AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura
It’s debate night, and these aren’t the headlines the Kamala Harris camp wanted to see leading up to what could be the decisive moment for the 2024 election. The vice president must convince a large swath of voters who are undecided about her. Was this the reason for evading the press—to ensure she could make her case before a national audience when crucial swing states, like Pennsylvania, are about to begin early voting? It’s a gamble, especially with a candidate as awkward, unqualified, and nearly braindead as Joe Biden.
Ahead of tonight’s showdown, Kamala got slapped with a CNN deep-dive into her record, which shocked its hosts over the pungent odor of political insanity; the woman wanted to cut ICE funding and provide taxpayer-funded gender mutilation surgeries for illegal aliens. She’s been slapped with brutal polls showing the race virtually tied, which is a Trump win in the Electoral College—Nate Silver gives the former president a 64 percent chance of clinching 270. And now, her policy section rollout struck disaster as the source code shows it’s a copy-and-paste job from the Biden 2024 website. The push to cast her as the “change” candidate imploded, though we knew this wouldn’t work. She’s been in the White House for the past three-and-a-half years. Harris is the incumbent. The revelation comes from a damning piece in The New Republic which warned that the Harris camp can no longer afford to run on vibes, brat antics, and joy.
After seven weeks of euphoria over Kamala Harris’s ascension to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, panic finally returned to the party on Sunday. The New York Times published a poll showing Donald Trump with a slim lead over Harris nationally and a dead heat in the seven swing states that will decide the November election.
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…Harris has plenty of time—and one pivotal debate—to define herself for the voters. But that will require abandoning the cautious approach she’s taking up since becoming the nominee—and publicly breaking with Joe Biden.
Three days before the Times poll came out, amid growing consternation about her deliberate lack of a clear and detailed agenda, Kamala Harris’s campaign announced a new policy—sort of. Harris, her campaign said, was no longer in favor of banning plastic straws.
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The campaign’s strategy, it seemed, was to ride those good summer vibes and avoid the risk of an aggressive policy agenda that would expose her to criticism. But having too few policies is also risky, not least because it makes Harris look like she doesn’t stand for anything (and also because her few policy stances then get nitpicked to death: Her price-gouging solution was roundly criticized by economists across the political spectrum, while her tip policy has come under fire because it was first taken up by Trump).
The Harris campaign is only now, belatedly, realizing that this is a problem. On Sunday, they finally added an “Issues” section to her website. It includes a slew of policies that the campaign has previously outlined, as well as sections on reproductive and civil rights. Unfortunately for Harris, its release was undermined by a simple but telling error: The page’s source code revealed that parts of the platform were copied directly from Biden’s campaign page.
This is dangerous territory for Harris, given that the Times poll found that more than 60 percent of voters wanted the next president to represent a “major change” from Biden—and only a quarter felt that Harris represented that change.
