Why Dem vibes have darkened
Kamala Harris should be losing. Team Trump will make you believe she is.
The panicked warnings, dark clouds, and unforgiving rain brought on by Hurricane Milton this week are too easy a metaphor for the Democratic Party’s current psyche on the 2024 presidential race.
The joy has evaporated; replaced with anxiety, second-guessing and existential dread.
Kamala Harris is out there Calling Her Daddy, vibing with Howard Stern, sipping beer with Stephen Colbert, even successfully fielding hardballs on “60 Minutes” and yet — she’s stuck, with no tangible advantage to show for her blitz into Regular Americans’ arms.
Frustration is seeping into press accounts.
It’s close. Margin-of-error close. Too Close to Call, (pardon the plug) and too close for comfort. She needs to do more to show her intellectual heft, or say less about the details of her plans; forcefully break with Joe Biden or spend every smidgen of her air time reminding people of the contrast with Donald Trump.
Should anyone rational have expected it to be any other way?
One could reasonably argue that based on personal skill, the drag of an unpopular president from her party, her truncated timeframe as a candidate and the issue set favoring Donald Trump, Harris should be losing, even significantly.
She is not.
But unlike the past two presidential cycles in which Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were both clear polling favorites in October, Harris is in a visibly jump ball race.
And let’s be frank, in Democrats’ heads, a tie goes … to the Trumpster. They’re wired to be psychologically fragile and susceptible to the worst case scenario. Moms worry.
Democrats fret they’ve already fumbled away this election; Republicans won’t even concede they lost the last one.
Harris confided to Stern this week she’s losing sleep over the election; Trump often boasts how little sleep he needs.
This gaping confidence gap between the candidates flows downstream and can be encapsulated by an exchange I had this week with a Trump spokesman …
