After feeling high hopes when Kamala took over the top of the ticket from mentally incapacitated Joe Biden and soaring on “Joy” through the Democratic Convention, it seems like the honeymoon is over, and with less than a month to go, Democrats are facing the reality of Trump victory on November 5.
Two months ago — even a month ago, Dems were feeling bullish about Vice President Harris’s prospects of defeating former President Trump.
But now, worried about a number of issues plaguing the Democratic nominee’s campaign, with many of the party’s top officials in full panic mode.
On Tuesday, there was grumbling from many Democrats about the vice president’s interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” An unnamed “Democratic Strategist” said Harris’s comments on the show largely fell flat.
“She is still fine-tuning her message 28 days out, and I’m sorry, we are in the ‘make the sale’ phase of the campaign now; we’re not still tweaking the message,” the strategist said.
There’s also growing concern on everything from the static poll numbers in the race to the vice president’s messaging and even her standing with men — not just white men but Black and Hispanic men, too.
Some of this, perhaps, can just be chalked up to typical Democratic nerves ahead of what looks like it could be among the closest presidential elections in history or could be something to really worry about. Either way, it’s nerve-racking for Democrats.
“Everything is deadlocked, and the composition of the electorate is unknowable, and there are so many things that are unprecedented,” said Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons, who served as Harris’s communications director until last year.
“We can’t look back with any level of security because we haven’t had an African American woman on the ticket. We haven’t had a former president running again. We haven’t had a campaign with two assassination attempts. We haven’t switched out a candidate two months before Election Day before.”
“So it’s just hard to know,” Simmons explained. “If you’re not nervous, you’re not paying attention.”
Democratic strategist Anthony Coley, who served in the Biden administration, acknowledged the fear, pointing to the stagnant poll numbers in the weeks following the Democratic National Convention when Democrats were making comparisons between Harris’s campaign and former President Obama’s run in 2008.
“Now that the sugar high is gone, people have realized what Kamala Harris has said from the start, which is that she is the underdog,” Coley said. “This is going to be a fight. These numbers are just so stubborn.”
Democrats are the first to acknowledge that they have walked around in a perpetual state of fear since the 2016 presidential race, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in a surprise victory. Since then, they have vowed to keep the former president from returning to the Oval Office, a major reason why President Biden was pressured out for Harris in July.
“We are Democrats. We are professionally nervous,” Democratic strategist Tim Hogan said.