Fight Club: Who’s Winning, Harris or Trump?

The four weeks since Joe Biden announced he would not be running for reelection could hardly have gone better for Kamala Harris. After the party fell into line, Harris secured all of Biden’s delegates and is now coasting all the way to the Democratic National Convention, powered by vague feelings of hopey-changey freshness. She has offered no interviews to the media, and the media, rather than complaining about that, has helped reinvent her as a stateswoman “matched to the moment.” And it’s worked. Kamala has closed the gap with Trump: All of the major polling averages show her ahead of the ex-president both nationally and in the major battleground states. 

In other words, Kamala Harris is winning. 

Or is she? 

The polls are very tight. A new candidate was always going to get the honeymoon bounce, and Republicans have yet to figure out their best response to the Democratic switcheroo. If the best Harris can manage in this period of intense media cheerleading ahead of the DNC is a narrow lead in the polls, things might not look so rosy come Election Day. 

So who is really winning: Trump or Harris? 

In today’s fight club, contributing editor Abigail Shrier and senior editor Peter Savodnik square off in the ring. Abigail argues the Kamala-mentum is real, while Peter says, “Not so fast.” 

Read Abigail and Peter’s arguments below, and tell us what you think in the comments.   

Abigail Shrier: Harris Is Ahead

As with a military campaign, we should evaluate a political campaign by asking: Are the candidates executing on a strategy? Frustrating the designs of their enemies? Neutralizing their opponents’ best weapons and generally making their lives miserable?

For each of these questions, it’s been a gangbuster month for Kamala Harris, who has smiled and laughed her way into the lead. Sure, she’s being carried along by the sympathetic corporate media, but that is her most potent asset. Like a good general, she is using it.

Harris shrewdly turned down an interview with Time magazine (let’s be honest, she’s lousy unscripted) and still managed to grab the magazine’s cover. In the cover image, her noble face pushes forward, surrounded by black-and-white images of her supporters who recall civil rights protesters from the ’60s. Not-so-subtly, Time is suggesting that Harris is the answer to MLK’s dreams.

As journalist Glenn Greenwald pointed out on X, corporate media have not only hummed the same tune, they have used the same word—joy—in ecstatic celebration of their new queen. NPR announced “Harris and Walz Reintroduce Joy to Democrats Their First Week on the Campaign Trail.” The Washington Post: “Harris and Walz Seize on Joyful Message.” 

But while her veneers scream “happy heroine,” her managerial record tells a different story. Harris is, apparently, so awful to work for that over 90 percent of her staff has quit in the three years since she was sworn in. And yet, voters don’t know that. They only know her through the media. And that is her plan: to ensure nobody goes beyond the fawning headlines. 

Another advantage Harris happily employs: identity politics. Witness the “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom fundraiser she held on July 29. Yes, it’s crass, and an otherwise verboten embrace of white identity politics—but she knows she’ll never be called out for it. “White Dudes for Trump” would be labeled a hate group and debanked.

Lacking a platform of her own, Harris has even nabbed one of Trump’s big ideas: a “No Tax on Tips” policy for service workers. And she did it without apology, knowing that a media that lambasted Trump for the policy would celebrate Harris for it.

Of course, much of her success requires her never to speak to a single reporter. That’s called “managing your liabilities.” When she tries to talk off-the-cuff, she sounds like Miss Teen USA. A single long-form interview on any of these questions could easily sink her candidacy:   

“You’ve said you’ll end inflation. What causes inflation?” 

“What do you think are the strategic goals of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and are they consistent with U.S. interests?” 

“Do you know what the profit margins are in the U.S. for the grocery stores that you claim are gouging consumers?” 

Does anyone imagine Harris can produce a sensible answer to any of these?

Meanwhile, the Republicans have yet to craft anything like an attack plan. 

She need only continue to duck interviews until September 6, when the first mail-in votes are sent. Until then, she can probably expect her poll numbers to stay strong. She now leads in the national polling averages and is ahead in five of the seven battleground states according to Nate Silver’s polling average. 

The largest prediction markets now peg her odds of victory somewhere between 7 to 12 percent higher than Trump’s. That sounds about right to me. 

Peter Savodnik: Trump Is Winning 

No, Kamala Harris is not ahead of Donald Trump. I don’t even think she has pulled level with him. The polling averages and models—and Abigail—may say that Harris is winning, but the Democrats are still on track to lose the White House in November.

Here’s why.

For months, Trump consistently led Joe Biden in the polls, and registered Democrats were so depressed they were unlikely to even turn out to vote. But now that the party has jettisoned the senile 82-year-old and they finally have a viable candidate, Dems are breathing a sigh of relief. Still, that excitement will cool after this week’s Democratic convention, and after more stories pile up about Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz. 

For example, this one—about Walz ordering Minneapolis cops to “give it up,” referring to a precinct station under siege during the riots of the summer of 2020. Which will pair nicely with the story about Harris raising bail money for protesters burning and looting in the city.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t matter that inflation numbers have shifted in a more positive direction lately. Voters’ opinion is fixed on the economy and the price of milk and a gallon of gas and their rent. And the consensus is that they’re just not feeling good under the Biden-Harris regime.

Nor does it matter that the number of migrants illegally crossing into the country has dipped recently. In June, that figure was around 84,000—the lowest since Harris became border czar, or whatever she calls herself. Many independent voters will still feel as though, on both the economy to the border, things have been worse under Biden and Harris than under Trump four years ago.   

On top of that is the harder to make out political climate: the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the university encampments (which are about to spring back to life, as The FP’s Francesca Block recently reported), the public revolt against defunding the police, and the harmful effects of progressive DAs in major cities around the nation, whose “anti-racist” policies have most affected minority communities.

A few hundred thousand voters in the suburbs of a handful of cities—Philadelphia, Phoenix, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Las Vegas, maybe Detroit and Charlotte—will decide this election.

The most important question, the question that all the political reporters at the conventions and rallies will be trying to answer is: What are these people feeling? Beneath the tangle of incongruous wants and angers is a feeling, a gestalt, a mood. The mood in America is that we are losing our way, coming undone, and this is felt most keenly in the so-called boring places, where things are still calm, and the schools are okay. (Not even Kamala Harris disputes as much. She would just like you to forget that she played a hand in this.)

The Harris campaign will keep proposing populist “gimmicks.” The candidate will remain cordoned off from the press. That will only go so far. In the fall, the suburbs will tune in, and they will not be hopeful. Or joyful.

Harris’s best hope is that Donald Trump makes an unforced error. That’s a possibility, but it’s unlikely. The Trump campaign was thrown by the Biden-Harris swap, and the media is trying to drag out the Harris honeymoon as long as it can, but the fundamentals cannot be changed at this late date. They cannot be made to go away.

I don’t expect a landslide, certainly not in the popular vote. But it’s very likely that Trump, who has more routes to an Electoral College victory than Harris does, will easily surpass the 270 electoral-vote threshold.

Abigail Shrier is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a Contributing Editor to The Free Press. She is the author of Bad Therapy. Read her piece, “California’s New Law Lets Schools Keep Secrets from Parents.”

Peter Savodnik is a senior editor at The Free Press. Read his latest piece, “John Fetterman Has No Regrets.” 

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