Republican strategists feel increasingly confident about former President Donald Trump’s chances of returning to the White House.
Many critics of Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign believe the energy behind her candidacy will decline post-Labor Day, following its initial boost on replacing President Joe Biden, 81, and receiving the DNC’s nomination.
“As we move past Labor Day, we will really get into the time where voters start to harden their opinions,” James Blair, the Trump campaign’s political director, told the Associated Press. “We feel pretty good about things. We feel energized. Our people are energized. But there’s certainly plenty of work to be done.”
“I always felt Labor Day was going to be about the time … the Kamala sugar high starts burning off,” Jason Roe, a Republican strategist and former executive director of the state GOP in Michigan, told Politico. “It’s gone on for too long, and there’s not a lot more left to propel it.”
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Democrats also acknowledge that Harris has a difficult path ahead of her to stop Trump from completing the greatest political comeback in modern American history.
“There’s not a scenario here that’s easy,” Harris senior adviser David Plouffe told the Associated Press. “The pathway to beating Donald Trump, the pathway to 270 electoral votes for Kamala Harris, is exceedingly hard, but doable. And that’s just a reality.”
“She’s got luck,” Democrat strategist Jim Manley told the Wall Street Journal. “The question is how long it’s going to last.”
Polling shows Trump and Harris are statistically tied in national and swing state polling. In polling on specific issues, however, Trump holds a sizable lead, suggesting Harris’s performance in swing state and national polling is more of a result of a “sugar high” than political reality of who voters trust to end the nation’s managed decline.
Harris “defended her and Biden’s handling of the worst economic conditions in a generation, … owning all of them,” Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita said in a TV interview last week.
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“She owns the policy decisions, and now she owns the political path,” he said. “Sixty-five days is an eternity in politics, … too long for American voters not to sniff out her weak character and dangerously liberal view of America.”
Harris faces another problem. Harris cannot campaign on the reduction of soaring costs, the number one 2024 issue, without undermining the Biden-Harris administration’s policies, but she must tout the administration’s policies to validate her record and candidacy.
CNN’s Dana Bash exposed Harris’s conundrum last week during her first pre-taped interview. Harris owned the Biden-Harris administration’s economic record while she simultaneously blamed Trump for it.
The contradiction was stark, producing an outcome that forced Harris to tout her administration’s policies to validate her candidacy all while she undermined her record and her candidacy.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.