Harris Can Win—Or Lose—in the Next Three Weeks

Plus: Calloused to Trump’s callousness.

Nikki Haley’s 2024 heel turn is complete: Lawyers for the former governor and UN ambassador sent a cease-and-desist letter yesterday to a group called Haley Voters for Harris demanding it stop using her name and threatening to make a (spurious) criminal referral to the Department of Justice.

Haley’s made major flip-flops on her support for Donald Trump in the past, but we believe this is the first time she’s tried to legally compel people not to remember them.

Big day for speeches today: Bibi Netanyahu will address Congress this afternoon; Joe Biden will give his first post-campaign presidential speech tonight. Happy Wednesday.

---

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks in the East Room of the White House, March 18, 2024. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images.)

Why the Next Month Matters Most

—Bill Kristol

In politics as in war, the enemy gets a vote. Everyone knows this. But in my experience—and I’ve made this mistake—you say you know it, but you often half-forget it. You get so caught up in devising your own plans that you just figure the other side’s going to plod along and not adjust and interfere too much. You don’t really expect them to encumber your maneuvers with their own.

Kamala Harris has had a remarkably successful campaign launch. Her team announced that as of Tuesday evening, it had raised $126 million since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and offered her his endorsement. That’s a lot of money that can be used to help define Harris and bludgeon Trump.

But the Trump campaign will strike back. They’re likely to do everything they can to suppress and reverse any further momentum on her part over these crucial next three weeks in the run-up to the Democratic convention.

This is one of the key points that former Clinton White House political director and veteran Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik makes in a conversation we recorded Monday, and that’s now up online. (You can—and should!—watch or listen to the whole thing here.)

Here’s Sosnik on what the Trump campaign’s going to do (quotes are slightly edited for clarity):

I suspect the Trump guys are going to dump tens of millions of dollars on Harris in the next few weeks in essentially a race to define who she is because she’s not really well-defined in the public.

And you remember what we did against Dole, where we defined the race at the end of ’95 and early ’96, what you saw in 2004 in March when Bush spent $100 million defining Kerry as he was getting the nomination, you saw how Obama defined Romney before his nomination was wrapped up in 2012. He who defines first defines last.

I asked Sosnik what themes he thought the Trump camp would emphasize against Harris. His answer:

Well, I think the first thing they’re going to do is try to drive the narrative about how she aided and abetted Biden being president when he clearly wasn’t qualified based on his health. And I think they’re going to try to make her own that out of the gate. The second thing I think they’re going to do is pin immigration and the border around her neck. And lastly, I think they’re going to make her an unconstructive California liberal, which I think will be important for these swing voters.

And in fact, as Sosnik expected, MAGA Inc. is up with an ad in the midwestern swing states along these lines. And the Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, Dave McCormick, put out an anti-Harris video last night, attacking his opponent, Sen. Bob Casey, for supporting her.

The McCormick video is tough. The clips of Harris taking various left-wing positions during the 2019 Democratic primary could stick in voters’ minds, unless rebutted or supplanted by a different message about who Harris really is.

Sosnik concludes:

If you look at any sporting event, there are always one or two moments that determine the outcome. And sometimes when you’re watching it in real time, you say, ‘Okay, that was the tipping point. That’s the turning point. That’s going to decide the game.’ And sometimes it’s after and you look back at the game and say, ‘Well, these are the two most important points.’ Well, elections have that as well. And if you go back to the last three incumbent presidents—and in a sense Trump is the incumbent now, right? He’s been at this for a while, Harris just showed up—we really won Clinton’s re-election in ’96 in that consequential period where Dole was trying to wrap up the nomination and stand up a campaign. And that’s where we flattened him. And in 2004, in March is when Bush beat Kerry. And the same thing happened in 2012 in the spring when Obama basically took out and defined Romney. And those were the pivotal moments in those campaigns. And so I think this next three week period is analogous to those periods, but it’s even more true because of how odd and compressed the time is for Harris to be able to come out of this as the nominee and be able to stand up a campaign and to win the race of defining who she is.

The good news is that just as the Trump campaign gets a vote, so does the Harris campaign. But her team has choices to make: What do they focus on? Answering the charges? Ignoring them and just introducing Harris as they wish? But what do they wish? It’s easy to say she should be “centrist” or “dynamic” or the candidate of “change.” But giving that enough content to be real, selecting some things to emphasize and downplaying others—those are real choices. And they’ll have to be made quickly.

