Kamala Harris Has to Break Through—and Time Is Running Out

The clock is ticking, and Kamala Harris is not yet where she should be in the must win battleground states. For all the joy and energy, she is (to Democrats) inexplicably behind where Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton were in their respective races against Donald Trump.

Before the debate with Trump, 28 percent of voters said they wanted to know more about Harris. 67.1 million people watched her skewer Trump, a record-breaking audience, but questions remain. A quarter of those polled after the debate said they still didn’t know enough about Harris and who she is and why they should trust her as commander in chief and to handle the economy.

The good news for Harris is that she’s got room to grow. Millions of voters are still reachable and persuadable, and she only needs thousands in a handful of key states. The bad news is that time is running out with no big stages ahead to easily reach those voters if Trump refuses to debate.

It’s up to the Harris campaign to find or create a platform every day to reach voters, and if you follow her schedule, you can see the strategy operating behind every move.

The economy is the top issue, and she’s significantly behind Trump, who benefits from a collective amnesia about the 200,000 manufacturing jobs lost on his watch. Harris fleshed out her “opportunity vision” before the Economic Club of Pittsburgh Wednesday, pledging middle-class tax cuts, child and elder care, and a pragmatic capitalistic approach that she vowed to applause “shouldn’t be constrained by ideology.”

She described herself as a lifelong public servant who also knows the limitations of government, a concession from a Democrat that ranks up there with Bill Clinton declaring in his 1996 State of the Union speech, “the era of big government is over.”

Then she sat down with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, a knowledgeable former business reporter who cut to the chase of what Harris’ economic pitch is all about. The vice president pledged to create three million new housing units for rent and for ownership by the end of her first term, a commitment that would require cutting through red tape and working with state and local governments.

Asked by Ruhle to define a good tariff versus a bad tariff, Harris showed how deftly she can take down Trump by saying he’s “just not very serious in how he thinks about some of these issues. One must be serious and have a plan and a real plan that’s not just about some talking point that ends with an exclamation point at a rally.”

And finally, of Trump calling himself the “protector” of women, Harris said, “I don’t think the women of America need him to say he’s going o protect them. They need him to trust them.”

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On Tuesday, the vice president had no public events, an omission that prompted talk among the White House press corps that she risked getting outworked by Trump. Like magic, an announcement appeared that evening from a Harris campaign official to the president of the White House Correspondents Association that the Vice President “participated earlier today in a taped interview for the podcast ‘All the Smoke,’ hosted by retired NBA players Stephen Jackson and Matt Barnes.”

The legendary players dish on the latest news whether it’s on or off the court, so Harris will reach Black men, especially young Black men, who are drifting away from the Democratic Party and toward Trump.

Harris lags Biden with voters of color despite being one of them, and she’s got work to do with white women, who in the most recent CNN poll split 50 percent Trump to 47 percent Harris. Hillary Clinton lost the presidency in part because she lost white women (and she was one of them) to Trump by 9 points. Biden lost white women by 11 points, a trajectory that Harris hopes to reverse.

Every presidential campaign puts the candidate on the spot when it comes to offering specifics. Governor Bill Clinton and Senator Al Gore published “Putting People First” in September 1992. It was a handbook that outlined their proposals concerning the economy, crime, education, energy, the environment, health care, housing, national security, business, space, trade, and welfare.

It worked to propel the pair to the White House on the strength of the change they would bring as the first baby boomers to defeat a Greatest Generation Republican, George H.W. Bush, who had just won a war.

Harris shouldn’t be afraid to take a bold step or two. It’s good that she will visit the border when she is in Arizona on Friday. She should be brutally honest about what went wrong (inaction for too long), and what is going right now with border crossings at a low. And she should slam Trump for killing a conservative border bill because he wants to run on the chaos.

There are voters out there that Harris needs, and who want to believe in her. She has found multiple slogans and phrases that are just right for the times. All we ask is that she dig a little deeper and trust herself as much as the voters want to know and trust her.