The Honeymooners

Sarah Isgur and I have a bet.

It was foolish of me to agree to it, as she just missed taking Steve Hayes to the cleaners in their own wager. Last year, they diverged on whether Joe Biden and Donald Trump would be renominated by their parties in 2024, with Sarah betting yes and Steve betting no. If not for the president turning in the worst debate performance in American history, she would have hit the exacta.

A few days after that fiasco, she and I wagered on whether the September 10 debate between the nominees would take place as scheduled. Sarah said yes. I said no, convinced Trump wouldn’t give Biden an opportunity to undo the horrendous impression he’d made on American voters on June 27. Trump has zero incentive to participate, I insisted, unless Democrats replace Biden and his successor starts running ahead in the polls.

Since then, Democrats have replaced Biden. And given the huge surge of enthusiasm this week for his successor, it’s possible that by early September she’ll be running ahead in the polls.

It’s no wonder, then, that Trump’s commitment to the September 10 debate has turned murky. His campaign released a statement on Thursday declaring that they won’t agree to anything until after the Democratic convention, just in case the party gets cold feet about nominating “Marxist fraud” Kamala Harris and opts for someone else. They even cited the misgivings about her candidacy allegedly felt by “Barack Hussein Obama”—who promptly turned around and endorsed Harris on Friday morning.

Trump’s hesitancy makes sense. If Harris faceplants in August, logically he should do what he did during the Republican primaries by dodging the debates and denying his opponent a chance to catch up to him. If Harris takes off, he’ll need the debates to try to erase her advantage and should challenge her to several. It won’t be clear which strategy is optimal until the dust settles from the Democratic switcheroo.

But there’s another reason he and his team felt obliged to throw the debates into doubt on Thursday, I suspect. They’ve lost control of the race. And Trump doesn’t like not being in control.

He can barely tolerate not being the center of attention when the center of attention is occupied by his opponent’s frailty and unfitness for office. But when it shifts to how much younger and more lucid his new opponent is and how surprisingly excited her party is about her (and how terrible his own vice presidential pick was), it’s unbearable.

So desperate was he on Thursday to regain some attention that he was reduced to babbling about jail time for flag-burners, the nationalist political equivalent of “stupid pet tricks.”

We all expected a sigh of relief on the left after Harris replaced Biden on the ticket, as her ability to campaign with at least some proficiency instantly gives Democrats a puncher’s chance of winning. But I’m surprised by how much genuine enthusiasm for her there is.

I continue to believe what I wrote on Monday, that the race becoming a referendum on Kamala Harris is unlikely to work out well for the anti-Trump coalition. But if you’re newly optimistic about her after the lavish honeymoon she’s enjoyed this week, I understand.

Happy and … competent?

It’s been a minute since we’ve had a presidential nominee who’s young (by the Jurassic standards of American politics) and pleasant in their mien on the campaign trail.

In my younger adulthood, candidates like that were par for the course. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all fit the bill in their first runs for president. But since 2012, when Obama abandoned “hope and change” to go scorched-earth on Mitt Romney, it’s been a parade of po-faced attack dogs snarling at each other with accusations of wanting to destroy America. And apart from Obama himself, all of them were grandmas and grandpas.

Harris has been a throwback this week. At 59 years old, she’s not that young, but the contrast with her predecessor and her opponent makes her seem like a Zoomer by comparison. And as you’d expect of someone who’s just been given one of the biggest gifts in American political history, she simply can’t contain her happiness about it. Every time we’ve seen her lately, she’s beaming.

Well, almost.

Democratic voters who spoke to the New York Times this week could scarcely restrain their own joy at suddenly having a nominee who can speak in complete sentences. “I realized today, while I was listening to my podcasts, that I spent the last few days without worrying and being depressed,” one chirped. “It’s gone from the dread election to the hope election, overnight,” said another. “It was just going to be this horrible, slow slog between two old men that nobody liked,” added a third, and now “everyone I know is happy.”

I don’t know if it’s possible to remain a happy warrior in a campaign against Donald Trump, especially given the direction he’s likely to take on the stump, but Harris can only benefit by maintaining the current vibe. Politics in this country has become such a dour, dispiriting grind that the thought of spending four years with someone who’s reasonably lively and upbeat is probably worth something to voters.

