President Joe Biden found great success in 2020 with the simple message that he was not Donald Trump. In a contest between the two men, one of them offered the country a chance to turn the page on a chaotic administration that was plagued with bombastic characters — led by the man at the top.
Vice President Kamala Harris has surged in the polls and raised more than $1 billion running on a similar message. She isn’t Joe Biden. She is two decades younger. She says she is the “generational change” candidate who can turn the page on the Trump and Biden years in one fell swoop.
The problem is that in the closing days of the campaign, she is failing to make the argument she is any different than Biden. Her name and age will shake things up, but voters are still voting for half of the “Biden-Harris administration” that has been running the country for the last four years. She is struggling to differentiate how she would govern from how she is helping govern now. And voters aren’t happy with how the Biden-Harris administration is working.
Congressional Reporter Ramsey Touchberry is up with an item for us this morning about the fine line Harris has had to walk in trying to separate herself from her day job.
The problem, Ramsey pointed out, is that “Harris’s lack of specifics has fed into the narrative from Republicans and former President Donald Trump that she symbolizes a Biden 2.0.”
A new campaign ad torches Harris for her similarities with the message that “insanity” is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”
Harris told The View that “there is not a thing that comes to mind” when she was asked what she would do differently than Biden. She later managed to offer that she would appoint a Republican to serve in her Cabinet, though that promise, like many of her plans, lacked specifics.
Her answer to the question of what she would do differently has evolved, much slower than her own political evolution from running as a left-winger in the Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) mold in 2020 to the centrist Democrat who supports fracking in 2024.
“My administration will not be a continuation of the Biden administration,” she said during a CNN town hall this week. “I bring to this role my own ideas and my own experience. I represent a new generation of leadership on a number of issues and believe that we have to actually take new approaches.”
The position she is in is a difficult one, Democratic strategist Brad Bannon told Ramsey. Voters don’t particularly like Biden, but anyone who is considering supporting her also probably doesn’t like Trump.
“It is a slippery bridge she has to cross,” Bannon told Ramsey. “But at this point, I think it’s more important to focus on the differences between her and Trump than it is on the differences between her and Biden because it’s getting to the point … it’s all about turnout, not outreach.”
Click here to read more about Harris’s struggle to separate herself from her boss.
Watching like a hawk
Trump and the Republican National Committee are trying to avoid a repeat of 2020. They don’t want to lose again, but they’re mostly focused on making sure the election isn’t “stolen” from them.
Trump has spent the last four years claiming, without evidence, that had all of the votes been properly counted, he would have beaten Biden. Nearly every claim he and his team brought to court to adjudicate that was rejected, with state and local officials roundly rejecting the accusations that anything was amiss with their election execution.
To head off those fights in two weeks, Republicans have invested heavily in recruiting poll watchers — people who stand on the sidelines of polling places and observe the voting process carefully. They aren’t allowed to interfere with people coming and going, but they can flag suspicious behavior or concerns to poll workers.
The massive effort has come at the expense of building out a ground game to match Harris’s campaign in several important states.
“The RNC recruited more than 230,000 volunteer poll watchers, workers, and lawyers, more than double its original goal,” Justice Reporter Ashley Oliver wrote for us this morning.
It’s not an effort that is only being taken up by Republicans. Democrats have recruited poll watchers of their own, sometimes with the purpose of watching the Republican watchers.
For Trump, it’s a strategy that comes with great risk.
Polling shows the election is going to be what amounts to a coin flip. He and Harris are both spending time in enemy territory, stumping in states they have no chance of winning with the goal of cutting into the other’s margins and attracting national attention for their efforts.
And the GOP poll watchers are set to have an increased presence in those deep-blue areas. Trump has singled out Philadelphia, Detroit, and Atlanta as areas of particular interest and concern, Ashley wrote.
“At a campaign rally in Michigan this spring, he announced that he and the RNC would ‘ensure that what happened in 2020 will never happen again,’” Ashley wrote.
“We’re going to watch them like hawks,” Trump said.
Click here to read more about the eyes on the polls.
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For your radar
Harris is sitting down for an interview with podcaster Brene Brown at 6:25 p.m. before campaigning with Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX) and Beyonce in Houston, Texas, at an event for abortion rights at 9:30 p.m.
Biden is speaking at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time.
Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) is campaigning in Pennsylvania starting at 11:15 a.m. He will speak in Philadelphia at noon at a campaign reception and in Allentown at 3 p.m., and he will hold a rally in Scranton at 6 p.m.
Trump is sitting down for an interview with Joe Rogan for his podcast. He will also speak in Austin, Texas, about border security and migrant crime at 1:30 p.m. before traveling to Michigan for a rally in Traverse City at 7:30 p.m.