As Vice President Kamala Harris enters the last month of the 2024 race for the White House, she’s proving she either won’t or can’t reach out to any persuadable voters.
In her Monday night CBS interview, it looked like “can’t”: Bill Whittaker asks a series of perfectly reasonable questions, and she delivered gibberish.
Is Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu just ignoring the White House? Harris offered a convoluted statement on “our advocacy” that brought some results she and President Biden wanted, without naming one.
How’s she going to pay for her spending plans? Tax the rich, she says; Whittaker retorts: “In the real world,” how will she get that through Congress? “Firefighters and teachers and nurses” will demand it!
Whittaker didn’t look convinced, and it’s hard to imagine who would be.
And that interview at least aimed at a general audience; what swing voter does she expect to reach with softball interviews on popular sex podcast “Call Her Daddy,” has-been Howard Stern’s radio show or Stephen Colbert and “The View”?
The “Call Her Daddy” audience is almost entirely young women — a demographic Democrats have been crushing it with for years. And even then, some listeners felt insulted by the “propaganda.”
Fine, she got to talk more about abortion, but she sure should have those voters already.
It’s also hard to see how she’ll gain any more among the rich white dudes (average household income $160,000!) who still listen to Stern.
And anyone tuning into “The View” or Colbert these days is already on her side: Is she just trying to get them to actually bother showing up to vote?
Harris needs to win undecideds in the Sun Belt and Blue Wall swing states, but nothing she says even seems intended to convince them.
They want some sign of a difference from the Biden-Harris years: How will she help families get back what they lost to Bidenflation? Why won’t her megaspending plans bring Kamalaflation?
What will she do to stop the millions jumping the border?
Democrats won’t win by simply insisting they care about the little guys they’ve punished for the past four years; they need to show a new vision — but whenever Harris talks, she struggles to show any vision at all.
Going through the motions is a bizarre strategy in the final weeks of an election — but maybe it’s the best Kamala Harris can do.