Hello! There are 6 days till election day.
Kamala goes to the mall
First up, the thing that should be the story: Kamala Harris last night held a monster rally outside the White House, in more or less the exact spot where Donald Trump rallied his most rabid supporters on January 6th 2021 and ordered them down to the Capitol.
In front of a crowd of 75,000, some of whom spilled onto the National Mall, Harris explicitly invoked the Capitol riot as she condemned Trump in the strongest of terms:
America, this is not a candidate for president who is thinking about how to make your life better. This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power.
Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other. That is who he is. But America, I am here tonight to say that is not who we are…
Nearly 250 years ago, America was born when we wrested freedom from a petty tyrant. Across the generations, Americans have preserved that freedom, expanded it, and in so doing, proved to the world that a government of, by, and for the people is strong and can endure.
And those who came before us, the patriots at Normandy and Selma, Seneca Falls and Stonewall, on farmland and factory floors, they did not struggle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedom. They didn’t do that only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant.
These United States of America, we are not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised.
Strong stuff. But given that not many voters can still be entirely unaware of who Trump is and how he behaves, why bother?
Leave aside for a second the fact that DC is not electorally relevant, that most likely voters who show up in polls seem to know who they’re voting for and that most people have better things to do than watch campaign rallies on the evening news. Last night’s rally matters because of what it says about what Harris has already achieved – and what it tells us about her campaign’s plan for the next few days.
Sitting vice presidents do not attract crowds of 75,000-plus people by default, and it’s not every day you find a candidate who can handle such a crowd as well as Harris for a full half hour. That the campaign knew she and they could pull this thing off signals a confidence that Biden (more on whom below) never warranted – a confidence about Harris’s abilities and her supporters’ enthusiasm that’s run high for three full months.
There’s also a clear logic behind the text of the speech and the symbolism of its setting. Harris simply would not have used the vocabulary she did or made the multi-layered callback to the January 6th insurrection if she did not think it would cut through to the parts of the electorate she most needs to reach at the finish line looms ever closer.
For every piece of insider reportage quoting campaign staff sounding bullish about their chances, you can find an article saying the reverse, and that’s on both sides. It pays to watch what the campaigns are actually doing, and to bear in mind that they’re both raking in stacks of data from the ground, constantly testing their messages, and monitoring online engagement at a granular level.
This, not just media narrative or the top line of any given poll, is what’s guiding them. Whether the campaigns are drawing the wisest conclusions from the information they’ve gathered is a separate question, and one that’ll only be answerable after the result comes down.
For now, reflect on the fact that one of the candidates can summon 75,000 people to the White House and credibly describe her opponent as an unstable dictator-in-waiting.
Reflect also on the mood Harris was clearly in: obviously sober about the threat Trump poses, but happy in front of a massive crowd; clearly neither exhausted from a thankless campaign nor furious not to be pulling decisively ahead of a man who frequently derides her as a low-IQ racial impostor.
And reflect also on the contrast with her current boss, whose cackhanded words last night risk overshadowing her unfairly at the final hurdle.
🚮 Deplorables 2: This time it’s garbage
I mentioned Hillary Clinton’s widely misreported “basket of deplorables” remark in an earlier post, explaining there how it was first overlooked and then all but forgotten that she spent much of the same speech warning that plenty of basically decent people living in economic frustration and distress could be all too easily persuaded to vote for Trump without a strong enough alternative on offer.
The memory-holing of what Clinton actually said was all too predictable, and all too enraging given that the very analysis she delivered would be used by liberal pundits after the election to explain her loss as if she and her campaign had never thought of it.
Should Harris lose to Trump next week, something similar might happen with Biden’s remarks on a Zoom call last night, in the course of which he appeared to describe Trump supporters as “garbage”. At least, that’s what most people seem to have heard.
Parsing what Biden actually said is far from impossible. The charitable reading, as transcribed below, is that it’s a botched condemnation of the Trump-supporting standup who delivered the rally’s racist warmup routine:
The messiness of that transcript is an accurate rendering of Biden’s halting, hard-to-untangle speech, the same mangled diction that sank his candidacy at the summer debate with Trump.
It is obviously not any public figure’s privilege to demand their remarks only be heard a certain way, though they can complain about it all they want. But there are a few reasons this is less of a disaster than the Puerto Rico incident at Trump’s rally on Monday:
Voters claiming Puerto Rican heritage are a powerful voting bloc concentrated in electorally crucial areas (Philadelphia in particular). Their votes are valuable to both sides, and they are a swing demographic among whom high turnout is not a given. The voters who will assume it was them that Biden referred to as “garbage”, on the other hand, are by definition already voting for Trump.
Whereas Biden and Harris do not have a long and storied history of referring to half the electorate as garbage, the Republican Party and Trump in particular are known for tolerating, indulging and fomenting racism against Hispanic people in general – and Trump himself has a long record with Puerto Rico itself, particularly his disastrous mishandling of the response to Hurricane Maria. The fact that the Republicans have for decades obstructed any serious discussion of Puerto Rico becoming a state doesn’t help.
Biden is not on the ballot; Harris is. That his mangled remarks were made on a low-quality video-call interview rather than at her mammoth rally only reinforces the impression that the party and the campaign were right to relegate him to the role of lame duck.
Biden was speaking on the back of an inside-DC mini-news cycle on the Harris operation’s ongoing refusal to put him front and centre alongside his own vice president in the campaign’s final week. To the extent this is a genuine bone of contention between the White House and the campaign, it may just shut that time-wasting conversation down.
It’s not exactly the mark of a healthy democracy, but as was true even when Clinton made her “deplorables” remark in 2016, a lot of people do feel this way about a significant chunk of Trump’s base – and not just on the left. Don’t forget that J.D. Vance recently referred to the January 6th rioters as “knuckleheads”, putting a dent in the cynical right-wing rebranding of them as “patriots” and “political prisoners”.
It would be naïve to say Biden’s words don’t matter at all. He is, after all, the sitting president, and the Trump campaign is essentially constructed around weaponising people’s sense of victimhood, justified or otherwise. The Harris campaign has duly been offering up examples of Trump making similar remarks and contrasting them with their offer of an alternative:
For Biden to offer the Trump team any sort of fodder is a major misstep. But it’s hard to believe that Biden speaking faintly and confusingly after being decisively sidelined will handicap Harris as she delivers a message she clearly has reason to believe is working.