Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential race and Kamala Harris’ ascension to the Democratic nomination has gone about as well as it could have for the vice-president.
In removing the greatest impediment to undecided voters voting Democrat and commencing her campaign as smoothly as possible, including in her selection of running mate Tim Walz, Harris has turned Trump’s 3-point average lead over Biden into her own 2.5-point average lead over Trump.
And Trump and his campaign are rattled. The first big sign that they weren’t prepared for Harris and were shocked at how well she has been doing was Trump deciding he didn’t want to debate her. He demanded in early August she appear on Fox News instead of the ABC, then reversed himself after a week and said he would debate her after all.
That revealed a lot. Frontrunners prefer not to debate — they have nothing to gain. Remember the contortions Julia Gillard went through in 2010 when the first week of her campaign against Tony Abbott had her cruising to victory, enabling her to dismiss talk of a debate with him, only for Kevin Rudd to blow up her campaign, leaving her the underdog who suddenly insisted Abbott debate her.
The second and more important sign was that Trump’s racist and misogynist abuse of Harris failed to stop her ascension in the polls (or diminish the size of her crowds, a subject Trump has a weird obsession with), forcing him to contemplate the unthinkable: talking about policy.
The pressure on Trump to scale back his personal abuse of Harris and focus on policy — which Trump has resisted — has come mainly from his own side, with GOP Senator Lindsey Graham overnight saying Trump the “showman” might not win the election and that he needed to focus on policy. Trump’s problems have been compounded by widespread, and correct, perceptions that his running mate JD Vance — widely considered a poor choice — has a problem with women.
The problem is, Trump doesn’t do policy. The GOP platform, which Trump appears to have directly dictated, is all assertion and no substance. Trump’s idea of policy is a half-formed notion to build a wall along the Mexican border and force Mexico to pay for it, or impose tariffs on Chinese imports under the illusion it will be the Chinese who pay the tariffs, not Americans. He’s the man who suggested Americans inject bleach or use sunlight to cure COVID.
The point of Trump is that he doesn’t have to do policy. His appeal lies in who he is, not what he intends to do — the sort of thing that quickly bogs down in the kind of detail Trump has no interest in. Trump is the embodiment of the grievance, hatred and hostility of his supporters, the man who says the things that they want to say, about the people whom they despise — the liberals, the elites, the media, the African-Americans, the feminists.
The moment Trump starts talking policy instead of abusing Harris and deriding the long list of “enemies of the people” is the moment he becomes an ordinary politician.
Trump understands this. It’s why he’s sabotaged his efforts to talk about policy. Last week in North Carolina, Trump told a crowd “Now this is a little bit different day [sic]. We’re talking about a thing called the economy. They wanted to do a speech on the economy. A lot of people are very devastated by what’s happened with inflation and all of the other things. So, we’re doing this as an intellectual speech. You’re all intellectuals today.” Then he added, “They say it’s the most important subject. I think crime is right there, I think the border is right there, personally.”
Trump thus confirmed that he was more or less giving an economy speech at the insistence of his advisers (“they”). He would later switch back to talk about migrants again, saying, “Rape and murder, rape and beatings, rape and something else, and sometimes just immediate killing. These people are brutal.”
On the weekend, Trump was making a virtue of abandoning talking about the economy to attack Harris. “You don’t mind if I go off teleprompter for a second, do you? Joe Biden hates her,” he told a rally on Saturday.
With Trump rightly understanding that policy is not his forté, and his standard shtick of racism not apparently working, the former president faces a real problem about how to tackle Harris, especially as she’ll receive a bump from the Democratic convention this week.
His best bet is likely to wait for the shine to come off Harris and for her to start making mistakes — inevitable in a presidential campaign — and to see what he can exploit in her policies and her attempts to differentiate herself from Biden, while also claiming partial credit for the strength of the American economy.
Harris knows interest rate cuts are expected to arrive as soon as September from the Federal Reserve, though these won’t have the same impact on American households as they would in Australia, given the reliance on fixed-rate mortgages in the US. But sitting and waiting are anathema to Trump, especially when he knows he’s behind in the polls.
