The Kamala Harris bandwagon could become a steamroller

The polls have turned for the Democrats… and tell us almost nothing about November.

Well, okay. They tell us a little, such as there has been a bounce after the precipitous decline of Democrat chances following the first presidential debate. Vice President Kamala Harris has already wiped out Trump’s lead in the seven key swing states and carries real momentum going into the first/last weeks of her much-abbreviated campaign. The support we’re seeing might not be transitory but it’s a little bit early to say it’s solid. If this is the “honeymoon”, we have no idea how long honeymoons last in politics. 

But there are signs that Donald Trump is in real trouble. 

The first sign is that the atmosphere around the election is markedly different. You can sense the change, not always in explicit actions or gravity-defying moments, but in the small incidental details and stories which might not make headlines. The Trump campaign is seeing pushback in parts of the media where they would not expect pushback. Fox News hosts are challenging Trump and his proxies for the language being used to describe Harris, such as when Neil Cavuto challenged Senator John Kennedy after he called Harris “a bit of a ding dong”.

Trump has also complained that Fox is showing Harris’s campaign stops and ads hostile to him.  “Why is Fox News putting on Crazy Kamala Harris Rallies?” he posted to Truth Social. “Why do they allow the perverts at the failed and disgraced Lincoln Project to advertise on Fox News?”

Make no mistake. These are signs of a fundamental change to what came before. Trump has lost his control of the media he’d tamed for eight years. 

Meanwhile, there are cracks in the GOP base. A Republican mayor, John Giles of Mesa, has switched his allegiance. Writing in The Arizona Republic, Giles explained his decision. “The time has come for my fellow Arizona Republicans to return to the core foundations of the Grand Old Party”, he wrote. It’s a sentiment which will be shared by many conservatives in America. Quietly they might also agree with Giles that “Too much is at stake to vote Republican at the top of the ticket”.

Then there’s Harris herself. One can speak of her virtues but the biggest might well be that she’s not Biden. The absence of stillness or hesitation is so very striking.

Two things you might have noticed if you’ve watched the Vice President’s rallies. The first is that she’s keeping them short. And I mean very short. Donald Trump routinely speaks for ninety minutes or more. It’s a testament to his stamina but also an indicator that he cares little for his audiences who generally look bored by the end. He repeats the same stories, anecdotes, jokes, and claims, that we’ve been hearing, in some cases, since 2015. He has new hits – his recent Hannibal Lecter obsession won’t go away – but the meat of a Trump rally is the same. 

Harris, by contrast, is choosing to just hit a few key points at every rally, obviously testing out new lines (we’ll hear a lot about her knowing “people like Donald Trump”), but usually finishing within 20 minutes.

The second thing to notice is the enthusiasm of her audience. The energy levels are considerably higher. Democrats sound excited. The campaign is feeling enthused. Harris leads them in chants, enjoying a game of call and response. It might be crude but it’s effective when done the right way. And Harris knows how to do it the right way.

No doubt there’ll be increasing talk about a Harris victory in November, but this shouldn’t be about guesswork but reasonable expectations. The story of 2024 was never entirely about the decline of Biden or the rise of Harris. It hasn’t even been about Trump. The throughline of this election cycle has always been the reasonable expectation that Democrats would turn their strengths into a pragmatic winning strategy come November. After the State of the Union, it looked like Biden would be able to do just that. 

Except we never saw that Biden again. Instead, his energy levels trailed off until he eventually lay down and went to sleep right in front of the Democrat train. It wasn’t going to even get out of the station, let alone build momentum as it headed towards November.

Harris was one of the many options available to Democrats and last week it wasn’t obvious she was the best. Any doubts must now be set aside by an extremely effective campaign launch. The choice of Beyoncé’s “Freedom” has been a good one and not simply because it showed the pool of musical talent available to the Democrats if they need it. The message of helping Americans regain their freedom reframes an issue that Republicans have long treated as though it was exclusively their own.

The other campaign message – “not going back” –  also emphasises the chief weakness of the Trump campaign, which is a 78-year-old guy who refuses to let go and who would roll back many of the policies that progressives care most about. 

Harris is now legitimising an argument that marginalises Trump, not just in the minds of independent voters but also Republicans, such as Mesa’s John Giles, who long for a return to conventional politics. Trump has never been a figure of political significance but, rather, a force of the zeitgeist. He has never campaigned on a manifesto – the closest he has had might well be the so-called “Project 2025” which he has now denied and subsequently forced to close. Democrats, on the other hand, have been fighting on policies they can explicitly describe. 

It’s a sign, indeed, of Trump’s political naivety that he picked J.D. Vance as his running mate. The ongoing controversy around Vance’s comments about people without children hurts Trump and, if I were a betting man, I’d have a small wager on Vance becoming the scapegoat for Trump’s failing chances. The former President needs to do something big and impactful. Replacing Vance is the obvious choice – assuming Trump can find a legal way of doing that.

If Donald Trump has been the unstoppable cultural force of the past six years, he now needs to find a way to prevent Kamala Harris from becoming the unstoppable cultural force of the next thirteen weeks. He needs to find a way to stop the Harris bandwagon from becoming a steamroller.

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