Harris’s Media Blitz May Cost Her the Election
New York Times political correspondent: Harris “keeps answering the question she wants, not the one that was asked.”
Extraordinary and unprecedented as it was, the Harris campaign’s early strategy of limiting Vice President Kamala Harris’s public exposure to scripted situations was actually very smart. She had initially performed admirably during her 2019 run for the Democratic presidential nomination. It was only when voters got to know her a little better that her support began to fade, forcing her to drop out of the race before a single primary vote was cast. Democrats were determined to prevent that from happening again.
Buoyed by the media’s full-court press to reinvent Harris as the next Barack Obama as well as the party’s tremendous relief that President Joe Biden had exited the race, she rose quickly in the polls and even surpassed former President Donald Trump in several crucial battleground states. Harris was riding high.
Moreover, Americans were surprised by her strong performance at the September debate with Trump. Despite Harris’s countless lies and obnoxious facial expressions, the night’s biggest surprise was just how ready she was to take on Trump. Gone were the word salads we’ve come to expect from her. Instead, many of us were forced to admit that Harris was uncharacteristically articulate, confident, and well-prepared. Remarkably so. She had taken five days off from the campaign trail to literally memorize her lines so she could recite them at the debate.
One month later, however, Harris’s momentum has stalled. In an effort to restore it, the campaign did precisely what they have so studiously avoided so far: they scheduled a media blitz. The two most notable appearances included a Univision town hall in Las Vegas on Thursday and an interview on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” last Monday. These events showed that Harris’s continued reliance on canned answers has started to grate.
In a clip from the town hall, an audience member seated behind a questioner was seen lip syncing Harris’s words because she’s heard them so many times before.
Random woman in the audience PERFECTLY mouths words along with Kamala Harris during her Univision Town Hall
What in the world is going on?! pic.twitter.com/Vo8WM9u1ir
— PolitiQuips (@Politi_Quips) October 11, 2024
She even turned on her Spanish accent for the occasion.
At a town hall event with Spanish-language media channel Univision, Kamala Harris slips back into a Spanish-sounding accent. She first debuted it when she spoke to Hispanic Democrats in Washington, D.C. pic.twitter.com/pqL5Ugs5oP
— Andy Ngo 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) October 11, 2024
In the following X post, a user noted that reaction to Harris’s performance was largely negative. He wrote, “Fake, liar, scripted, teleprompter, terrible, brainless, and fake accent top the list of adjectives used.”
3,400 comments on Kamala’s town hall disaster.
This is the *Univision Noticias* channel, so it’s mostly Hispanics commenting.
Not a single positive comment. Fake, liar, scripted, teleprompter, terrible, brainless, and fake accent top the list of adjectives used. pic.twitter.com/KQEesRYvhP
— Bad Hombre (@joma_gc) October 11, 2024
Harris’s worst fears were realized during her “60 Minutes” interview. Reporter Bill Whitaker had the audacity to ask Harris some tough questions. (If all journalists conducted interviews like he did, the race would not be so close.) Fox News host “Kennedy” said she saw fear creep across Harris’s face as Whitaker questioned her.
Among his many questions, Whitaker asked how she planned to pay for “proposals to boost the child tax credit, giveaways for first-time home buyers and big handouts to small business owners,” measures that would add $3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
She replied, “When you invest in small businesses, you invest in the middle class, and you strengthen America’s economy. Small businesses are the backbone of America’s economy.” We’ve heard some variation of that answer in nearly every interview she has done.
Whitaker challenged her on her many flips on major policy issues. Harris said, “We are a diverse people. Geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds. What the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus. … That has been my approach.”
In one of the most contentious exchanges between the two (below), Whitaker pressed Harris on the administration’s decision to “loosen the immigration policies as much as you did.” He pointed out that these changes caused the number of illegal border crossings to quadruple.
She recited all of her previous talking points, but he kept pushing for a real answer.
Bill Whitaker presses Vice President Kamala Harris on President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers as part of a policy shift on border crossings, and on whether the Biden administration should have taken those steps sooner. https://t.co/l85soF5tG7 pic.twitter.com/XNnCKNnaWS
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 8, 2024
The full interview can be viewed below.
Although Harris’s rote memorization served her well during the debate, five weeks later, she continues to draw from this limited and stale material to avoid answering questions from both the media and from voters. Even New York Times political correspondent Michael Bender noted last week that Harris “keeps answering the question she wants, not the one that was asked.”
Are voters catching on? It appears they are.
NBC released a poll on Sunday that showed Harris and Trump tied nationally at 48%. When third party candidates were added, Trump led by a 47% to 46% margin.
In the September NBC poll, Harris led Trump by 5-points, 49% to 44%.
The latest NBC poll also shows a drop in Harris’s popularity among voters over the past month:
One of the major developments in September’s NBC News poll, conducted after the Harris-Trump debate on Sept. 10, was her double-digit increase in popularity compared to earlier in the summer, before she became Democrats’ presidential candidate. Her ratings shot upward to 48% positive, 45% negative (a +3 net rating).
