It’s Kamala’s to Lose
It’s Kamala’s to Lose
The race is slipping away from Trump.
It was August and Donald Trump was not supposed to be in North Carolina.
After one of his best months ever as a presidential candidate, rumors were swirling that Trump was raging in private and on the verge of firing his campaign managers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles. Whether the reports were true or not, the writing was on the wall—something, somewhere had gone terribly awry.
The Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is suddenly neck-and-neck with Trump across all the battleground states as independent and black voters coalesce behind her campaign. Buoyed by newfound momentum and backed by an ever-growing stockpile of cash, some are even suggesting Harris could make a run at Florida.
And in North Carolina, where Trump was previously leading Biden by a comfortable margin in mid-July, Harris has now vaulted into a statistical tie according to an aggregation of polls compiled by polling site FiveThirtyEight.
This was the backdrop as Trump arrived at a hurriedly-scheduled rally in the state on Wednesday.
Trump’s “last-minute” rally appears to be an open admission the campaign is concerned about losing a critical state that the former president narrowly carried in 2016 and 2020 and one he must carry in 2024 if he is to return to the White House. Asheville city officials announced the Trump team had only contacted them on August 8, evidence the campaign is moving quickly (and reactively) to reinforce sagging momentum in the state at a time when Trump’s numbers are falling nationwide.
The Trump campaign, which has a history of failing to pay venues and cities for billed rally fees, coughed up $82,000 ahead of the rally to cover venue fees and staffing. Organizers learned from the mistakes of other cities that failed to secure up-front cash from the Trump campaign—officials in El Paso, Texas for example are still seeking $500,000 in unpaid rally fees from the Trump campaign’s event there over half a decade ago.
And yet none of this appeared to sour the mood of Trump’s loudest acolytes on ????, who were wowed by the several thousand Trump fans milling about outside the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium on Wednesday. In their eyes, the polls were wrong (they’re always wrong) and Trump was coming off a massive ???? “interview” that registered 1 billion “views,” according to ????’s internal data.
It didn’t matter that those viewership numbers were heavily disputed, or that the event began nearly an hour late following a series of technical glitches, or that Trump sounded like he had a lisp throughout what could only be characterized as a stump speech featuring the background “oohs and ahs” of the Trump-supporting ???? CEO Elon Musk.
It didn’t matter that Trump-friendly commentator Megyn Kelly called the discussion “boring,” or that Trump’s UFC buddy Joe Rogan was praising Harris’s speech in Atlanta and labeling her a “problem” for the former president, or that The American Conservative contributing editor Dan McCarthy was practically begging the Trump team to quit the virtual games and hit the road to “campaign like it’s 2016.”
It didn’t matter that Florida, a reliably red state, is suddenly in play, or that Harris is surging with Latinos, or that Trump is (allegedly) reevaluating his campaign managers. And it certainly didn’t seem to matter that the campaign was now scrambling to schedule a rally in a battleground state that 30 days ago was firmly in Trump’s grasp. For his greatest warriors, Trump’s “triumphant return” to ???? was evidence the tide was shifting in their favor.
Never mind news that Trump’s media platform Truth Social had just posted a quarterly loss of $16 million, with less than $1 million in revenue, and even less cultural currency among the internet community at large. For the “digital soldiers,” as Ret. General Michael Flynn once put it, Trump’s return to ???? was a momentous occasion that could concretely reenergize the MAGA base.
But the metrics on the ground suggest something completely different.
While Trump supporters spent the better part of the next 24 hours defending Trump against the “lisp hoax,” Harris and the VP nominee Tim Walz were organizing a campaign rally in Milwaukee at the site of July’s Republican National Convention. It will be Harris’s third campaign rally in the swing stage of Wisconsin since she became the nominee in late July.
When asked on Tuesday about a recent New York Times/Siena poll that found Harris leading in Wisconsin, Trump dismissed the numbers and bullishly replied: “I think we are winning.”
Harris’s momentum is such that the Cook Political Report changed its ratings for Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada from “lean Republican” to “toss-up.” Only a week later, the service now has Harris winning Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin—and, of course, North Carolina.
The days of Democrat doubt are gone. Only weeks prior, Trump looked destined for a second term in the White House. Now, he’s struggling to lock down the Tar Heel State.
