Kamala Harris Isn’t Repeating the Mistakes of 2016

Will Donald Trump win? As I write this in late October, no one knows for sure if 2024 will be a repeat of 2020 or 2016—or if it will manifest as some other election scenario none of us have lived through yet. But we do know a couple things for sure.

First, vote totals from mail-in voting and early voting show that, unlike 2016, this will not be a low-turnout election.

Second, Trump 2024 is very much not Trump 2016. This is to say that the former president is no longer a symptom or an outlier of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party, and the Republican Party is him. The GOP House Speaker, Mike Johnson, was effectively installed by Trump for his work trying to overturn the 2020 election. And while some senators, like Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, may like to downplay their alignment with Trump, any truly anti-Trump Republican has been driven from the party. All that remains are a sea of mini Trumps, sycophants and faint mimeographs of the OG.

Third, although many Democrats are living in mortal fear that this cycle will be another 2016, they’d do well to remember that Kamala Harris’s campaign is not like Hillary Clinton’s. Harris is running a highly targeted ground game focused on picking off Republican women who can’t stomach Trump and the few undecideds who are somehow still on the fence. Will it work? That I can’t say. After all, she’s running as a woman of color in a country that is still deeply racist and sexist. But if she doesn’t win, it won’t be for lack of trying.

Take, for example, her canny media blitz: Over the past few weeks, the vice president has dared to puncture the right-wing media ecosystem. She sat down for a very annoying interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier—who interrupted Harris at least “38 times in 27 minutes,” according to CNN—and is reportedly in talks to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Meanwhile, her running mate, Tim Walz, has been on Fox News Sunday twice in the last three weeks. (Oh, and it also doesn’t hurt that Harris absolutely destroyed Trump in the first and only debate.) All of this, as one swing state member of Congress tells me, is “the total opposite” of the anemic way Clinton campaigned in 2016. “I experienced both,” they said. “Like night and day.”

More recently, on Sunday, Harris spent her morning with two different church congregations in the Atlanta area. And on Monday, she’s doing another campaign stop with anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney, who rallied with Harris earlier in the month in Wisconsin and will cohost “moderated discussions” with the veep in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee.

Trump, for his part, isn’t (at least not yet) crisscrossing the country with a flurry of campaign stops in battleground states, as he did in 2016. According to ABC News, around this time that year, Trump did 26 rallies, while Clinton only did 19; Trump went to 12 states and Clinton only went to eight. Clinton’s biggest fumble: She neglected to visit both Georgia and Wisconsin—and only spent a single day in Arizona—after clinching the Democratic nomination in June. That likely fed into her -12 unfavorability rating at the time. By contrast, Harris presently sits at a comfortable +5%, according to a new AP poll, and she rates better on the economy than Trump too.

Perhaps the most important number of all, though, is age. Trump is 78 years old now. He has been doing this for almost a decade, presumably at this point his campaign has morphed into a play to stay out of jail given that the federal election-subversion case is still looming. He’s tired, and you can see it in his campaign schedule: “An ‘exhausted’ Trump says no to another interview,” as Politico reported last week, noting that the former president canceled “sit-downs with NBC in Philadelphia and CNBC’s Squawk Box—and that’s on the heels of him backing out of a 60 Minutes episode earlier this month.” (A Trump spokesperson told Politico that the characterization that Trump is exhausted is “unequivocally false.”)

These days, Trump only seems to have energy for silly stunts and photo ops, like the one he did this weekend, cosplaying as a McDonald’s employee. It was a clear attempt at trolling Harris, who has said she worked at the chain as a student one summer. “I’m going to McDonald’s to work the French fries,” Trump said—and he did, though the store was technically closed and the customers were pre-vetted. Later that night, he told an audience in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that he was “not close to 80.” In fact, he is actually two years from 80, meaning that he is quite close to 80. And then, relatedly, there’s the question of Trump’s mental acuity—something that Trumpworld beat the hell out of Joe Biden for until the president bowed out of the race. The Trump of 2024 likes to call his stream-of-consciousness speechifying a “weave.” But Trump’s weave is getting more tangled by the day, as evidenced by his more than 10-minute soliloquy about the size of late golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis. Needless to say, Trump might win, but it sure as hell won’t be because he stuck to his message.

Part of why 2016 took everyone by surprise was because there were these “hidden” Trump voters. They were low-propensity voters who were impossible to capture in polls, and who were by all rights not really thought of as voters. But by the same token, it’s also possible that hidden Harris voters will be in store for 2024. “There’s an undercurrent of people that feel that way about Kamala, that don’t want to admit that they will vote for her, but they will,” as political independent Kevin Kerr told The New York Times. “They just don’t want to get into it with their neighbors.” Trump may be tired from running for president for nearly a decade. But so are we; American voters have reached a saturation point for drama. The big question is: Do they remember that Trump is the one who started it?

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