Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both want to be candidates of change. With good reason: 65% of Americans in the RealClearPolitics average say the country is on the wrong track. Can the nominees make the pitch?
It could be a stretch, particularly for Ms. Harris. She knows she can’t run by saying the White House has done a great job. The Biden-Harris administration’s approval numbers on inflation, the economy, immigration, foreign policy and crime are all in the mid-30% range. It’ll be hard for her to escape responsibility for this record.
That isn’t a new problem. It’s difficult for anyone from the incumbent party to be anything other than a candidate of continuity. In 1968 Vice President Hubert Humphrey struggled to create a separate identity until Sept. 30 when—behind by 15 points in Gallup’s polling—he finally broke with President Lyndon B. Johnson by saying he’d be willing to stop bombing North Vietnam. Humphrey made up significant ground but still narrowly lost to Richard Nixon.
Ms. Harris might want to signal her independence from the Biden administration. The best she can likely do is present a forward-looking agenda to improve life for ordinary Americans. In North Carolina on Friday, she’ll reportedly try to move away from Mr. Biden’s record by offering ideas on the cost of food, healthcare and housing.
The vice president faces a tough choice on how to break from the administration. Her party leans increasingly left. Swing voters, especially disenchanted Republicans, don’t. Will Ms. Harris head left anyway, hoping that turning out true-blue Democrats is enough to get 270 electoral votes? Or will she risk alienating elements of her base by reaching out to moderate voters in battleground states?
Though she has yet to articulate a policy platform, it looks as if Ms. Harris has picked the wiser option. She has moved toward the center, abandoning ideas she once supported, such as a ban on fracking, decriminalization of illegal border crossing, mandatory gun “buyback” programs, and the effective abolition of private health insurance through Medicare for All.
Whether she’ll be able to explain her flip-flops as something other than opportunism is unclear. The press hasn’t been able to ask such questions. She will, however, debate Mr. Trump at least once.
Yet it’s also unclear whether the Republican will prosecute the case against Ms. Harris. Mr. Trump so far has largely focused on themes that appeal only to his true believers—childish insults and talk of stolen elections, Jan. 6 “political prisoners” and a weaponized justice system. That won’t win him a single vote he doesn’t already have.
Mr. Trump needs to reset. Saying times were better when he was president is only a start. He has hardly offered any new policy ideas, and the ones he does occasionally mention—tax-free tip income and history’s largest deportation of illegal aliens—won’t clinch swing states. With less than 12 weeks to go, he’s running out of time to settle on two or three ambitious second-term agenda items that will resonate with and reassure swing voters.
Going after Ms. Harris’s reversals on important issues is useful. That approach made a difference in the 2004 race between George W. Bush and John Kerry. Mr. Kerry set it up by saying about a war funding bill, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” But caution is in order: Voters think every politician flip-flops. The attack against Mr. Kerry worked because it was reinforced for nearly nine months. At press time, this election had only 83 days left.