Biden’s embarrassing debate performance served a fitting bellwether for the 2024 race; two (very) old men, shadows of their former selves, struggling to hit their marks, as the 96 percent of Americans who do not identify as octogenarians gnashed their teeth and wondered who could meet the lowest bar ever set in American presidential politics.
Missing were the old Trump’s brilliant strokes of wit and charisma. The Republican standard-bearer sounded bitter and confrontational throughout but without the zingers. By the end, Trump had only won because Biden’s brain ate itself alive in front of the nation.
In the runup to that now-iconic debate, 50 percent of registered voters repeatedly stated their desire to vote for anyone but Biden or Trump in 2024. The staunchly millennial “double haters” were about to get their wish. Exit Biden. Enter Harris.
For all their prognostications that the former First Lady Michelle Obama or Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) were waiting in the wings to be swapped in for Biden at the last moment, the Trump campaign and its strategists appear to have spent little time considering what a Harris ticket would look like and how to attack it.
The former president’s jabs at Harris about her race have alienated mixed-race voters, a key demographic the Trump campaign is attempting to win over this election cycle. In more worrying news, Harris’s favorability has risen sharply since ascending to the top of the Democratic ticket. She’s up 30 points with black women, 20 with Democrats, and 13 overall as Trump’s characterizations of the former senator fail to land. And, as her numbers rise, Trump continues to attack Biden, a man who is no longer in the race.
The broader right’s myopic attempt to position Harris as a social climber who rode the former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown to the Senate (so to speak) hasn’t taken either. Speaker Mike Johnson has consistently warned that attacking Harris on race and her controversial past will not lead to victory, and top Republicans, including Vivek Ramaswamy, reiterated their desire Wednesday for Trump to focus on policy instead of personal attacks.
The message from Trump’s team was clear in Asheville as they attempted to steer the Republican frontrunner toward the struggling economy. But Trump didn’t seem interested in the prepared remarks, quickly ditching the teleprompter to riff about Tic Tacs, how America has become a “third world nation,” how he will “fire Kamala,” and how Kim Jong Un respects him, not Harris.
It was the sort of wild and unabridged salvo that has made Trump the titan political figure he is today. And it’s exactly the sort of rambling speech that over the years has turned off many of the independent voters he is so eager to win.
Speaking of the independents, Harris, not Trump, has all but ended the fledgling campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and turned lukewarm Democrats back in her favor. Now, the Washington Post reports Kennedy has approached Harris about serving in her Cabinet.
Much of the strongest criticism aimed at the Democratic ticket has fallen at the feet of Walz, whose military record, pro-socialism rhetoric, and friendship with a Muslim cleric who shared antisemitic content have been rapidly leveraged by the Trump campaign. Though such accusations and rhetoric have sunken the aspirations of politicians before, the stories surrounding Walz have failed to land a knockout punch.
Walz is one of the most progressive Democrats in the country. No one disputes that. But he’s being pitched as a friendly football coach who has actually filed a W-2 and, by all measures, it’s working.
“He genuinely does have authenticity and that’s an extremely rare commodity in Washington,” argued liberal commentator Krystal Ball. “He provides incredible class diversity. Here’s a guy who doesn’t own any real estate, crypto, stocks, bonds. Nothing. Has like a teacher’s pension. Earns a sufficient living but this is not a guy or a family who is living high on the hog. Actually relates to the average American in a real and tangible way.”
As the Republican VP nominee J.D. Vance and Donald Trump Jr spent Tuesday disputing accusations that the junior senator from Ohio is “weird,” Walz escaped serious scrutiny from the major players in American media.
They ran the stories but no one demanded he drop off the ticket. Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) rallied to Walz’s side. And so Walz stays.
Another strategy from Trump and Vance has been to paint Harris’s failure to sit for an interview with the American press as “revealing” her inability to face off against world leaders. It’s a fair criticism, but one that has failed to gin up political momentum on the right or pose any real concern for the Democrats. As we learned in 2020, tens of millions of American voters are perfectly happy to pick a basement candidate.
Though Harris has yet to sit for an interview, she is barnstorming the country with political rally after political rally in major battleground states. Harris hit six of seven swing states last week as the Trump campaign weathered criticism from supporters who questioned why Trump was only visiting Montana during that same period.
Harris has the money, the manpower, and the momentum. The only thing stopping her from becoming the 47th president of the United States now is herself.
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