My new DC apartment is a 30-minute walk from the law firm I work at and a 40-minute walk from the White House. It’s also a 40-minute walk in the opposite direction to the Naval Observatory, which is where Vice President Kamala Harris resides.
For DC, the apartment is a mansion. With my rare laundry unit and five-minute walk from Safeway, I feel like a European monarch. The only thing is that the apartment has four keys, and with the summer humidity, fumbling around for the right key to open the right door is a workout.
The problem is that some keys fit into the keyhole but won’t turn, or you must use extra effort to turn the right one. I haven’t been living here long enough to remember which key is for which door, so it’s a time-wasting guessing game that I eventually win on the fifth try.
I think I’ll just be able to become more familiar with time, but that uncertainty and painstaking learning curve comes with the unknown.
I’ve been living in this apartment for about as long as Harris has been a presidential candidate. And for many voters, she is about as familiar as my keys.
At the time of this writing, the 538 national polling averages have her ahead by 3.0 points. Only a month ago, Harris’s approval rating clocked in at 36.5% and has jumped to 44.4%. Even the RCP presidential betting markets have Harris leading Trump by 8.0 points.
Now, if Trump holds North Carolina and Georgia, he only needs either Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, or Michigan to win the election. Yet, his support in all four states declines every day as the Harris campaign gains momentum.
When Biden dropped out and before Harris became the nominee, I said that the Democrats cannot just solve the age problem because they also have a policy problem. In May, a Pew Research poll found that only a quarter of Americans think the economy is good. Now, the consumer price index has dipped below 3%, but the cooling labor market might mean that the next presidential administration will face a recession on day one.
That’s not even getting into immigration policy on the Southern border, abortion drama, healthcare costs, social security solvency, the Middle East debacle, or other salient political issues. However, as dire as these issues are under this current administration, it seems the Democrats, in fact, do not have a policy problem.
That is of course assuming this is not the Paris honeymoon of Harris’s campaign. Many Republican strategists believe (and hope) that this stage of the campaign is just the Democrats exhaling a tremendous sigh of relief that their nominee is not older than Alaska statehood. That may be true, but the election-deciding question is how many voters disapproved of Biden because of his age or because of his policies.
By every metric, a Harris presidency will just be a continuation of Biden’s agenda. I don’t believe she was a tremendous architect of Biden’s national policy, but she will just double down on the status quo.
Assuming all of this is true, her rise shows two things: Americans disapprove of Trump more than the status quo, and Harris is benefitting from being out of the spotlight.
To understand what I mean by the latter, we have to turn the clock back to when John F. Kennedy went on CBS’s Face the Nation in 1960. In just a few days before the presidential election, JFK sat before four veteran journalists as if he was a nominee before the Senate Judiciary Committee. For thirty minutes, the journalists grilled him on question after question about a wide array of political issues.
The reason I bring this example up is because Kennedy and a myriad of other presidential candidates before and after him understood that speaking to the people directly is nearly impossible in such a large country.
The press was viewed as a tool for communicating with the public, not because it was an unbiased judge of news, but because people could watch these interviews on TV and form their own opinions based on the candidates’ responses to reporters’ questions.
To put it simply, these interviews or press conferences allowed candidates to quite literally face the nation. This was true in the 1960s and is true now, but what’s different is that while JFK had every incentive to be interrogated on national television, Harris now seems to have every incentive to avoid television.
Vice President Harris declined Time Magazine’s interview invitation to her for their latest cover article, which remarked, “”Harris has yet to do a single substantive interview or to explain her policy shifts. (Her campaign denied a request for an interview for this story.)”
That Time Magazine article also discussed Harris’s failed 2020 presidential campaign, “Big interviews went poorly; Harris seemed ill-prepared and unsteady on her feet. Biden reportedly vented to a friend that she was a ‘work in progress.'”
If you watch Harris’s interview with “Face the Nation” back in September 2023, she does fine in the first few segments. However, when confronted about Biden’s age, she flounders and doesn’t have the greatest responses. Later in the interview, Margret Brennan went back and forward with Harris on abortion. Brennan challenged Harris and the Democrats on the vagueness of their abortion policies, and Harris didn’t provide a reassuring answer in my opinion.
Before then, she didn’t do well in her 2021 interview with Lester Holt. This was around the same time as her controversial “Do not come” speech in Guatemala which also arguably led to declining approval ratings in July 2021.
Last week, the New York Times reported that “Ms. Harris replaced a Democratic nominee who has hosted fewer White House news conferences than any president since Ronald Reagan. Now she is taking a similarly cautious approach, relying on televised rallies and prepared statements amid a tightly controlled rollout of her candidacy.”
This is all to say, put aside the policy debate of this election, Harris’s campaign is avoiding interviews for a reason.
Yet, the bizarre thing is that it’s working. She might walk away with the presidency and a Democrat majority in at least the House.
How many people actually know that Harris visited Guatemala in an attempt to curb migration to the Southern border? How many people know that she cast the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act? How many people know that she once attacked Biden for compromising with segregationist senators on busing? What has Harris done in the past month to warrant an eight-point increase in her approval ratings?
Now, I don’t think the entire election will flip on its face if Harris does sit down again with Lester Holt or Margret Brennan. However, what does it say about the candidate if the winning strategy is having less interview time and fewer difficult questions? I think a better question is what does it say about our democracy when ignorance means victory?
Forget about the Republican attack lines and Trump’s brute condemnations that she’s not “smart enough for an interview.” Our future leader should actually be asked difficult questions because the president is rarely in friendly environments.
At the very least, I think the people are owed answers on policy. We have a vested interest in the health of our economy or tensions in the Taiwan Strait. I want to know what a Harris presidency may look like. If it’s the familiar, played-out agenda of the Democratic establishment from Biden, Obama, and Clinton, then tell me — and the rest of hundreds of millions of voters who deserve an answer. If it’s different than the policy shortcomings of the past nearly four years, then say how it will be different in the next four years.
How does Harris expect to get anything done with a Senate likely controlled by the Republicans? Will a Harris administration oversee a compromise to the crisis in Gaza? What will Harris do as president to reassure the voters who have been dissatisfied with the economy and southern border while she was vice president?
These are the questions we need to ask the frontrunner of this race — not because Trump whines about it but because voters should know. We need to know that this is the right key for the right door.
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