Her ground game may be good, but can she push a winning message
#MediaBuzz - Sunday, October 6
Tim Walz, Hurricane Helene, January 6
For well over a month, Kamala Harris rode a wave of the most positive press any presidential candidate has gotten in two decades, and her own skills, to turn what had been a lost cause for the Democrats into an extremely tight race.
But does she have a second act?
Kamala 2.0, under constant attack by Donald Trump and the Republicans, doesn’t have much new to say. She is conducting a play-it-safe campaign, like a basketball team sitting on a lead and running out the clock.
But Harris doesn’t have a lead in the three "blue wall" midwestern states she needs to win, and the loss of any one of them could hand Trump the presidency once again.
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For all the focus on Pennsylvania, Harris leads by 0.7 percent in Michigan – a statistical tie, based on the Real Clear Politics average.
On Sunday’s "Media Buzz," Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell told me her state could go either way.
"The vice president has a problem with union workers," Dingell said. "Many of the men, as well as, quite frankly, African-American young men who have said to me, I was with a group with them last week. ‘You know what, Donald Trump talks to us. Democrats take us for granted.’"
The lawmaker recalls how "everybody got mad at me" when she predicted in 2016 that Trump would win Michigan – which he did, along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
A major problem for Harris is that she doesn’t seem to know how to make news. With less than 30 days to go, with many voters understandably believing they don’t know her, or enough about her policies, since she took over for Joe Biden, the VP is stitching together parts of her stump speech and recycling the same anecdotes virtually verbatim.
A presidential candidate has to deliver a few new lines, a new proposal, something to break into the news cycle, which is currently being dominated by Trump.
So what’s on this week’s agenda? Kamala will sit down with Howard Stern (who is totally against his old pal Donald); "The View," where the ladies despise Trump, and Stephen Colbert, who hosted fundraisers for Joe Biden in 2020 and this year.
For good measure, she’s also spoken to Alex Cooper, whose podcast, "Call Your Daddy," is about sex.
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I’ll go out on a limb here and say these sessions are designed to be friendly – not unlike the conversation with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, who kept agreeing with Harris and had just pronounced Trump a danger to democracy.
In fairness, Harris also sat for a "60 Minutes" interview, an invitation declined by Trump.
Look, there’s nothing wrong with candidates showing their softer side with unorthodox outlets in our fragmented media universe. We’ve come a long way since critics scoffed at candidate Bill Clinton answering the "boxers or briefs" question on MTV, calling it unpresidential.
On "Call Your Daddy," Harris was actually quite thoughtful in responding to Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying that her kids keep her humble and the VP doesn’t have anyone to keep her humble.
(Rebecca Droke/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Rather than jab at the Arkansas governor, which would have produced a cheap headline, she ruminated that families come in all shapes, bound by blood or love, that she is deeply involved with her stepchildren, and this isn’t the 1950s anymore. They also discussed, uh, tampons.
Still, the party is getting nervous. "Democratic operatives, including some of Kamala Harris’ own staffers," says Politico, "are growing increasingly concerned about her relatively light campaign schedule, which has her holding fewer events than Donald Trump and avoiding unscripted interactions with voters and the press almost entirely."
Since the convention, the veep has spent more than a third of days on meeting and briefings, with no public events.
With early voting under way in more than half the states, Politico describes this "a do-no-harm, risk-averse approach to the race."
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Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, who fervently doesn’t want Trump to win, nonetheless is whacks Harris pretty hard:
"She hasn’t fleshed out her political intent — what she stands for, what she won’t abide, what she means to establish, what she won’t let happen.
What is her essential mission? Is it national ‘repair,’ is it to ‘stabilize’ an uncertain country, is it ‘relaunch’?..
"She so far hasn’t conveyed a sense of intellectual grasp. Her campaign has placed too many chips on the idea of the mood, the vibe, the picture."
And vibes can only take you so far.
But the VP has certain duties, and spent two days visiting hurricane victims and relief workers in North Carolina and Georgia–which also happens to be good politics. She also met with Volodomyr Zelenskyy.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy addresses the 79th United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York, U.S., September 25, 2024. REUTERS/Mike Segar (REUTERS/Mike Segar)
Harris attended a fundraiser over the weekend. Why bother? Her campaign has already had $400 million roll in. She’s already outspending Trump 2-½ to 1 on ads. She doesn’t need any more money. What’s more, Harris doesn’t make news at these fundraisers, which in any event are off camera. A ground game is great, but it has to be married to a winning message.
Here’s one more: Dan Pfeiffer, a former top Obama White House official, says on Message Box, his Substack column, that "the media — and Politico Playbook in particular — are fuming over the Harris-Walz media strategy."
Kamala "must be on offense at all times — say new things, be edgy enough to get attention, and dictate the terms, or the campaign could "take on water…In this media world, there is a never-ending, insatiable appetite for content. Either serve lunch or become the menu…
"Dominating attention is Trump’s political superpower…Even when he doesn’t have a big moment, Trump speaks so outrageously that it shifts attention to his issues of choice."
Now it’s easy to snipe from the sidelines. For Harris to be neck and neck in the core battleground states means she’s obviously done many things right. She had to overhaul the Biden operation and vet a running mate while the campaign was in full swing, like changing the tires on a speeding hot rod. She could still win.
One positive sign: The Harris camp took off the bubble wrap and allowed Tim Walz to appear on "Fox News Sunday." This was an attempt at damage control, since he lost the debate so badly to JD Vance.
While Shannon Bream repeatedly pressed the governor on late-term abortions, his Minnesota record and his history of falsehoods and exaggerations, Walz was far more forceful than he’d been in the CBS debate. He ducked certain questions, but an interview format is much better suited to him than friendly exchanges with his opponent.
Walz’s next stop? A man who relishes his feuds with Trump, Jimmy Kimmel.
Howard Kurtz is the host of FOX News Channel's MediaBuzz (Sundays 11 a.m.-12 p.m. ET). Based in Washington, D.C., he joined the network in July 2013 and regularly appears on Special Report with Bret Baier and other programs.
