Three weeks ago on election day, kamala harris slipped. The Democratic presidential candidate's campaign looks like a car that starts to lose power at a particularly crucial moment, right before the final stretch.
Sure, let's start with the obvious: By entering the race as a White House candidate to replace Joe Biden, Kamala Harris has made the election contested. But even at that moment it was easy to recognize the problems facing the former prosecutor and senator from California - the fact that her candidacy is electorally limited given her narrow ideological profile and belonging to an unpopular administration like the current one. Her candidacy for President of the United States was therefore one step forward for Harris and two steps back for the Democratic Party. A few months later, time does not refute, but rather confirms, these structural obstructions in front of her: she continues to be perceived by Americans as the more radical candidate to Donald Trump and fails to distance herself from the unpopular and frankly wrong policies of the current Democratic administration .
A particularly serious example of the latter was her media appearance on The View on ABC, where, when asked if she would make different decisions than those already made by Joe Biden, she replied with "not one thing that comes to mind". And subsequently he added that "I am part of most decisions that matter". And that was an extraordinary gift - something like an own goal 10 minutes before the end of the game - for the Republicans. They "grabbed" this part of Harris's interview in which she herself "stitches" to an unpopular administration, and turned it into a successful anti-advertisement that is already playing on various cable and social networks. In fact, throughout the campaign, Donald Trump tried to tell the American voters that Kamala Harris was the same (Joe Biden), and finally they heard it from the mouth of the Democratic candidate. Such seemingly small things in the whirlwind of campaigns - like looking at your watch while being asked about a country's national debt, as George HW Bush did in 1992 - actually have an inversely proportional effect.
Three weeks before November 5th, support for Kamala Harris is somewhere between electoral stagnation and recession (that is, if there is momentum, it is more in the direction of losing support than keeping it, but in any case the Democrat does not increase it). The meaning behind this finding is very important: the final date on which American citizens can vote is approaching, and the Democratic candidate is busy retaining, not increasing, support for himself! Perhaps this unenviable position explains why Kamala Harris has toured a number of media platforms over the past week, from cable TV networks to podcasts, with a more Democratic-leaning audience. Harris is in a situation where she is trying to keep the tame in the fold and not bring the wild into it. Tame isn't enough to win the White House, but at least it keeps her in the race in a reasonably competitive position.
This electoral slippage of Kamala Harris finds numerical expression in the data as well. Six of the seven contested states "lighted up" in the red, according to the RealClearPolitics average. Yes, in every one of them the difference between Harris and Trump is not just within margin of error, but even less than 1%. Such marginal differences exist more on paper than in practice. But they do show something important: since the Republican is competitive in Michigan (probably, Trump leads there) and Wisconsin (probably, Harris leads there), then Trump is in a better position to win Pennsylvania than Harris is. And the problem for the Democratic Party candidate is that it is much more important for her to win both Wisconsin and Michigan than it is for Trump; a Republican can lose both of those states and still become president, while it seems much more difficult for a Democrat.
In fact, the current moment shows that Donald Trump has never been in a better position to win the White House. Three weeks before Election Day, the Republican trailed by a margin greater than statistical error in both 2016 (against Hillary Clinton) and 2020 (against Joe Biden). As it stands, Kamala Harris leads Trump nationally by 1.8%, but - which is far more important than the national polls! - the Democrat is losing to the Republican by 0.4% in contested states, according to RealClearPolitics. I repeat: since these differences are rather formal, their numerical expressions should not be absolutized. But they are more than enough to outline a clear trend in comparative terms. For once, Kamala Harris is in a worse position than she was a month ago. Then, if either had an edge in contested states — no matter how thin or marginal — it was on the Democratic side. For the second time, Kamala Harris looks like the weaker Democratic presidential candidate to Clinton in 2016 and to Biden in 2020.
Indicative of the fact that the Democrat's campaign is in a state of quiet crisis is the involvement of former President Barack Obama in it. The 44th head of the White House's appearance at a campaign event in Pittsburgh this week had a dual purpose. One time, to give some extra energy to Harris' campaign in a key state like Pennsylvania. The second time, to address a specific electoral problem of the Democratic presidential candidate - the lack of enthusiasm among African-American men to vote for Kamala Harris (the latest New York Times/Siena poll showed support for Harris in this particular electoral segment at 50% , while for Hillary Clinton it was 71% and Joe Biden - 69%).
Of course, each appearance of Obama brings much more than overcoming specific problems, as long as he remains the most significant politician in the circles of the Democratic Party, who can influence in a positive direction the motivation of voters related to the formation in question. From here, the former president tries to compensate for Harris' deficits such as the lack of authenticity/effortlessness in public communication and her still relatively high degree of obscurity among American society. No matter how many beers Kamala Harris has with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show on CBS, no matter how many "girl talks" the Democrat held on Alexandra Cooper's Call Her Daddy podcast, there are simply things only Obama can do.
But it's not Obama who is running for office in three weeks, it's Kamala Harris. And she has a problem, which is not Trump, but the image in the mirror.