By Bruce Wolpe
The prosecutor put the convicted felon away.
First, Kamala Harris made her case on where she wants to take the country. The polls have been telling Harris the voters do not know her well enough. She got the message and provided more depth on the economy, on energy, and on America’s leadership abroad. She attacked the “Trump sales tax” from his tariffs. She was relentless on what Trump did to abortion rights.
Then she sliced Trump like sashimi. Harris used ridicule as her weapon of choice. “The American people are exhausted. World leaders are laughing at you. Putin is a dictator who would eat you for lunch.” Trump, she said, is “a weak, pathetic man”.
Trump wanted to monster her off the stage by defining her as the radical, elite, Marxist, immigrant, extremist – and he called her that. Trump always goes on the offensive but his heavy hand boomeranged. “Biden hates her and can’t stand her.” Trump went on rants that had dead ends. Illegal immigrants are eating cats in Ohio, apparently.
So how does Trump win from here?
He does not change strategy or tactics. Vindicated by the latest polls going into the debate that showed him as popular as ever and more trusted on the hot-button issues of inflation and immigration, Trump will continue to double down. He echoed throughout the debate what he told Sean Hannity on Fox News: “You gotta vote for me – even if you don’t like me … We can’t be politically correct any more … Make America great again – that’s all we have to do … She has no idea what the hell she is doing … We’re headed into World War III territory.”
A month after Harris came out of the box at warp speed, Trump gave up the wild hope that he could flip Democratic states like Virginia, New Hampshire and Minnesota. He is back to going all-out on the states be won in 2016 – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia – and making a big play for Nevada, Arizona and North Carolina. If Trump can win Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina – even if it means ceding the rest of the swing states to Harris – Trump wins.
Trump will keep hammering Harris on inflation and soaring prices, immigration and crime. The message from the debate: I am far better at managing these issues than she is, and you know it.
Trump will seal the deal with nonstop playing of the race card and the sex card. He believes that just as America had had enough of eight years of Barack Obama before granting him the presidency, that in 2024 the country is not viscerally ready for a black female president. Trump knows that his voters do not want or respect Kamala Harris, that she makes his base uneasy, and he knows they want to vote for him to evict her from the White House.
How does Harris win from here?
The ground game is everything for Harris. Trump has a ceiling of 45-47 per cent of the popular vote. Harris must keep him there. What is particularly daunting is that almost all the polls in 2016 and 2020 undercounted the Trump vote by two to three points nationally. In 2020, Trump won 46.9 per cent of the popular vote; the poll averages had him at 44 per cent. Biden won enough – 51 per cent of the vote – to beat him.
But Harris is still short. While she’s winning back the Democratic voters who gave up on Biden, she still trails the support Biden had in 2020 from under-30 voters by 12 percentage points. She is still 10 points under Biden’s support from black voters, six points under Biden with Latino voters, four points under Biden with men, and – still – two points under Biden with female voters. Harris’ trajectory is on course, but she has not yet locked in those votes.
This debate will help her do that.
Harris is also targeting more voters who are not committed to Trump, especially women on abortion rights. For women under 45, abortion rights – not the economy – is their No.1 issue. Harris wants to garner some of the 15 per cent of Republicans who did not vote for Trump in the primaries. The endorsements from staunch conservative Republicans Liz Cheney and her father, former vice president Dick Cheney, will help.
Harris reached those voters in this debate and gave them reasons to break with Trump.
Harris is carpet bombing her campaign with the jet fuel of politics: money. She raised US$361 million in August (US$230 million more than Trump). She has US$110 million more in cash on hand. This means she can fund the field offices and armies of volunteers in the suburbs and exurbs of Republican states to cut Trump’s margin, if not beat him outright. If Harris carries Pennsylvania and Georgia, she is all but assured of victory.
Trump saved his best – his most effective remarks – for last: that Harris has had three and a half years to do all the things she talked about, “but you haven’t done it”.
It’s a great argument. But it was too late to recover from what will go down as a genuinely shocking performance.
And Taylor Swift agrees.
This article was originally published on The Sydney Morning Herald and United States Study Centre and has been republished with permission.
