If you’re running a political campaign, the one person you never want to be compared to is Hillary Clinton. The twice-failed presidential candidate went down in history after losing to Donald Trump in 2016, and plenty of speculation has revolved around whether her defeat was preventable. Most infamously, she never set foot in Wisconsin because she was confident the so-called “blue wall” states would hold.
Ultimately, they didn’t, and Trump walked away with Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and the entire election. Now, Democrats are beginning to panic, and the comparisons to Clinton are getting scarier by the minute.
Democratic operatives, including some of Kamala Harris’ own staffers, are growing increasingly concerned about her relatively light campaign schedule, which has her holding fewer events than Donald Trump and avoiding unscripted interactions with voters and the press almost entirely.
In interviews with POLITICO, nearly two dozen Democrats described Harris as running a do-no-harm, risk-averse approach to the race they fear could hamper her as the campaign enters its final 30-day stretch.
With early voting by mail and in person already underway in more than half of the country, Harris spent just three days of the last week of September in battleground states. On Sept. 28, when Trump gave a speech in Wisconsin before flying to Alabama for the Georgia-Alabama football game, Harris was attending a fundraiser in San Francisco. And beyond concerns about her schedule, Democrats argue that Harris would benefit from venues that allow her to introduce herself to voters in a more authentic way, such as town hall events, more sit-down interviews and unscripted exchanges with voters.
When Harris first entered the race, she bested Trump in the number of events held for the first month. That has completely turned around, with the former president barnstorming the country while the current vice president plays it safe. But is keeping her from interviews and town halls actually the safest path to victory in November?
That’s what has Democrats panicking. They see Harris repeating a lot of the mistakes Clinton made, both in showing such overconfidence and in being so risk-averse. That is only exacerbated by the fact that the vice president only got into the race in late July. If anything, her schedule should be busier than a typical nominee because there’s so much ground to make up in a limited amount of time.
But while Democrats want Harris to seem more “authentic” by doing sit-down interviews and unscripted exchanges, there’s a big problem: She doesn’t have the ability to do them.
That was illustrated perfectly on Friday after her teleprompter went out during a speech. Instead of showing some command of her policy platform, Harris melted down, cackling uncontrollably while rambling about how many days were left before the election.
SEE: The Look on Kamala Harris’ Face When Her Teleprompter Goes Out in Michigan
She had no off-the-cuff material to go to. She had clearly not even read the speech beforehand. This is a woman who is incredibly lazy and incapable of doing anything but reading from a script provided to her by her handlers. More interviews would be disastrous for her.
Comparing Harris’ campaign to other recent Democratic presidential nominees is difficult, as Biden’s 2020 campaign was affected by the restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic. But an analysis of Barack Obama’s first campaign in 2008 and Clinton’s 2016 bid — based on data from Eric Appleman’s Democracy in Action sites — shows that Harris’ schedule more closely reflects the latter than the former.
Looking at the same time period in those two elections, Obama had just two days with no public events, and his schedule was packed daily with an array of campaign events, brief appearances at local restaurants, fundraisers, and other events. Clinton, by contrast, had roughly the same number of days with no events that Harris has had, including a brief stint where she was treated for pneumonia.
The Harris campaign has become complacent in the face of an overwhelming cash advantage. They don’t want to put the vice president out on the trail every day because they fear she’ll do more harm than good. But bombarding the airwaves with the same, tired political ads can only get her so far. Perhaps her schedule picks up as we move into mid-October, but for now, Harris is playing a dangerous game.
