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1 Last Tuesday, the first and possibly only US Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris took place. As someone afflicted with following the US presidential elections, I couldn’t miss it, even if it meant watching it live at 3 AM my time.
There was a reason for the anti-Trump crowd to be nervous before the debate, especially after Trump’s performance against Biden. Trump only had to appear somewhat competent and cogent to survive that debate—a bar so low that Biden couldn’t clear it. For Kamala, the bar was almost equally low, given her propensity for avoiding interviews and struggling during press conferences. She had to seem competent and not allow Trump to distract her. She did that and more—she made fun of him, baited him repeatedly, and he dug himself into a hole, with his comments about “Haitians eating cats and dogs” going viral and being endlessly mocked.
Once the debate was over, the timeline rejoiced, with Harris supporters doing backflips and the media declaring not just a victory over Trump, but a public humiliation. I agreed for a few minutes, but then I started to watch the debate not through the lens of someone who hates Trump, and a terrifying realization dawned on me: Kamala may have won the debate, but she may have just lost the election.
Before explaining, I want to make a number of things clear:
First, I don’t like Trump. I don’t support him. His tenure and the Muslim ban made life harder for everyone I know in the US, and his dismantling of Roe v. Wade has personally hurt female friends I know. However, I can understand why his supporters back him or why he gained more votes in 2020 than Obama ever did.
Secondly, I can’t say I’m a big fan of Kamala Harris either; I would love to see a brown woman as US President, but I have a problem supporting someone who has funded and defended genocide for the past year, and started two world conflicts without advocating ending them through negotiations. Somehow over the past decade, the US Democratic Party has become the party of war.
And finally, I don’t necessarily trust the media celebration and polling on this, since they all projected his loss against Hillary Clinton in a landslide in 2016, and instead he won decisively.
That being said, let’s look at the first and only presidential debate between Trump and Kamala Harris.
As candidates, they are unevenly matched against each other:
Trump has a wide, solid base of believers but a limited ceiling of general votes, making his best-case scenario getting half of the country’s voters.
Meanwhile, Kamala has a high potential ceiling that could surpass 50%, but no real base of believers in reality. What passes for her base consists of people who hate Trump more than they support her.
So unlike Trump, who has a consistent minimum vote that is guaranteed, Harris has a theoretical high vote full of people who aren’t in Trump’s base and have diverse if opposing views, meaning she will lose some support with every choice she makes.
For instance, her potential voter-base includes both Zionist Democrats and anti-Zionist Arabs. When Trump baited her during the debate about her stance on Israel, her response—declaring her love for Israel—you could almost hear her losing 200,000 Arab votes in Michigan. They won’t vote for Trump, but they won’t vote for her either. That’s Trump’s strategy: the fewer votes she gets, the better it is for him.
Now, in trying to gain independent voters—those who identify as non-political—their concerns are different. They care less about controversial issues such as banning abortion or supporting transgender rights and more about their quality of life and the economy. The fact that US voters currently have the President of the previous administration and the VP of the current administration running against each other is not only unprecedented, it allows for comparisons based not just on numbers, but also on relatively fresh memories. With this situation as the background, as far as all interviews and polls say, those independent voters have three problems with Kamala.
The first problem: They either don’t know her or don’t love her. Not only was she never their first choice as a presidential candidate, most independent voters remember when she first ran for President in 2020. Despite being the front runner for a few weeks, she couldn’t win a single primary then, and still hasn’t won a single primary today. They also remember that 5 months ago she was one of the least popular Vice Presidents in history, polling consistently in the 30s since the beginning of the Biden administration. Her current high polling as the candidate amongst the Democratic base is due to her being a better candidate than Biden (she is mentally present) and against Trump (she is mentally sane)—which is not a hard barrier to overcome for anyone younger than 70.
