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We are watching in real time one of the greatest achievements of modern presidential campaign history, a consequential miracle that has, for sure, involved some luck, but has been mostly skill, a marvel that has turned a woman who the public and many of those who knew her best thought a few months ago had next to no chance to beat Donald Trump into a candidate leading in the polls and poised to win the presidential election.
Kamala Harris has performed brilliantly in public since the day Joe Biden yielded to the pressure and handed her their party’s presidential nomination.
And she has benefited from the reality that nothing now focuses Democratic minds more intensely than the shared belief that defeating Donald Trump is a mission of existential dimensions, both for America, for the senior strategists running her campaign, for their reputational place in history.
Still, today is the day to take stock of the series of remarkable achievements that Harris World has already accomplished, simultaneously flying and building that metaphorical airplane with extraordinary skill.
All campaigns at this level require making countless decisions every hour within the context of a unique organizational beast, a billion-dollar-plus, coast-to-coast, high-profile start up with thousands of employees, numerous opinionated stakeholders, and an unrelenting and unforgiving series of deadlines culminating in the ultimate drop-dead end date of Election Day.
Consider all that Team Harris has accomplished already, in transitioning from Biden-Harris to Harris-Walz:
* Planning and staging an extremely successful convention in Chicago, with the complexities of scheduling, messaging, logistics, and personalities.
* Bringing in veterans of past Clinton, Obama, and other campaigns and integrating them into the operation with an all-hands-on-deck urgency.
* Safeguarding and building up the candidate’s public image, through her events, advertising, spinning, surrogate operations, and media management.
* More specifically, knowing the Trump campaign believes that their (only) way to win is to paint her as “weak, failed, and dangerously liberal,” the Harris high command has counteracted that head on, taking on each element directly, as in this new ad:
* They have changed the dominant negative messaging frame on Trump, from the Bidenesque “serious threat to democracy” to the Harrisian “buffoonish laughingstock.”
* On policy, including with yesterday’s New Hampshire rollout, they have carefully straddled the lines, showing loyalty to the Biden-Harris record, while shamelessly stealing Trump’s idea of no taxes on tips, and, with yesterday’s capital gains tax differential with the incumbent, finally suggesting to the business world and those who care about symbolism, that she is more “centrist” than the man she wants to replace. Her two economic speeches have been case studies in positioning with the public, the press, the Congress, and the center-left business community, with just enough substance to pass through a filter that, Harris’ team knows, doesn’t demand much substance in late summer of a presidential year. All of this is clearly frustrating the Reds, as is evidenced regularly on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, something that produces the highest and most exuberant of fives in Wilmington. This New York Times passage is music to their ears as sweet as any Beyonce tune:
Ms. Harris has sought to present herself as an ally to businesses and investors in a way that Mr. Biden did not. That has meant courting donors from Wall Street as well as Silicon Valley, which Ms. Harris once represented as a senator from California, and embracing some of the language and policy ideas favored by businesses.
* Harris’ campaign has perfected the art of doling out, case by case where her team thinks it is needed, anonymous representations that she is repudiating positions she took in her 2020 presidential campaign (fracking, ICE, etc), while leaving others in place, all typically without a word from the nominee herself. This might frustrate Tom Cotton, but the media and the Democrats don’t care!
Ross Douthat, in an essential reading piece that is the best explanation by far to date of how Harris has pulled this policy jujutsu off and why it has been so effective, writes:
Harris did stake out some moderate positions, promising border enforcement and touting her prosecutorial credentials. But mostly she followed a Marie Kondo strategy, applying the life-changing magic of tidying up to the Democratic platform. She didn’t offer a comprehensive moderate agenda or seek out a Sister Souljah confrontation with some left-wing interest group. Instead she offered a form of progressive minimalism, reducing a cluttered agenda to a few popular promises and just leaving everything else out….
When being a Democrat just means being pro-choice and anti-Trump, it’s a lot more relaxing and, yes, joyful than constantly looking over your shoulder to figure out what antiracist rule you need to follow, what radical alternative to the U.S. health care system you’re supposed to champion, what very specific environmental proposal you need to fulsomely embrace. That sense of ideological relaxation is what Harris’s campaign delivered to her party, and many of her supporters really did love her for it.