The messaging from her nascent campaign has also been deft, uncharacteristically. “Ms. Harris has not, in five years on the national stage, shown competence,” Peggy Noonan wrote on Friday, with understatement. “She is showing it now, and that is big news. Her rollout this week demonstrated talent and hinted she may be a real political athlete.”

I’m not getting my hopes up, but it’s true that her early attack lines on Trump have been auspicious. “We’re not going back” is a clever one, not just as an answer to MAGA’s perpetual nostalgia trip but because it places some distance between Harris and her extremely unpopular boss. Half of America doesn’t want to go back to Trump, the other half doesn’t want to go back to Biden. “Elect me if you don’t want to go back,” she’s telling the country, cryptically, aiming to seize the mantle of “change candidate” from the Republican nominee. Not bad.

“Freedom” is another noteworthy message coming from the American left, which for most of my life has championed equality while leaving sloganeering about liberty to the right. Any party that’s as enthusiastic about regulation as Democrats are has a highly nuanced idea of freedom, needless to say, but as a rallying cry it holds promise. And not just as obvious code for abortion rights, which the party is counting on to drive turnout in November.

It’s a smart message because Joe Biden’s big bet on trying to make the election a referendum on democracy wasn’t paying off, and might even have been backfiring. “Freedom” reframes the contrast with a GOP that’s grown less libertarian and more statist in its nationalist incarnation, as Trump’s “stupid pet trick” reminds us. If, like me, you prefer Harris to him because she’s the less sinister authoritarian between the two, you’re already voting for freedom in November.

The new message simply clarifies the stakes.

Finally there’s the punchy emphasis lately on the “weirdness” of modern Republicans, a jab that began with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz but has migrated to the Harris campaign itself. A faction that condones transgender surgeries for minors and defunding the police (as Harris herself did in 2020) can do only so much to persuade the public that it’s the lesser of two weirdos on the ballot. But Trump and his most devoted acolytes are deeply weird people, including the acolyte who just became his running mate.

American voters conducted an experiment by electing Trump in 2016: “What if we dispensed with sober leadership for four years in order to radically shake up the system?” It went badly enough that they turned to establishment dinosaur Joe Biden in 2020, believing that he’d right the ship, and instead his presidency delivered inflation no one under 40 had ever seen and complete indifference to enforcing the southern border. After eight years, they’re starving for normalcy.

There’s only upside for Harris in reminding voters how abnormal another four years of the weirdo-in-chief would be.

Expanding the map.

There are less vibe-y and more substantive reasons for this week’s honeymoon too, of course. For starters, polling already shows the switcheroo paying off for Democrats.

The final RealClearPolitics national average of Trump and Biden head-to-head had the former leading by 3.1 points. The first round of polling between Trump and Harris has seen the Republicans’ lead cut to 1.5 points, and that figure is inflated by a survey from Trump-friendly Rasmussen Reports that puts him ahead by 7. In six of the eight most recent polls, he and Harris are within 2 points of each other.

Some individual surveys show more dramatic progress. Earlier this month, the highly regarded New York Times poll saw Biden fading to a 6-point deficit against Trump following his debate disaster. The paper’s first poll involving Harris after the president withdrew from the race has that lead down to 1. Ditto for the Wall Street Journal, which has the two statistically tied in a survey released Friday afternoon after finding Trump up six points on Biden earlier this month.

The turnaround in certain swing states is also meaningful. The last survey taken in New Hampshire, which Biden won by 7 points in 2020, had Trump jumping ahead to an ominous 2-point lead after the debate. But two new polls conducted there this week find Harris up by 6 and 7 points, matching Biden’s margin four years ago. A key subplot for the rest of the campaign will be whether she can sustain Biden’s support among white voters; early indicators in the very white state of New Hampshire are promising.

Same story in Michigan, a must-win battleground. Trump led Biden dependably there for weeks, bouncing out to a 7-point advantage in the last survey taken before the president dropped out. In two polls published this week with Harris as his opponent, Trump led by just a point in one and trailed by less than a point in the other.

It’s not merely that Harris is polling better than Biden. She’s polling better with constituencies in swing states that had slipped away from him.

The president’s only path to reelection was to concede Sun Belt battlegrounds like Georgia and Arizona and throw everything at holding the Rust Belt trio of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. With Harris at the top of the ticket, though, the map has opened up:

Performing better than Biden with nonwhite voters won’t mean much if she performs worse with white voters. But if she can maintain that level of support, she could put states in play that seemed long gone a week ago. “The historic nature of Harris’ candidacy is likely to resonate louder in North Carolina than most other places, given that over 20 percent of the population is black,” Politico reported on Friday of a state Democrats lost by less than 2 points four years ago.

