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September 11, 2024 - 1:00pm
Heading into the first — and possibly only — debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, polls showed a stubbornly close contest. Though Harris gained back much of the ground that President Joe Biden had lost among core Democratic constituencies, she and Trump continue to split an all-important group: independent voters, who are likely to decide this year’s election. Recent polling averages find Harris leading with them by just 1.7 points.
Part of the problem for the Vice President is that many voters perceive her to be too liberal for their liking, no doubt a product of the myriad Left-wing positions she adopted during her 2020 presidential campaign. New polling from the New York Times found that while half of all voters thought Trump was “not too far” to the Left or Right, just 41% said the same about Harris. Meanwhile, a plurality — 44% — believed Harris is too liberal compared to just one-third who said Trump was too conservative.
Throughout yesterday evening, Harris worked to soften this image, which started with the economy. She touted her tie-breaking votes in the Senate to allow Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs and to cap the cost of insulin for seniors, as well as her endorsement from the United Auto Workers. Harris also used these examples to set up a contrast with Trump, whom she painted as a man of the elites by attacking the tax cuts he passed during his first term that disproportionately favoured the wealthy and corporations. In doing this, she worked to disabuse Americans of the idea that Trump is an economic populist and to speak to working-class voters’ biggest concerns.
Immigration was also a big topic during the debate. For most of this year, voters have identified the issue as a top problem facing the country, and according to the Times poll they trust Trump over Harris to handle it by a 10-point margin. Here, Harris knocked Trump off his game, leading to a bizarre moment when he pushed debunked claims about migrants killing people’s pets to eat them — a talking point unlikely to register with “normie” voters. It also allowed her to sidestep more uncomfortable questions about her past support for decriminalising border crossings.
Of course, one of the biggest questions coming out of the debate is whether these rhetorical appeals to the centre of the electorate will make a difference during the campaign. While it will take time to capture any movement in the polls, one of Harris’s clearest vulnerabilities continues to be the credible charge that she has flip-flopped on several issues, and thus many voters find it hard to believe what she says. The answer her campaign appears to have landed on — that her “values” have never changed, a claim she repeated in the debate — may not be all that assuring to some. Then again, most politicians, including Trump himself, shift positions throughout their careers, especially when confronted with the reality that one or more of their views are not popular.
Harris seems to understand that running to the Left, as she did in 2019, is a losing proposition in a general election. If voters believe her pivots to be sincere, she may very well receive a boost from the debate. But if not, it will be a sign that too many voters still aren’t convinced, and it will leave her with a lot of work to do to change that reality in an increasingly short amount of time.
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