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Bruce Wolpe is a Senior Fellow (non-resident) at the United States Studies Centre. Bruce is a regular contributor on US politics across media platforms in Australia. In recent years, Bruce has worked with the Democrats in Congress during President Barack Obama’s first term, and on the staff of Prime Minister Julia Gillard. He has also served as the former PM’s chief of staff. From 1998-2009, Bruce was a senior executive at Fairfax Media in Sydney.
Bruce is author of Trump’s Australia, an examination of Donald Trump’s possible return to the presidency and the issues presented to Australia (Allen & Unwin, 2023), The Committee, a study of President Obama’s legislative agenda in Congress (University of Michigan Press, 2018, 2d Edition September 2021) and Lobbying Congress: How The System Works (Congressional Quarterly Books, 1990, 1996).
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I fear that Harris was preaching, as it were, to the choir. She was basically saying to the Democrats that they made the right decision to nominate her. But I don’t believe that any Trump supporters will be encouraged to change sides, and swing or undecided voters probably aren’t yet convinced either. She did indeed make mincemeat of Trump during the debate, but it probably doesn’t matter: Trump can be smeared, convicted as a felon on multiple charges, have a horrendous history of mistreating women, live entirely in an imagined world, and is an atrocious bully, but to the faithful he is still the political messiah. I don’t understand it.
Political polls are tricky things – but I’ll be checking out natesilver.com over the next few weeks. Probably the best thing that Harris can do with the money she’s raised is getting Democrats out in force to vote, and ensuring that they can get to polling stations unharassed.
Trump crashed and burned, as expected. But WTF is an “opportunity economy”???
Trump showed that he is open to conspiracies, he not only takes them on but he repeats and promotes them and the gullible suck it up – immigrants eating pets in Ohio and full term babies being exterminated in West Virginia.
He has demonstrated that he is unfit to be placed in a position of ultimate trust and certainly not anywhere near the levers of nuclear responses.
“He does not change strategy or tactics.” He can’t change his mindset, his low cunning and intelligence, monstrous, but very fragile, ego and malignant narcissism won’t allow him to see any error on his part.
Max, An “opportunity economy” is the opportunity to bleed dry the American economy by The Donald and famliy and all the ultra rich?
It is a pity a couple of the Murdoch Cadets working at the ABC, Speers in particular, did not watch the same debate as you, Bruce.
I am so fed up with the blatant bias, almost school kid like way they favour the LNP and excuse Trump’s behaviour as somehow acceptable. Speers, Karvelas and Jennett.
Who cares if a pop singer agrees! Only in America would someone ever make a comment like that. America’s political circus with all it’s performers!
John C, I think you’ll find the significance of Tay Tay endorsing Harris is that she (Swift) has the capacity to bring potentially hundreds of thousands if not more of her fans along with her to either/or register and vote for the Democratic nominee. It’s significant. Not a single musician or other artist has endorsed Trump… which of course would guarantee professional suicide if they did. You may disagree, but then you don’t live in America and you don’t necessarily comprehend the significance of the entertainment industry on the collective psyches of those who do.
As their death cult rolls on, maybe an “opportunity economy” is where they add to everyone’s AR-15s, a pee (not pea) shooter, some pot and a potty so they can help themselves and git a little of that trickle-down and some narcotics and stimulants.
Interesting the FOX contributors in the US are profoundly in agreement that the ABC (US) moderators of the debate were chronically biased against Trump : funny I didn’t notice that. On the contrary I thought that they were balanced and respectful particularly when pointing out to Trump his lies and conspiracy theories.
Terry Mills, even stranger is how the Sky Non-News flunkies, and the likes of Cardigan Sheridan, are even more strident in their claims of biased moderators.
What a world of coincidences we live in-not!
Actually, Sheridan has become completely unhinged, frothing at the mouth, and needs some time in a padded cell for his own safety.
Sheridan’s rants are tactical messaging for reinforcement shared with related media, curated to be packaged and circulated further via social media, especially YouTube, globally.
Shitheaderidan has been around for half a century, a puffed up dried turd, a mediaeval romanist misfit fantasising substandard fool, whose mental processing is straitjacketescapee madness, full of error, supposition, but, what the owner of POX wants. He has never produced a balanced, honest, fact supported, decent, analytical, logical article yet. He is paid to “invent”, to “create”, to synthesise, to fabricate, to fablefantasise, to alter reality. Perhaps he seeks salvation and heaven by this loyalty.