But in this latest poll, Harris’ rating stands at 43% positive, 49% negative (-6), with the erosion coming mainly from independents and young voters.
Over the past few weeks, support in the critical swing states has ticked up for Trump and down for Harris. Her lead in the RealClearPolitics national average has softened to 1.7%, far lower than Biden’s lead of 9.2% at this point in the 2020 race, or Clinton’s lead of 6.7% in 2016.
“Harrismania” was never based on reality. Rather, it was a media-driven construct that ignored the most basic truths about Harris: she is vapid, arrogant, and inauthentic.
Democrats hoped that a short campaign would prevent voters from seeing the real Harris. But, despite their best efforts, the truth is slowly being revealed and voters are starting to grasp that Harris is the same weak and unappealing candidate she was in 2019.
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
Wait, you mean the diversity hire that was selected as VP *specifically* because of her gender and (supposed) race, the woman who got the nomination of the Democrat party without receiving a single cast vote is up by 50 points?
We’ll knock me over with a feather.
It is not enough for Harris to lose the election. I want her to destroy the Democrat Party altogether.
That fact that a brainless, platitude spouting idiot like her is even close in any poll indicates to me the American people who have any intelligence should be demanding the schools quit playing politics and actually teach the three R’s.
And the teachers unions should all be declared illegal.
“She’s got what voters crave.”
Not only that but I bet a number of people like me never believed her massive spike in popularity was real. Real Clear Politics had her around a -15 early this year and then suddenly she gained 25 points? Really?
Harris’ only selling point is Not Trump.
Problem is, Americans like Trump and probably understand the Soviet style attempts to take him down.
In fairness, a majority of Americans in fact don’t like Trump. BUT, his favorable/unfavorable numbers have now inched past hers and I think he’s higher at any point since he first won the 2016 election. The most recent Harvard/Harris poll (very Dem friendly) had Trump at 46/50 (favorable/unfavorable ) while they’re only measuring Harris at 42/53 in the same poll. That’s disastrous for her. How disastrous? That same pollster’s last 2020 poll had Biden winning by +8.5. Biden, of course, only won by +4.0.
In the history of polling, the candidate who had the worst favorability rating has always lost. That’s Harris right now.
Given the media has been imitating Harris at the start of her political career by getting on their knees for her at every opportunity the fact she is cratering suggests Democrats have a real problem in their hands.
She is so bad that not even the slobbering whore media can keep brown diversity Hillary afloat 😂
And don’t discount the significance of the betting odds. Trump’s advantage in the betting markets was in the stratosphere in the days before Biden dropped out. By August 9, Harris was ahead of him. Trump gained a small lead in the days before the Sept. 10 debate. Lost it for obvious reasons. On Oct. 6, he regained the lead and he is now up by over 9 points. According to Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey, betting odds are a leading (by about one week) indicator of voter sentiment. https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2024/10/14/wanna-bet-theres-something-happening-n3795783
Fox Butterfield.
She’s engaged in a media blitz because she was ALREADY losing. The media blitz was the last desperate attempt to reverse it, not the cause of it.
I was and am still wondering about the return to media. A month ago I predicted that they were keeping Harris under wraps for a crash course on being interviewed in middle America. Eventually I knew that she would appear before her allies to the tune of ‘Kamala boldly faces toughest host on NPR in a grilling pre-recorded edited_for_anything interview.’
Do you think it’s the 4th quarter, “Uh oh, we had better try that ‘forward pass’ thingy.” ?
Yes. And I think that her decision to be interviewed by Brett Baier is a sign of utter desperation.
I think Baier should “get sick,” so Fox can spring Peter Doocy on Harris. She would have a seizure as soon as she found out.
Or Sean Hannity! 😁
I wonder what she can win in a Brett Baier interview.
Most of the people I would prefer to interview Harris have been fired by Fox.
She was unable to pull ahead of Trump even with the fawning media coverage and hiding from interviews. The result at this point is desperation so her handlers threw the dice and started her national coming out party on friendly venues like The View and podcasts few listen to. Even there it was apparent she couldn’t handle question even softball ones. Her personality and oozing fakeness from her pores can not be hidden.
Say what? I’m not sure what debate you watched … it certainly wasn’t the one that I saw.
To be fair, she was pretty good about sticking to her canned lines at the debate even at the expense of answering any single question.
She was protected and stopped from going off message. Even Barry Hussein could come across as lucent and coherent with that level of protection 😂
:HEART:
“Extraordinary and unprecedented as it was, the Harris campaign’s early strategy of limiting Vice President Kamala Harris’s public exposure to scripted situations was actually very smart. She had initially performed admirably during her 2019 run for the Democratic presidential nomination. It was only when voters got to know her a little better that her support began to fade, forcing her to drop out of the race before a single primary vote was cast.”