If she fails to blunt the Trump offensive, Harris could follow in the footsteps of those of Dole, Kerry, and Romney. But if she succeeds in containing Trump and even counter-attacking successfully, and if she can come out of the Democratic convention in something like an even race—then Harris could well be the next president of the United States.

---

We are living through history right now. We hope you’ll join us for it:

---

Dallas, here we come! Join the gang Thursday, September 5th for an evening of politics among friends. Featuring former Rep. Adam Kinzinger with Bill, Sarah, Tim and Sonny.

Keep Your Eye On The Bull

—Andrew Egger

On Truth Social Monday, Donald Trump reposted a quote from Ulysses S. Grant, written in the early days of the civil war: “There Are But Two Parties Now: Traitors and Patriots.”

Also Monday, at an Ohio rally for JD Vance, Republican state Sen. George Lang proclaimed that Trump and Vance were “the last chance to save our country politically.” Should the election be lost, Lang added, “it’s gonna take a civil war to save the country. And it will be saved.”

On Tuesday, Jewish Insider reported that Donald Trump Jr. will headline a fundraiser this week with podcaster Candace Owens, whose insanely conspiratorial, rabidly antisemitic rhetoric finally made her too radioactive even for the right-wing Daily Wire this year.

It’s not hard to remember a time when any one of these things would have sparked a days-long controversy. Today, they’re just background noise. Civil war talk? Hobnobbing with conspiracists? Wildly irresponsible social media posting? Ah, I see Donald Trump’s up to his ol’ hijinks again.

Many rightly wonder: Why aren’t these sorts of stories the shock to the system they used to be?

At the simplest level, we’ve all just grown callused to Trump’s nonstop assaults on the boundaries of what’s considered acceptable in politics. This is both an audience-side and a media-side problem.

For the voters, the issue is fatigue. How many hundreds of stories like these can a person read before they lose their ability to inspire rage?

For the press, it’s a little more complicated. What the media specializes in spotlighting is good stories—narratives with conflict and drama. And throughout Trump’s first run and first term, his assaults on norms, decency, and the rule of law made for great stories, because they seemed to bring multiple powerful forces into conflict. How far would Trump dare to go against norms previously thought sacrosanct? How far would other Republicans let him go?

Now, the stories are less compelling, because we already know all the answers. Trump will go exactly as far as he wishes, and Republicans will embrace him regardless. It’s hard to spin a good yarn about a bull loose in a china shop; all you can really do is tally up the latest damages.

But of course all this simply serves to make Trump more dangerous. Anything at all that he might try in order to seize or keep power now gets baked in instantly; what weak checks there may once have been on his worst impulses are weaker than ever.

All we can do is refuse to be bludgeoned into stupor. Don’t look away.

---

Quick Hits

There’s some great stuff up on the site today: 

• “When I talk to my fellow Americans about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I get uncomfortable looks,” Will Selber writes. “When traveling through Israel this month, I’ve received similar horrified looks—but not from my war stories. Nobody blinks an eye at my stories in that land where everyone serves and every adult has lived through times of terrible violence. No, they’re horrified at my stories about America’s treatment of its veterans.”

• A.B. Stoddard notes how Nancy Pelosi rose to the occasion in a pivotal moment for Democrats: “Pelosi and Mitch McConnell are often compared as legendary tacticians whose care and feeding of their members help them win, or at least stop their opponents from winning . . . Yet McConnell will also be remembered for letting Trump end his career as Senate leader. He could have been the Republican leader who blocked Trump from running for office ever again. Pelosi had the guts to push a president out of the race, while McConnell balked after January 6th . . . The power of Nancy Pelosi has helped reset the campaign, and threatened Trump’s path to victory for the first time in the entire 2024 cycle.”

• And Ilyse Hogue makes the case that Kamala Harris should pick a male running mate: “I’ve spent years documenting and fighting the male backlash that propelled the former president to power. I’m here to testify that that same energy is currently undergirding his re-election campaign and has, in fact, gained strength. We ignore it at our own peril.”

---

Cheap Shots