough to defeat a merely subpar one?
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