Politics
Are Team Trump’s Two Good Days Enough?
The wind is at Harris’s back, but she has shown some vulnerabilities.
The day after Tim Walz was chosen as Kamala Harris’s running mate, the Trump-Vance team finally had a relatively good day campaigning. For the previous 16 days, since Biden had been forced out, Kamala Harris had huge wind at her back, her every move receiving hagiographic girlboss press coverage. The Trump camp should have better anticipated it. It might actually have been quantifiable in the polls—a good day might be worth nearly a point in general national favorability ratings, and Harris had pulled off 16 of them in a row.
Actual “who are you going to vote for” polls were somewhat stickier, but by the end of the period some polls showed the race tied, some showed Harris moving towards a large advantage. One poll—the Marquette Law School poll—showed her moving into a six point national lead. Horserace analysts like Mark Halperin (whose studiously non-polemical streaming show Two Way is surprisingly addictive) conveyed that some leading Republicans in private considered the race nearly over, that Harris was pulling into the kind of lead that Trump would never be able to overcome. (For what it’s worth, Halperin didn’t concur, but it is obviously significant that some well-informed people think that.)
What was the good day? Vance was on the trail in Wisconsin, mercifully not required to defend remarks that a conservative intellectual might reasonably make as a polemic make but a national politician wouldn’t, and he found a clever way to talk about Harris and Walz. He walked over to Harris’s plane on Eau Claire airport tarmac and addressed reporters, a way to point out that Harris seemed to be terrified of speaking to reporters without a prepared text and a teleprompter. He shifted the conversation over to Walz and made some points about Walz’s refusal to call the National Guard during the early days of the George Floyd r …