Harris Sees a Campaign Reset; Trump Only Sees Old Attacks

Echoes of 1980 in 2024?

The candidacy of Kamala Harris resets the presidential race to where it was a few months ago. Now, as then, Democrats need to enthuse their base and generate a large turnout, especially in the key swing states. Republicans, and especially candidate Donald Trump, need to expand their base and bring out the voters that have eluded them in recent years.

With President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, Democrats were seeing their base erode. Polls showed Trump was making gains among traditional Democratic voters, including Blacks and Hispanics. Momentum was on the side of Trump.

At least for now, Harris has turned the tide. Even surveys from conservative media show the presidential race today is a toss-up. In the must-win states for Democrats, Fox News showed Harris tied with Trump in Pennsylvania and Michigan and down by just one point in Wisconsin.

The Wall Street Journal published polling results showing that 81% of Harris voters were enthusiastic about her, compared to only 37% of Biden voters who felt similarly about his candidacy just a month ago. The turnaround is “an astounding change,” Democratic pollster Mike Bocian, who conducted the survey with Republican pollster David Lee, told the Journal.

Longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz told NPR that the Harris surge in the polls “is for real. In the polling and the focus groups that we are doing, she is attracting voters who had given up on politics, and I think this is going to continue through November.”

Trump seems flummoxed by Harris’s candidacy and uncertain how to respond, so he falls back on what he knows best: personal attacks. So far, his efforts have been “weird,” to use the current descriptor of choice among Democrats. How weird? He went to the National Association of Black Journalists and suggested that Harris is not Black. While some in his base cheered (you know, the “good people” Trump believes exist on both sides of racism), the small inroads he was making among Black voters hit a roadblock.

Meanwhile, Trump is paying the price for rejecting advice to select a seasoned policymaker as his running mate. Trump thought Democrats had missed their window for Biden to drop out and that he was on his way to a landslide win. He picked J.D. Vance because he is Trump’s MiniMe. Vance was selected over more substantive candidates because Trump values undying loyalty (or, if needed, dying loyally as some Trump advocates asked of VP Mike Pence) above all else.

Trump miscalculated and now is stuck with his Cat Ladies candidate. Vance has no better chance of changing his public image now than did Sarah Palin or other ill-advised selections. The clock is running out for Vance to be anything but a Trump attack clone.

Trump also seems intent on ignoring the fundamental rule of campaigns: go to where the voters are on issues they care about and do so in ways that make sense to the average Joe and Jane. Republican strategists must be tearing their hair out every time Trump goes weird. He has two winning issues - immigration and inflation - that don’t even require him to attack Harris. Trump can just keep repeating the claim that both skyrocketed out of control after he left office. Instead, Trump wants to debate whether Harris is Black.

For her part, Harris, wisely, is using the time Trump is giving her to inoculate herself against the attacks. She has a brilliant new ad that reminds voters Trump killed bipartisan legislation to reform immigration laws and strengthen border security. Her new ad reframes the immigration debate: “There are two choices in this election. The one who will fix our broken immigration system. And the one who is trying to stop her.”

Campaigns, of course, can change in an instant. The 2024 campaign in some ways is a reminder of 1980. Then, an incumbent president, Jimmy Carter, carried the burdens of inflation, high interest rates and questions about America’s role in the world (the Iranian hostage crisis sowed huge seeds of doubt among voters about America’s strength and resolve).

But Carter had one huge advantage. People were worried about the temperament of Ronald Reagan. As long as voters were asking whether Reagan was stable enough to be president, Carter was winning. In fact, a late October Gallup poll put Carter ahead of Reagan by 3% among likely voters. But the one presidential debate of the campaign, held just a week before Election Day, proved disastrous for Carter and calmed voters’ fears about Reagan. When Carter tried to paint Reagan as an extremist, the former actor smiled and brushed off the attacks with, “There you go again.” And in his closing statement, Reagan delivered one of the most famous lines in the history of political debates when he asked voters, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

Not only did Reagan win in a landslide (Carter won only six states and the District of Columbia, losing the electoral college 489-49), but he brought with him one of the largest Senate turnovers in history. Republicans gained 12 Senate seats, defeating Democratic stalwarts like Frank Church, Birch Bayh, John Culver, George McGovern and Gaylord Nelson. The GOP went from a 41-59 minority to a 53-47 majority in the Senate.

On the House side, Democrats maintained the majority, but Republicans had a net gain of 35 seats. Many of the majority Democrats were southern “boll weevils” that often voted with Republicans, giving the GOP and President Reagan an ideological majority in the House.

Donald Trump isn’t Ronald Reagan. He is incapable of deflecting criticism with self-deprecating humor or posing a question that turns a campaign. If Trump persists in his off-putting personal attacks on Harris, he wastes his advantage on the issues voters care most about. Harris not only will be able to redefine those issues to her advantage, she will make the election a referendum on Trump. Republicans know all too well how that turns out, having suffered through election disasters in 2018, 2020 and 2022 with Trump defining the party.

A 1980-style outcome in House and Senate races will be hard for either party to replicate. Voters are far more polarized than they were 24 years ago and big swings between the parties are rarer. Even so, a month ago, the best outcome most analysts saw for Democrats is that 2025 starts with a divided Congress - Democrats controlling the House and Republicans regaining the majority in the Senate. Today, some Democrats quietly are hoping for better, and Republicans increasingly are worried. As GOP pollster Luntz told NPR, Harris is “doing so well, not only nationwide, but in the key swing states, that it has completely jumbled our expectations over who controls the House and who controls the Senate on Nov. 6.”

Nearly a quarter century after Reagan calmed voters’ fears by telling Carter, “There you go again,” in 2024 it will be Trump on the receiving end of the barb. And if 2024 becomes a referendum on Donald Trump, he won’t have to worry about how to pronounce Harris’s first name. He will be calling her Madame President.

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