Kamala Harris’s momentum has slowed just a bit. It’s still real. She’s still leading in the polls by around three points, even though we all had our ritual freakout Sunday morning over the latest Times/Siena poll. She’s ahead or competitive in swing states where Joe Biden was six or seven points behind. But the initial burst of excitement she enjoyed has, as is routine, faded, and she’s been off the trail for a few days preparing for the debate at the expense of stoking voter enthusiasm. But this is a reasonable short-term investment: A good performance Tuesday night can put wind back in her sails. A bad one will have the press start writing a Donald Trump comeback narrative. It was a consequential debate that brought us to this point. Harris is smart to assume this next one could put a twist in the tale of this election year—provided she wins.
To me, Tuesday’s debate comes down to two challenges. One, Harris needs to come across as confident, sure of herself, in command of facts. She would be well served to toss out one or two new policy ideas, just to quiet the criticism that she’s short on specifics. All this, I feel reasonably sure she can do.
The second hurdle is the more worrisome one. Trump is going to savage her in every way he can think of. It’s who he is. He can’t believe he’s losing to a Black woman, and he can’t possibly comprehend the fact that America likes her better. Harris’s favorability rating isn’t exactly high, but she was in the red on that score for most of the last four years by 15 or so points—until she became the nominee, when her favorable numbers spiked. Now she’s even. Trump remains 10 points underwater.
He knows there’s only one way he can win: He needs to get America to hate Harris. Right now, people don’t. They don’t adore her, but they don’t hate her. This is very different from 2016, when he was running against someone the right wing had been telling Americans to hate for a quarter-century. He knows he has seven weeks to do a Hillary on Kamala.
He’ll throw it all at her—Comrade Kamala, Marxist, Communist, for starters. Then there will be some policy-based attacks. He’ll blame every bad thing that’s happened in California in the last 20 years on her, and of course he’ll tell lie after lie. Trump’s constant use of the “gish gallop” proved to be something with which Biden could not contend. Harris will have to demonstrate the deftness of her relative youth.
Here’s a good example of what Trump might spring on her. One of the tall tales you may have heard is that Harris decreed it perfectly legal for shoplifters to steal up to $950 worth of stuff. The reference is to a 2014 ballot measure, Proposition 47, which was passed by the voters by a whopping 60 to 40 margin. Far from making theft legal, it reclassified six felonies to misdemeanors, including shoplifting up to the above amount. People can reasonably disagree about where the dollar amount that pushes theft from misdemeanor to felony should be. In this case, the people decided directly; Harris had nothing to do with it. She should say that, although I hope she notes that Prop 47 has actually reduced recidivism rates in the state substantially.
Trump may go with his standard lie that Harris (like all Democrats) wants abortion to be available right up to birth and even after. (The media has, for some reason, given Trump a pass on an outrageous claim that Democrats are in favor of post-birth abortion.) It’s hard for me to imagine anyone is stupid enough to believe this, but I guess some people are. She needs to have a good comeback line for that one.
But mostly, he’ll go through her record as prosecutor to try to find another Willie Horton. Trump’s press operation sent out an email last week calling Harris a “soft-on-crime radical” and listing some cases where people were released and committed crimes again. One name we’re likely to hear is that of Edwin Ramos.
Ramos was an undocumented immigrant and an MS-13 gang member. In March 2008, he and another undocumented immigrant were arrested in San Francisco on a weapons charge. Harris’s office declined to prosecute Ramos, arguing at the time that they didn’t have the evidence to make the charge stick (they did prosecute the other man arrested in the incident). Three months later, Ramos killed a man and his two sons, mistaking one of the sons for a rival gang member.
We’ll have to see how she handles this in the 60 seconds or whatever it’ll be that she has to respond. She’ll probably hit back with the story, revealed last week by Judd Legum, of Jaime Davidson, a drug kingpin who was convicted for playing a role in the murder of an undercover Syracuse police officer in 1990. Trump commuted Davidson’s sentence in his last hours in office. Last year, Davidson strangled his wife during a dispute. He was sentenced to three months in prison.
Granted, that’s not the same as a triple murder. But it’s awfully weird that Trump commuted a convicted cop killer’s sentence (Davidson did not pull the trigger, I should note; he was a drug kingpin who handed the gun to the subordinate who did the deed). Davidson’s attorney was the wife of a lawyer who had at times represented members of the Trump family. The prosecutor who sent Davidson to prison on the murder charge was angered by the pardon.
This will all be part of a larger effort by Trump to scare the country into thinking that under a President Harris, the United States is going to turn into an apocalyptic hellscape of violence committed by non-white people against white people. That’s the main course. As side dishes, throw in that she hates capitalism and wants to punish success and wants to tax you to death while she and her elitist Berkeley friends sneer at you, and that’s the Harris that Trump will want to fix in voters’ minds over the next seven weeks.
And let’s face it—what Trump plans to do can work—it has worked in the past. It will be especially effective if it goes unanswered. She should avoid getting down in the mud with him, yes, but that just means not directly answering his crude personal attacks. She needs to defend herself and hit him hard on his lies, the pandemic that he made so much worse, the insurrection, his felony conviction, his Putin-love, and all the rest. And then she needs to turn to the camera and smile and talk about the middle class and the future and what she’s going to do to help people.
Harris is something Biden no longer was by the time his debate with Trump ended: She is well positioned to win this election. I think there’s a quiet army of millions out there who are both inspired by her and terrified enough of him that they’ll register and volunteer at levels we’ve never seen, not even in 2008. But to stoke enthusiasm among voters who aren’t already true believers, she has to come out of Tuesday night with those millions feeling revved up by something in which they can put their faith. Hope can beat hate. But hope has to come to the fight ready to throw punches.