* Team Harris beyond the scenes continues to coordinate hand-in-hand-in-glove with the White House, as on Wednesday’s Nippon Steel announcement, a level of no-daylight-between-them synchronization that was wholly absent from Clinton-Gore 2000. Joe Biden and everyone working for him in the administration wants Harris to win, and they have turned the executive branch over in service of that goal. Jen O’Malley Dillon and David Plouffe are not just world-class political hacks, but they have both also worked in the White House and they know how to pull those levers and forcefully divert those aircraft carriers at campaign cadence.
* Through careful stage managing and extensive quiet consultations they have (for now, at least) quieted both the Arab-American community in Michigan and the protesters at Harris’ events.
* They have built a record-breaking low-dollar and high-dollar fundraising apparatus, taking in hundreds of millions (with more coming) via events, coordination with Super PACs and other outside entities, and digital digital digital.
* They have taken all that moolah and supercharged the Biden-Harris ground game and advertising efforts, raising them to levels that have impressed Karl Rove, enhancing even more the edge that Biden previously had over Trump.
* They have played their pals in the Dominant Media like Peter Vehoyen with the piccolo, mostly easily able to spoon feed them and IV them endless steams of joy, but also engaging in the thuggish Biden-era intimidation tactics when necessary, knowing exactly what the traffic will bear in terms of press access, via short gaggles, OTRs on the back of Air Force Two, and the CNN interview.
* David Plouffe’s Electoral College cred has been leveraged in a series of interviews this week.
* They have built a debate prep team, including the best-in-class Karen Dunn and many other experienced hands, to get Harris ready, and put in place the classic tactic of setting up camp in a key media market in a battleground state to reach important voters during breaks and via their sheer presence, even as they hunker down to get ready.
* Through the candidate, the campaign, and surrogates, they have consistently hit the rhetorical sweet spot of confidence/optimism while warding off complacency.
* They have managed those surrogates in terms of messaging and scheduling brilliantly.
* The Harris social media game is world’s better than Biden’s was, in part because of the organic energy, but in part because they have harnessed and operationalized that energy.
* With purpose and determination, they have stoked the issues of abortion rights and Project 2025, taking what they inherited from the Biden campaign and moving it beyond 11 to a lot more.
* They have behind the scenes negotiated with the Liz Cheneys of the Republican world, to minimize the downsides and pitfalls and maximize the impact of defections from Trump.
* They have, like secret assassins, silenced disgruntled former Harris staffers, who used to tell tales of all sorts to reporters about what a bad boss she was/is.
And they have done all of this with, like the Biden operation before them, almost zero leaking or carping to the press.
Behind the scenes, there is, of course, as in any campaign, lots of infighting, chaos, and error.
But my list above is only partial.
Team Harris doesn’t have time to crow or brag. They are perspiring daily under the strain, but living by the Dillon-Plouffe mantra (also a deodorant commercial) of “never let them see you sweat.”
If Kamala Harris pulls this off, the managerial miracle of July and August (into September) will go down in history as one of the most incredible human organizational achievements in the annals of modern America – not just in politics.
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ESSENTIAL READING
* Mostly embedded above, but this Politico story about Harris’ trip to New Hampshire is a miracle all its own, in which the news organization turns the Democrat’s apparent need to shore up a Blue state into a piece about how Trump is on the ropes – a 180 degree turn from the reality that is testament in equal parts to the Dominant Media’s fervent anti-Trump sentiment and the Harris campaign’s ability to control that all-important narrative!
Today, New Hampshire stands as the latest sign of how Trump’s map is constricting in his run against Kamala Harris. A trio of surveys have shown the vice president opening an outside-the-margin-of-error lead over Trump — one that she aimed to cement on Wednesday with a campaign event at a brewery on New Hampshire’s Seacoast where she touted her new plan for small business tax breaks. Race raters have shifted the state to the left. And Republicans here are privately bemoaning the Trump campaign’s lack of investment in this state where Democrats outnumber Republicans in field offices by 17 to 1….
The paucity of the Trump campaign’s operations in New Hampshire is particularly glaring when contrasted with that of his rivals. Democrats have flooded the state with field offices and dispatched some of the party’s biggest stars — among them: California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and, over Labor Day weekend, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and California Rep. Ro Khanna — to launch canvasses and headline fundraisers.
So Harris, following many Democratic surrogates and TV ad money, has to burn a valuable day campaigning in the Granite State, but it is TRUMP who is on the defensive there??!!!???
Right!!!