Has the shock of the new worn off, and with it the luster of the Harris-Walz campaign? And what can the candidates do to recapture the moment?
Now, we don’t want to suggest that anyone should be thinking about the election as a horse race, but we have to go on the data we have, and the latest Times/Siena College poll numbers suggest that support for Harris has softened. In particular, going into a change election, fewer respondents (40 percent) saw Harris as representing change, while 61 percent felt that way about Trump — a big problem for one veteran of high office trying to fend off another. Even in the polls that continue to tilt in Harris’s favor, the gap has narrowed.
Still, as we learned in 2016, it’s unclear how predictive polling is, so how many grains of salt you should take these latest figures with is up to you. But if this is a vibes election, there’s no question that with the Walz announcement and the convention in the rearview mirror, the vibes have softened in these waning weeks of summer. Harris and Walz have been less present, and arguably less exciting. Perhaps out of design, they came off as conventional in their joint CNN interview. Some of the campaign’s latest attempts to play in the culture have fallen flat, the meme stock has lost some of its luster, and the boundless energy seems to have run into some boundaries.
In some quarters, there is a feeling that, as more serious heavy hitters — advisors, consultants — have come onboard the once surprise campaign, it has gotten more conventional. To succeed, however, the campaign must remain bold, must keep the scrappy startup energy, must remain…brat.
However you read it, it’s pretty clear that the young campaign is out of the honeymoon phase, and Harris needs to get the mojo back.
From our perspective, here are three rules the Harris-Walz campaign needs to live by:
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This post was originally published on The.Ink.