What?
Your own quote says nothing about “border security”. It says she was tasked with tackling the challenge at the border and to “work with Central American nations to address root causes”, which is what was claimed.
Your own cite supports the point you were attempting to rebut
I like the enthusiasm of Harris’ campaign but irrational exuberance doesn’t help. It is encouraging that Florida is said to only favour Trump by three percent. It is wise to emphasize drops on crime and in border crossings. It is smart to stand for international institutions without strongly advertising Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies since this did not really work for Joe.
But Trump has flummoxed a thousand attempts to bring him under Republican control or be limited by the “adults in the room”. In fact, the convention showed how thoroughly he commands the party. It is still a very close race, much can happen between now and the election. The last debate did not go so well. It was barely a debate. It is time to get to work, not to count chickens…
(my emphasis)
As there are surrogate “candidates” that can help carry a campaign’s message (e.g. Pete Buttigieg, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro), there are surrogate “campaign organizations” that can help extend an official campaign’s reach (both spatial and financial). I posted about some specifically working in Florida upthread.
That said – I do think it’s worth some of the war chest for Harris-Walz to make an appearance or three in Florida. If nothing else, to tweak Trump and DeSantis’ nose a little bit – but also to support the state’s abortion initiative. Maybe piggyback Florida stops on top of Georgia ones – Savannah to Jacksonville, or Albany to Tallahassee.
So basically, if Harris does something that Trump tends to do on the daily, she’ll lose?
Withdrawn
I don’t want to turn this into a sidetrack, but there are substantial populations of retired Northerners in Florida and Arizona, or at least that’s the old perception. Is it just a TV trope that a substantial amount of those populations are Jewish? I suppose in 2024 if Harris is within a few thousand votes for the win in Florida she’s got the election in the bag, but I remember the “butterfly ballot” in 2000 causing a significant number of Jewish voters to Vote for Pat Buchanan. Some posts in this thread have indicated that Arizona is a purple state. Are there enough Jewish voters in Arizona to hypothetically swing that state’s electoral votes?
Impressions of the current state of the race are a Rorschach test, I imagine. Quoting Silver directly, as of yesterday afternoon:
Last update: 3:30 p.m., Wednesday, August 14 : Another day, another series of strong swing state polling for Kamala Harris — other than in Nevada, although she’s had enough strong surveys recently there to remain slightly ahead in our average. The race is still in what we’d consider the toss-up range, but Harris’s momentum has been steady and upward.
After looking at the numbers Silver’s collecting and at some other sources, I call that conclusively better than a tie at this point – the use of the term “toss-up range” notwithstanding. Might depend on how I’m holding the prism.
And frankly Silver had a prism here too. He was big on the bandwagon that Biden had to go and that going with Harris was the better option. He has some “told ya so” mindset in place.
Big Mo is hard to sustain for three months. Banking on its unending positive trajectory is unwise. It is there until it is not. Relying on it through the afterglow of the convention is reasonable, after that? Less so.
The numbers are definitely toss up range. Maybe the trajectory keeps rising but I’d WAG we are closing in on her ceiling in the not distant future.
To use another overused metaphor, she’s picked the low hanging fruit, and that might be enough, but gaining more becomes increasingly difficult.
The challenge at the border is “border security”. The Central American migration challenge that American voters were and are concerned about is that millions of Central Americans have been entering the United States by crossing the Mexico-US border on foot without visas. A large percentage do so intending to evade the US Border Patrol. That’s a border security issue. The AP article I cited has the headline “Biden taps VP Harris to lead response to border challenges”. A statement that Harris was tapped for “border challenges” and not “border security” is disingenuous.
One of the most common statistical mistakes that human beings make – be it in polling, finance, business, etc. – is projecting a trendline out into infinity. “This stock is unstoppable!” “At this rate, she’ll win by 20 points!”
If all you’re doing is watching from the sidelines, I suppose it doesn’t matter. It’s when people alter their behavior based on the assumption of an infinite upward trajectory that you get stock market bubbles and overconfident campaigns.
Right, that ends up being the logic.
Well if Harris tries to out-Trump Trump she’s definitely going to lose. However, I think the bigger risk is doing a Hillary.
A separate thread has been started on Walz debating Vance, which will probably be as momentous as most VP debates…
So says you but define what you mean by “security”.
But “border challenges” is deliberately imprecise for a reason. It is sufficiently imprecise to allow for action.
Because promising “security” is also vague - what does it mean? Stopping any and all crossings? Nobody has ever managed that and, as I noted earlier, there are fewer now than 25 years ago. So, stopping any and all is doomed to failure before anybody does anything. If you do not mean this, there are millions of Americans, many of them Trump supporters, who will accept no less. And declare anything less to be abject failure. We all know this.
So, they don’t promise it. And they don’t use those words.
Clearly you took it to mean one thing. And the Trump campaign relies heavily on people reading whatever they want into such statements, which includes much of the latent racism from much of their base.
