Harris was panned for her CNN town hall performance, with former President Barack Obama alum David Axelrod handing her the key to “word salad city” for some of her answers. 

Trump, by contrast, does freewheeling rallies where he veers off script with reckless abandon. Democratic attempts to call attention to his alleged gaffes often fall on deaf ears outside the progressive base.

“They’re not taking the same exam,” CNN’s Van Jones complained afterward. “He gets to be lawless. She has to be flawless.”

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The online Left frequently protests the “sane washing” of Trump, which is the latest version of their complaint about “normalizing” the once and perhaps future president of the United States.

Part of this is that Harris is emphasizing her conventionality as a selling point against the unorthodox Trump. The upside is she appeals to some voters who find the former president too chaotic. The downside is that she is judged by the standards of a conventional politician and Trump is mostly not.

But the biggest reason the “exam” is harder for Harris is that people know Trump better than her and she has tried to keep her convictions a mystery.

Trump has been involved in national politics for nearly a decade, if you don’t count previous flirtations with public office that date back at least to 1999. He served one term in the White House and has been the Republican presidential nominee for the last three elections.

Before that, Trump was a reality TV star and a New York City real estate tycoon. Trump publicized his business dealings with an interview schedule that rivals that of most politicians, made numerous cameo appearances on television shows and in movies, graced the covers of magazines, newspapers, and tabloids, grew a massive social media following, and has been a household name since the 1980s.

Love him or hate him, most voters have formed an opinion of Trump.

Harris is less familiar. Moreover, she does not want to be judged solely by her record as vice president or at all by her 2019 campaign platform when she unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination. She wants to separate herself from President Joe Biden, but without identifying any clear areas of disagreement.

Voters don’t feel like they know Harris, which is probably better than simply continuing to hold the same negative views they expressed to pollsters for most of her vice presidency. She has not made it easy for them to familiarize themselves with her.

Much of this is by design. Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket after the primaries but before the party’s convention. She avoided a competitive process for obtaining the nomination. She then kept a light interview schedule and stuck to tightly scripted events until late in the truncated general election campaign.

The hope appeared to be that with limited scrutiny she could hold together or recreate the anti-Trump coalition Biden assembled in 2020 without alienating either its progressive or centrist wings. That coalition is meant to stretch all the way from hardcore socialists to former Republicans repulsed by Trump as well as Democrats on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide. 

But now this messy coalition needs to be preserved amid a war in Gaza, with much angrier progressives, in the absence of a pandemic but the presence of higher prices and an actual, unpopular Biden record, with Trump having somewhat higher favorability ratings and people remembering his term more fondly than they did in 2020. All this with a candidate from a deep-blue state who has never managed such a broad coalition before and isn’t particularly skilled at navigating one. 

This has left Harris ill-equipped to answer basic questions. She left the most difficult media appearances, such as her one interview with Fox News, to the end of the campaign. At the same time she is reluctant to shed light on her own platform or overarching political philosophy, her team remains hopeful it can unearth new bombshells that will alter entrenched opinions about Trump at the last minute.

Biden used to exhort Democrats to compare him to the alternative, not the Almighty. But he has been in Washington for 52 years and was a two-term vice president before winning the top job.

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Harris has given voters limited opportunities to get to know her ahead of the election and gets graded more harshly than Trump, who has practically lived in the public’s televisions and smartphones for the past nine years. 

But the problem is less a challenging exam than, as Jay Cost puts it, she wants a pass-fail option to the presidency.