I think they were hoping to build such a lead over Trump with that Hide Harris strategy that no matter what she did towards November she could coast. They were wrong but what else could they do?
Clearly the Democratic Bosses should have waited until much much later before having Consigliere Nancy slip the horse’s head into Joe’s bed.
Sure, it would have been after the DNC Convention, but, hey, they’ve been in make-it-up-as-we-go mode, assisted by their ever-compliant MSM, for months.
Yes, an even shorter campaign – say 2 months – would have increased her chances.
This crazy ass woman just stuck a hatch in her political career
Indigenous day my ass
https://x.com/AutismCapital/status/1845859032743161865
She can always go back and continue her career at McDonalds.
She can’t even pander properly. If she’d just used a conversational tone instead of obviously emphasizing the phrase like she was proud of it, this would be just a momentary blip of a story. Similar to Retch’s Dorito communion, this was a designed dig at those horrible, awful deplorables who don’t properly hate everything about the U.S. like we’re supposed to.
‘Turn out election’ = be angrier than the other side?
Abortion and ballot fraud are her hopes.
And owning the counters if fraudulent votes will help to.
A quote I’ve heard attributed to way too many people for anyone to really figure out who originally said it.
It is better to be thought a fool and remain silent than to speak and remove all doubt.
Her problem is that she spoke and removed all doubt. She is a fool and that’s being very very kind
Aesop’s Fables, THE FOX, THE DONKEY AND THE LION SKIN
Few claimants to authorship predate the ancient Greeks.
It’s a lot older than the Greeks.
“Gone were the word salads we’ve come to expect from her. Instead, many of us were forced to admit that Harris was uncharacteristically articulate, confident, and well-prepared.”
So what changed? Well if she were given the questions in advance, and had real-time prompting with a hidden earpiece, that would explain her performance. Hidden earpieces are available on the retail market. They are inserted deep in the ear canal and removed with a magnet. The Secret Service and FBI use them. Undetectable without an otoscope.
Only the gullible take these polls seriously. The response rates are well under 5%. So pollsters are forced to use a statistical technique called “imputation,” which provides the means to fiddle. I suspect that her campaign’s private polls showed she had to do something. Thus the media blitz.
An old saying: “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
I’ll remark here again that during the debate (which I was not watching) a friend who was watching contacted me and described Harris’ appearance, mannerisms, and the delivery of her replies. I said to him, “Sounds like she’s repeating what she’s hearing in an earpiece.” Note this was without hearing or seeing her myself, and before the “earpiece” theory arose (my reaction was during the debate).
“…she is vapid, arrogant, and inauthentic.”
For these reasons, she became Joe Biden’s safeguard against impeachment and removal. I’m no longer sure Harris was supposed to replace Joe (via the 25th Amendment) after his inauguration, or if Joe was a genius to select her to insulate himself from the possibility. Certainly, when it because obvious she was both unpopular/unlikeable and a moron, Joe’s hold on the Oval Office was assured.
She was his insurance policy. No matter how bad he was, she was worse.
…dumber than me.
I think you are correct but I’ve been wondering for several months exactly what the Dems strategy was. It has been apparent for a few years that Biden was not up to the job. Since they never planned on Harris doing anything what did they think would happen? Why the sudden shift in propelling Harris of all people into Biden’s place? Are they so trapped by their own DEI nonsense they were frozen in place?
The Blue Queen has a vagina (presumably) and black skin. For millions of voters that will be all they need to vote for her.
As Mark Steyn once noted: sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. The Blue Queen’s candidacy (tied or leading in polls, if you believe in that sort of thing) is another data point in that decline.
again
she is the perfect embodiment of affrim action hate crime dei agenda
by any means necessary
When you say “may lose the election”…
She would lose in a landslide if the election were held on Election Day with registered voters marking paper ballots or using a mechanical voting machine; where absentee (aka mail-in) ballots are handed out very sparingly and mostly to those in service to the United State who are far from their voting district.
But now we have mail-in ballots sent to registered voters who are not verified and harvested into drop boxes along with voting machines tied to the internet — which monitored by DHS and other intelligence agencies who were very active in censoring social media for anything anti Democrat or pro Trump.
Oh, and millions of illegals who are undoubtedly registered with their ballots already harvested and waiting to be dropped off at strategic voting precincts.
Lose the election? We have no control over that with our votes anymore.
If nothing else, this presidential campaign is only increasing Americans’ cynicism about election integrity, quality of candidates, and media bias. Aside from that, the campaign has become more absurd than any during my 82 years. I have been a Trump support since 2016, primarily because our political system needs a major reboot—within the guidelines of the Constitution, of course—and Trump is just the disruptive actor to make that happen. On another level, Kamala must be sent packing from the national scene, back to California where she will blend back into her native environment but less likely to do significant damage than at the national level. And I speak here as a California voter !