Why play that game? Especially on their terms? You may call that disingenuous, but that’s assuming they share Trump’s goals. They are playing their own game and people are calling them out for not playing somebody else’s. People will always do that. Going defensive about it is a non-starter. It’s a losing strategy. And why try to be more Trumpy than Trump on this issue? They should be aiming to be better.
I don’t get this. When has enthusiasm for any other candidate been called a “honeymoon period” that could end at any moment?
In this case, the “honeymoon period” refers to the time span in which enthusiasm and support for the Harris ticket is on the rise. As @flurb mentioned, that cannot go on forever, especially in this day and age, with so many entrenched Trump loyalists.
It may be plateauing right now, in which case it will be a close race that could go either way (with about a 60% chance that Harris will win).
Or it could plateau in another week or two or three* (this is rather likely, with the Dem convention coming up), which would boost Harris’ chances to more like the 80% range – which is still a 1 in 5 chance that Trump will win. (That’s a very high number – even higher than a one-spin Russian roulette game).
One way that this resembles other types of honeymoons (including the original marriage meaning) is that Harris hasn’t been in the public eye long enough** to for many voters to get to know her flaws. (The particular flaw will vary among voters). She’s still, for many, a “generic Democrat.” Polls nearly always show voters prefer a generic (i.e., unnamed) candidate over a real-live, inevitably flawed individual.
*It’s very, very, very unlikely it will keep rising beyond three weeks from now.
**I know she’s been veep for 4 years. You’d be shocked at the ignorance of millions of Americans. I was in O’Hare airport five days ago, and two twenty-somethings (with pure American accents) were talking near me. One asked the other “So, who is replacing Biden?” The other explained “Her name is Kamala Harris.”
This was five days ago! Has this idiot been living in a cave for the past month? Alas, not an idiot – just an average American oblivious youth.
It’s a pretty common term and concept in politics – when a new candidate enters an already established field, he or she often enjoys a polling bump and a wave of support and enthusiasm. There are several reasons for this – the candidate can seem like a breath of fresh air when voters have soured on or grown bored with the existing candidates, the new candidate is a bit of a blank slate onto which people can project their own hopes and preferences, opponents have not yet honed their attacks, etc. But they can just as quickly come down to earth as the candidate is forced to make the sort of choices and suffer the sort of attacks that soured people on the existing field.
I just did.
Harris is in a tricky position regarding illegal immigration. It’s clearly higher under the Biden-Harris administration than it was under the Trump administration. She can, and probably should, make the case that the best use of the Vice-President’s office was to try to address long-term solutions through diplomacy and investment, so that’s what she focused on. She can also campaign that as president she’ll “hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking” as she has been doing. But my belief is that claiming that Biden-Harris were successful on illegal immigration as this Harris proponent did is a risk:
Katie Tobin, who worked on immigration at the White House, says Ms Harris’s work has been deliberately “misconstrued and painted in a bad light“.
Ms Harris deserves credit for “a good news story” in Central America, she says. She points to statistics showing a 72% drop in immigration from just Central America between March 2021, when Ms Harris took on the role, and June 2024.
I’m not going to over-analyse that statement since it didn’t come from the Harris campaign as far as I can tell, but I’ve noticed similar statements in other articles, enough to make me think it’s an organised talking point. If it is, then the obvious rebuttal is to point out that the number of border crossings under Biden-Harris is far hire than it was under Trump.
Likewise, statements such as “Allies and former officials who worked with the vice-president say she was not given responsibility for policing the border.” seem like an evasion. Another Biden quote:
“She is the most qualified person to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle in stemming the movement of so many folks to our southern border,” Mr Biden said at the time.
I get the argument that that statement indicates she’d be dealing with Central American governments rather than improving the US Border Patrol. But it’s clear she was tasked to reduce the numbers of illegal Central American migrants. And the numbers indicate she failed to do so.
It’s definitely an opportunity for Trump and his campaign to exploit a Harris weakness. I don’t think trying to handwave away that weakness is going to work.
Quotes from this BBC article:
She did the latter. Apparently not to your satisfaction and likely not the satisfaction of Trump’s base. So, nah, again, why play Trump’s game on Trump’s terms?
She’s not going to convince his hardcore base either way, so why the insistence she do so?
That’s not to say she can’t flub responses, but there’s no reason to respond to these sorts of charges on their terms. No more than there is for Walz to respond to attacks on his service record on the terms the Trump campaign has set.
It also puts her on the defensive and lets Trump dictate how much energy she puts on defending a single issue. That’s strategically and tactically silly.
So, she should just…not. Don’t expend more energy than necessary on it. Come up with her own responses across a lot of issues (of which immigration should be one but only one and a small part at that) on her own terms rather than be pinned down on a single issue and respond the way her opposition wants her to.
If that’s not enough for the hypothetical Joe Q Voter, then Joe was unlikely to ever vote for Harris in the first place.
Responding on immigration on the terms the Trump team has set is a surefire way to give the election away.
It’s not that that was the best use–that was her assignment. She wasn’t told, “Reduce border crossings by any means necessary.” She was told to do the things you just described. Blaming her for not doing other things is dumb. Trump makes dumb arguments, but we shouldn’t amplify them.