OPINION:
In his three campaigns for president, Donald Trump has never been in as strong a position as he is right now, and that is apparently scaring the daylights out of Vice President Kamala Harris. You don’t have to take my word for it; just watch the way she’s behaving.
After a six-week period of glowing coverage that followed her ascension to the top of the Democratic Party’s national ticket — replacing the feeble and forcibly discarded President Biden — she doesn’t have a tremendous amount to show for it. Yes, she’s faring better against Mr. Trump than Mr. Biden had been, but that’s nothing to brag about.
Ms. Harris has been the beneficiary of the equivalent of millions of dollars’ worth of free advertising from the mainstream media, and she still couldn’t quite catch Mr. Trump in most public polls. There are exceptions (in polling, there always are), but a slew of recent national surveys from The New York Times, CNN and Quinnipiac have shown the race to be tied, or show Mr. Trump with a slight lead. That’s devastating because a national poll includes Democratic strongholds such as California and New York, and she’s still tied or behind.
In many battleground state polls, Mr. Trump holds leads of varying sizes, and that’s the best indicator that if the election were held today, he’d win. This has led to reactionary behavior from Ms. Harris, proving that she knows she’s behind.
She announced a trip to the southern border with Mexico this past week, which is clearly a desperate move and an effort to address her own failures as Mr. Biden’s border czar Rather than shoring up her position, the visit reminds voters of a glaring weakness: The border is far from secure, and everyone knows it is her responsibility.
Ms. Harris traveled to Pittsburgh to deliver what was billed as a major economic address to draw contrasts between herself and Mr. Trump on what every single poll says is the most important issue on voters’ minds. Instead of laying out a detailed agenda, she spouted the same pablum she has offered before, broke no new ground and disappointed viewers who expected her to finally put some meat on the bones of her plan.
Her campaign knows it needs to cut into Mr. Trump’s lead on economic issues, so she tried to take control of the conversation with the speech. But instead of fleshing out details, she confirmed that she’s almost completely bereft of ideas.
What voters did get was an admission that the economy isn’t working and this gold nugget: “We just need to move past the failed policies that we have proven don’t work,” she said, unaware that she was really talking about her own shortcomings, since she’s been vice president for the last 3½ years.
Ms. Harris is still pandering to the left, which complicates her phony shift to the middle, and is a problem with the election less than six weeks away. She pledged to ditch the Senate filibuster to codify abortion access, but in so doing managed to alienate independent West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a former Democrat, who said he could no longer support her candidacy because of it.
Her campaign announced that she would skip a huge annual Catholic event next month, the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York, citing a desire to campaign in battleground states. But this slight indicates that she knows she wouldn’t be welcome in the room because of her extreme position on abortion access and support for taxpayer-funded sex reassignment surgery for illegal aliens and inmates.
According to exit polls, a slim majority of Catholics broke for Mr. Biden in 2020, but they have been abandoning Ms. Harris in droves, and the Alfred E. Smith Dinner episode will only worsen her problem.
Catholics aren’t her only demographic problem, as she’s not doing nearly as well as Mr. Biden had been doing among Black voters, Hispanic voters and other groups. She is “underwater” on favorability, as they say — lagging behind Mr. Trump — and the number of people who say they still don’t know enough about her should be troubling to her campaign.
We might start seeing news stories about infighting in the Harris ranks soon, which would not be surprising from a group made up of three factions: Harris loyalists, Biden loyalists and Obama loyalists.
That happens when campaigns begin to falter, and it’s just one of many warning signs. To see which way she’s truly headed, pay no attention to what she says and focus instead on what she does.
That’ll tell you that she’s losing and knows it.
• Tim Murtaugh serves as a senior adviser to the Donald J. Trump for President campaign.
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