Tipsheet

Here's What Kamala Needs to Do to Win, And She's Not Doing It

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  July 25, 2024 6:30 AM

The Biden-Harris switcheroo has solved one major problem for Democrats: fundraising. The coffers got filled to the brim once Joe Biden quit the 2024 race, with over $250 million in donations pouring in to help Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump. We’ll see if there’s any movement in the coming weeks, but the Biden campaign outspent Trump’s operation and couldn’t make an impact. Can Kamala, who is just as unpopular as Biden? 

Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report charted a path Harris must take to win. She needs to win white working-class voters in the Rust Belt and especially in rural Pennsylvania to have a prayer. It’s nothing you haven’t heard before, but there’s also the “unknown” factor: no one knows Ms. Harris. What they do know is either not good or too thin to make any serious determination. For now, she’s lives happily in ‘generic Democrat’ land. That’s going to change quickly, and with less than 16 weeks until Election Day—Democrats must sprint to define her as a candidate (via Cook Report): 

At this stage of the process, to paraphrase the late former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, we are dealing with “unknown unknowns.” 

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Polling taken in the next week or so — especially in battleground states — will tell us whether things look all that different now that Harris is the likely nominee. 

We also don’t know how voters, especially swing voters, will feel about Biden's last-minute decision to leave the contest and endorse his vice president. 

In theory, Harris can energize a deflated Democratic base, especially among young voters of color. That would at least ensure that her “floor” of support would be higher than Biden’s currently sits. 

However, coalescing the base only gets you so far. To win in states like Pennsylvania, Harris needs to be able to win over swing voters in white, working-class areas like Erie and Scranton in Pennsylvania. 

The Trump campaign, knowing how important those “blue wall” states are to a Harris victory, is eager to deploy vice presidential nominee and Ohio Sen. JD Vance to the Midwest. This is also why the short-list of potential Harris vice presidential picks is centering on Democrats like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper. 

The problem is that Harris is trying hard to get young voters back into the fold, and it’s not working. They don’t like her. That’s the thing that’s being glossed over: she dropped out before the 2020 primaries began because no one liked her, not even black voters. Semafor tried to point out that artist Charli XCX might be a sign that Harris can do better with this demographic:

The first sign that Harris may have one advantage over Biden with younger voters came from Charli XCX. In a tweet on Sunday, the pop star tweeted “kamala IS brat,” a reference to her recent hit album of the same name. 

The Charli tweet is a manifestation of Harris’ recent meme-ification, which after the debate transformed from an online joke into a type of wishful thinking for Democrats pining for a younger nominee with a different energy. But it also highlights how Harris could be a more digitally potent and savvy candidate. 

Over the course of his presidency, Biden’s White House and his campaign have attempted to implement digital media strategies aimed at breaking through in an increasingly fragmented and partisan media landscape. But those tactics often ran up against a candidate more comfortable with a media strategy built around legacy news outlets. 

For all of her flaws and mistakes during her 2020 campaign, Harris had a formidable presence online, running a digital-first media strategy that leaned on a vocal “K-Hive” fanbase. 

Case in point: Just minutes after Charli tweeted about Harris, the vice president followed her on Instagram and Twitter and was highlighted on the popular celebrity news aggregator Pop Crave. 

Again, this is not the case, and as CNN’s Harry Enten added, young Democrats are not more motivated to vote because of Biden’s exit either. Folks, the Obama coalition is likely dead. Thus far, Harris has shown she doesn’t have the political skills to climb this uphill battle. We shall see.