Her lack of enthusiastic support is also due to her not getting the presidential nomination by battling her way on her own merit in presidential primaries, gathering supporters and believers along the way. The Democratic Party this year refused to even have a primary for Biden in their attempt to cover up his obviously declining mental state, a strategy that exploded during his debate against Trump, leading to his withdrawal from the race and her becoming the nominee overnight without anyone knowing her or voting for her. For many of them, while Trump was unfortunately elected as a nominee by his base, Kamala was selected by a handful of Party leaders as the nominee, the same leaders responsible for the Biden cover-up.
The second problem: She has great power, but has neither taken nor claimed any responsibility. Kamala has been in power for the past four years as the Vice President of the United States and since her nomination became the de facto leader of her party while still in power. For them, this raises questions about why, since the beginning of her term which hasn’t ended yet, she hasn’t proposed any of her solutions or accomplished any of her goals throughout her tenure as Vice President.
No one can even point to a single issue that she has championed over the past 4 years. The only such issue is protecting abortion rights, which is one of her main issues during this campaign, but all she did about it was talk. Why hasn’t she proposed federal legislation protecting it the moment Roe v. Wade was overturned? Why hasn’t she proposed any of her other ideas or policies that she wants to implement as solutions to problems that she still has the power to address, even now? How much of the current state of the country is she responsible for, and what is she doing about it, since she is currently in power? How can one believe any of her promises, when she never pushed for them once over the past 4 years and is not pushing them right now while effectively running the country?
The final and biggest problem: the US economy. Under the Biden administration, inflation and cost of living have soared in the US in comparison to the Trump years, and that included 2020 and Covid. For the independent voters, both those who worry about thriving and those who worry about surviving, this election is a referendum on the economic direction of the Biden-Harris administration: should they continue in the current direction or revert to Trump’s economic policies, which they remember as better economically? It might be good to remember that while celebrated by the Trump-haters, for those non-educated working class independent voters who are currently economically suffering, her rehearsed ridicule and laughter during the debate is borderline offensive. What exactly about their situation, thanks to the current Biden-Harris administration, is so fucking funny to her?
From now until election day, those three problems will be the focus of Trump’s campaign, and Kamala has no answer for any of them, especially the economy. She dodged every question related to the economy under the Biden-Harris administration during the debate, promising an “opportunity economy” while offering platitudes about her love for small businesses. However, the economy voters not only noticed her lack of answers and her dodging of any responsibility for the current state of the economy under her administration, they still have no idea what exactly an “opportunity economy” is.
For any candidate in her position, the right move would be to immediately distance themselves from the current unpopular administration. Unfortunately for Kamala, she can’t distance herself from the Biden administration’s economic issues and blame it all on Joe Biden’s leadership, because she’d have to admit that the economy was poorly managed under Biden. Such an admission would lead to uncomfortable questions about how long she knew about Biden’s declining mental state, how much that declining state led to the current economy, and if she allowed people to suffer such conditions knowing the truth and covering it up, even willing to run with Biden again for a second term, in order for her to stay in power. So she has to stay attached to it, even as it drags her down with it, meanwhile Trump has only to remind the economy voters of their bank accounts during his era and promise to do it again. While there is a possibility that some economy voters still might not end up voting for Trump, chances are if they won’t vote for him, they won’t vote for her either.
The September 2024 Times/Siena Poll of the Likely Electorate has shown that more than 60% of the voters want a change from the current direction under Joe Biden. About 61% see Trump as that major change, while 55% view Kamala as more of the same from the Biden administration. While it can be argued that having a brown woman in charge represents significant change, it is a rather symbolic change. In the fight between symbolism versus results, I would always bet on results to prevail, the same way I would always bet on the candidates whose voters genuinely support them, over the one who is the beneficiary of the other candidate’s hatred. This matters because the more the US media projects an inevitable Harris win based on polls, the more complacent and fractured her voters become, and the more encouraged Trump’s voters become.
Strategically, Kamala’s only chance to win is to not hemorrhage enough votes between now and election day, and hope that abortion rights voters have a high enough turnout to beat Trump’s low ceiling. Given how close November 4th is, it is possible that she might pull it off, but until then, this race is far from over
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