Barack Obama won there in 2008 thanks to 72 percent turnout among African Americans, a number that hasn’t been matched since. If the first black woman nominee in U.S. history can flip North Carolina, perhaps with its governor as her running mate, she’ll earn more Electoral Votes than she would from winning Michigan.

Speaking of which: The Harris veepstakes that’s playing out in public view this week has also given Democrats an unexpected shot in the arm.

A chronic problem for Joe Biden was that few prominent figures in his party wanted to vouch for him, as tends to happen with presidents whose job approval is terminally stuck at 40 percent or so. There’ll always be people like Gavin Newsom willing to say anything for the sake of getting on camera, but for the average Democratic governor or senator, defending Biden required constant disingenuous chastisements that voters shouldn’t believe the evidence of their eyes or ears about the president’s frailty.

Harris’ ascension and the soon-to-be-filled vacancy on the national ticket has put a spring in the Democratic establishment’s collective step. Turn on a news program this week and you’re apt to find some vice-presidential shortlister—Roy Cooper, Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear, and Mark Kelly, among others—auditioning by emphatically making the case for electing Harris. However self-interested their excitement might be, it’s surely helping to unify and motivate the rank-and-file.

And it’s given Harris something that Biden, in his decline, never quite managed to put together: An actual campaign, replete with surrogates. The president’s personal feebleness helped obscure how feeble his operation had become; the burst of support for his successor among party apparatchiks and the avalanche of grassroots money it’s unlocked feel less like a lifeless patient being revived than outright resurrected.

How long can it last?

When the honeymoon ends.

Harris’ stock is overvalued, Noah Rothman argued today at National Review. I agree.

At some point, perhaps not until September if she’s very lucky, the hype about her being the second coming of Barack Obama except with 50 percent more historic-ness will calm down and voters will consider her record. It won’t be pretty.

If Sarah wants to go double or nothing, I could probably be talked into wagering that the high point of Kamala Harris’ polling will come a week after the Democratic convention and that it’ll be all downhill from there.

But even here, I wonder if I’m underestimating the extent to which the good vibes she’s enjoyed this week might sustain her into fall.

The greatest political benefit Harris will derive from the swell of enthusiasm for her is leeway to run to the middle. Progressive voters have been granted a second lease on political life; they’re excited about having a nominee with whom it’s easier to relate; and so they’re not going to turn on her in a snit as she pivots opportunistically away from them and toward the center. Any chance they have of winning the election depends on Harris winning the race to define herself before Republicans define her, so they’ll give her room to run. 

In fact, the pivot has already begun. She’s destined to spend the next 12 weeks touting her credentials as a tough-on-crime prosecutor in order to heighten the contrast with convicted felon Donald Trump. And only the dumbest, shrillest progressives will bother to make much of a stink about it.

It’s also possible that the “fresh start” goodwill she’s earned this week will insulate her from some of Biden’s liabilities.

On Tuesday, Semafor flagged an intriguing result from a Democratic pollster about Harris’ liabilities. Americans trust Trump more than her on immigration, unsurprisingly, but they trust the two equally on the radioactive problem of inflation. It’s strange that Joe Biden’s vice president isn’t carrying his heaviest policy burden into the home stretch of the campaign.

Maybe that’s an inadvertent benefit of her low profile as VP. She’s not being blamed because no one believes she was actually helping to set policy in the Biden White House! But I suspect it’s more the case that voters came to view Biden’s governing failures as functions of his age, with his cognitive decline supposedly rendering him incapable of addressing problems effectively as they developed. That’s not how inflation works, of course—there was no “switch” to maintain the 2019 cost of living that the president, in his dotage, forgot to throw—but it sure helps Kamala Harris for voters to think that way.

She’s not old and asleep at the wheel and therefore she can’t be blamed for the inflation over which she helped preside: She and her party will have no objection if Americans want to believe that.

Frankly, in a country that no longer takes major policy problems seriously, having the right vibes might be enough. Trump won in 2016 mainly on vibes that he’d drain the Washington swamp. Biden won in 2020 mainly on vibes that he’d restore stability. Why couldn’t Kamala Harris win running on vibes that America needs a leader who’s neither at death’s door nor a glowering autocratic freak?

Harris 2024: Alive and well. We’re not going back.