Thomas O. Falk

Opinion | Trump won’t self-destruct. To win, Harris must come out swinging

Harris will wait in vain for Trump to shatter under the pressure of his incoherence. He is a bulldozer and Harris must face him head on

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Thomas O. Falk

Published: 8:30pm, 20 Oct 2024

When US Vice-President Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket, the party’s operatives believed they had engineered the perfect formula for victory. Biden, after all, had become a symbol of age and frailty, his presidency increasingly defined by his gaffes and lack of vigour.

Harris, with her historic nomination and ability to galvanise the Democratic base, seemed the antidote to Donald Trump’s bombast, and she began leading in the national polls, with even some battleground states leaning in her favour. After the Democratic National Convention, where Harris’s acceptance speech hit all the right notes, the momentum felt irreversible.

But the mood has shifted drastically. Democrats, once giddy with optimism, are facing an all-too-familiar nightmare: a coin-flip election that could easily go the other way. Recent polls show Harris’ lead shrinking as Trump pulls ahead in the battleground states.

To put this in perspective, Harris’ numbers are not just weaker than Biden’s at this point of the year in 2020 but, more importantly, worse than Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. For all her flaws, Clinton still led Trump in several battleground states weeks before the 2016 election.

How did the Democrats let this happen? The answer lies in critical miscalculations.

Trump has brilliantly capitalised on two enduring issues that resonate deeply with the electorate: immigration and the economy. With inflation and interest rates still high and a job market that remains shaky for many, Trump has painted the economic climate as a failure of Democratic leadership.