On Monday, Donald Trump’s brain broke. After medical emergencies in the crowd cut short his town hall in suburban Philadelphia, the former president decided he didn’t want to leave the stage. Instead, for half an hour, he swayed as the loudspeaker blasted a playlist of his favorite songs—among them “Ave Maria,” “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and “November Rain”—and his increasingly confused supporters streamed out. Trump’s abnormal behavior is central to his political appeal, but this was something different. He did not seem well. As has been increasingly true, he looked old and diminished and more than a little confused.
At the same time, Trump is more extreme than ever. Before the aforementioned town hall detoured into a zombie dance-off, Trump said of migrants, “So they’re coming in, many are coming in from jails and prisons and mental institutions and stay-in asylums … and they’re coming as terrorists…. It is an invasion like we’ve never seen before.” And he promised to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in response, noting that “it gives the president tremendous power to do what has to be done to secure our country.”
Trump is running an explicitly authoritarian, if not outright fascist, campaign: The central planks of his platform are to deport millions of people, to let police use violence without oversight, and to use the military to round up his political opponents. He is, by every metric, more dangerous than he was when he left office four years ago. And yet, most polls show him having a roughly 50-50 chance of returning to the White House in January—which, understandably, has Democrats in a panic.
“Dread is growing among Democrats that the euphoria over Harris’ entry into the race in July, her successful convention in August and her debate performance the following month have not translated yet into a decisive lead over Trump,” CNN reported on Monday, in one of multiple recent articles about growing unease in the party. Politico’s Playbook published a guide for “anxious Democrats”; Maureen Dowd wrung her hands at the lack of “fierce urgency” in defeating Trump.
The Democrats are right to freak out. Harris should be trouncing Trump, and the fact that they’re neck and neck is at least partially her fault.
One could look at the Trump’s standing—he was running up the score against Joe Biden in the early summer, but has consistently trailed Harris since August—as being far more deserving of anxiety. But Republicans, in addition to being less neurotic than Democrats, have long distrusted the polls: Their Dear Leader tells them he is winning and therefore it must be so.
At the same time, given Biden’s dismal position after the first debate, one could look at Harris’s position with hope. Three-odd months ago, the Democrats had only a slim chance (if that) of retaining the White House. Now, it’s a coin flip. Not bad!
Democrats are nevertheless right to look back at earlier stages of the Harris campaign with more than some regret. Harris’s brief campaign was buoyed on three separate occasions: first, when she became the party’s prospective nominee, after Biden announced he would not be seeking re-election and endorsed her; next, after she picked Tim Walz as her running mate and the two appeared at the Democratic National Convention; and third, after her strong performance—and Trump’s related meltdown—in their only debate.
Yes, Harris’s prospects rose after each of these events, although the race has remained close throughout. But, more than generating momentum, these events created an opportunity for the campaign to figure out what it wanted to be. Having become her party’s nominee at a remarkably late stage of the election, Harris has had to build a campaign—and a message—in a very short period of time, at least by American electoral standards. So the days (or even weeks) of excitement created by her nomination, the convention, and the debate theoretically gave bought her campaign time to decide how to define itself. But instead, the campaign seemed happy to bask in the afterglow, perhaps hoping that it wouldn’t fade.
Each time, it has faded. And with less than a month to go until the election, Harris is still struggling to address the two biggest drags on her campaign: Her role as the vice president to a remarkably unpopular leader, and her inability to articulate both a larger vision and a coherent set of policy positions.
Perhaps anxious about appearing ungrateful—or to diminish the enthusiasm surrounding her candidacy—Harris has largely been deferential to Biden, to her campaign’s detriment. She has consistently failed to answer the question of what she would have done differently than him. (In a disastrous moment in an appearance on The View, she merely said that she would have appointed a Republican to her cabinet.) She has failed to break from Biden symbolically or, for that matter, on areas where he’s particularly vulnerable, such as inflation or foreign policy.
Laser-focused on the states that will most likely make or break her campaign—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—Harris’s approach seems to be tailored to a remarkably narrow band of voters, specifically older white voters in these states who lean conservative (and may have voted for Nikki Haley in the Republican primary). When she deviates, it’s largely as a form of prevent defense—either adopting Trump policies (like his terrible No Tax on Tips proposal) or attempting to halt his gains with young men, particularly young men of color (hence her terrible pro-crypto policies). She is not without welcome surprises—Harris’s proposal to have Medicare pay for home health care is particularly good—but her approach to policy has been disappointing and, at times, myopic.
Beyond taking down Trump, however, there is no larger sense of mission in Harris’s campaign. She has no had enough time to craft a raison d’etre for her candidacy and to articulate how she would govern the country. But the race keeps snapping back to the mean in large part because Harris has squandered those opportunities that bought her time and goodwill. Despite performing well in individual moments, she hasn’t been able to actually change the terms of the election itself. Indeed, Harris has arguably let Trump set those terms: Harris is running as a hawk on both immigration and foreign policy; as she woos Republican voters, she has largely eschewed the attacks that were so effective in the summer, particularly on Project 2025 and the current “weirdness” of the Republican Party.
It’s an approach that might nonetheless work, of course. Maybe Harris doesn’t need to craft a larger message. Maybe she doesn’t need to stake out a defense of liberalism or, for that matter, to articulate a vision for the Democratic Party or the country at large. It’s possible that her approach will awaken just enough Nikki Haley voters to push her over the line in the upper Midwest. It may even work in socially conservative states where she’s currently trailing, like Georgia and Arizona. But it’s also increasingly clear that the moment where she could have altered that course has passed. Without another debate, it’s likely gone for good.
