Kamala Harris has embarked on a desperate last ditch bid to keep her presidential bid alive amid sliding poll ratings little more than two weeks before polling day.
The Democrat nominee is struggling to keep a lid on recriminations from colleagues infuriated at her high-handed approach as they see the key battleground state of Pennsylvania slip from their grasp.
The VP has been forced to abandon her safety-first strategy of cozy sit downs with friendly outlets, in a high-stakes pivot towards finding unlikely recruits for her fraying electoral alliance.
And hope has been replaced by fear as Donald Trump becomes the focus of her election rallies amid increasingly shrill warnings of the threat he poses to the American way of life.
‘All the campaign has left is to attack Trump as unfit,’ Fox News commentator David Marcus noted. ‘He has erased the sugar-high, joy-induced lead Harris enjoyed two months ago, so that only leaves personal attacks.’
Trump has meanwhile rocketed to an astonishing 17 percentage point lead in the betting markets and a one-point lead across the top battleground states. Republican strategists believe that all they need to do is flip one state that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 to win the race against Harris.
Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff arrive to deliver remarks before planting a pomegranate tree at the Vice President’s residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory on October 7, 2024 in Washington, DC
Pennsylvania building trades council chief Ryan Boyer is among Democrat activists seething at the performance of the party’s Pennsylvania campaign chief Nikki Lu
Concern at Harris’s faltering performance comes as cameras caught Biden huddling intensely with Barack Obama at the funeral of Democrat matriarch Ethel Kennedy on Thursday
The VP surged into the race on a wave of euphoria after Joe Biden bowed to months of pressure and agreed to drop out in July.
But the ‘brat girl’ summer has turned chilly as the momentum was lost and tensions with her former boss have spilled over.
What started as a strategy of ‘joy’ appears to have turned to one of anger.
Speaking at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Monday, Harris furiously lectured the American public about Trump.
‘Anybody who says they would terminate the Constitution of the United States should never again stand behind the seal of the President of the United States. Never again. Never again. Never again,’ she shouted into the microphone.
That anger was on full display last month during the hurricane crisis when she made the disastrous decision to engineer a political dispute with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over the federal response, slamming him for not taking her calls.
But she found the ground cut from under her feet after Biden praised the governor’s response, with sources close to the president blaming a ‘situation of her making’.
‘The White House is lacking someone in the room thinking first and foremost about how things would affect the campaign,’ a Harris aide told Axios.
The president has been scrupulously loyal to his designated successor in public despite his resentments at being forced from office.
But concern at her faltering performance was apparently evident as cameras caught Biden huddling intensely with Barack Obama at the funeral of Democrat matriarch Ethel Kennedy on Thursday.
‘She’s not as strong as me,’ Biden muttered according to lipreader Jeremy Freeman.
The outgoing president looked unconvinced as his former boss tried to reassure him as they huddled at the Catholic Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in DC.
‘I know…that’s true…we have time,’ Obama said weakly.
But concern at the VP’s floundering campaign stretches from the top to the bottom of the party and has erupted in Pennsylvania where 19 of the most keenly contested electoral college votes are at stake in a state that is crucial to the Democrats’ chances of victory.
If Trump wins Pennsylvania he stands a 91 percent chance of winning the election, according to polling guru Nate Silver.
Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, will spend her 60th birthday on the campaign trail as swing state polls show her in a precarious position and bettors believe former President Donald Trump will win the race. She arrived in Atlanta Saturday
It comes as she tries to win over conservative audiences starting with an appearance on Fox
The state has been swamped with political ads after the rival campaigns bought $500 million worth of TV airtime between them.
But veteran party workers are furious that the Harris campaign has blown the chance to ensure the black and Latino turnout needed for a Democrat win, and appointed in Nikki Lu a young campaign chief who they believe is hopelessly out of her depth.
‘We need young African American men to come home. We need African American women to come out in record numbers, and disaffected African Americans,’ building trades council chief Ryan Boyer told Politico.
‘We have surrogates in this area that have tremendous credibility in our communities. And Nikki Lu was slow to get to them.’
One Democratic elected official described Lu as ‘Awol’, while another complained that the Pittsburgh operative had no clue about the vital Black and Latino communities in the south-east of the state.
‘There’s been a lot of struggles,’ admitted Philadelphia City Councilmember Kendra Brooks.
She blamed ‘folks coming into Philadelphia that are making assumptions about what needs to happen in Philadelphia and not necessarily having the relationships to move Philadelphia politics’.
‘Pennsylvania is such a mess, and it’s incredibly frustrating,’ said another Democrat official.
Harris’s Fox interview was a radical change of approach for a candidate who did not agree to a sit-down interview with even a friendly outlet for the first month of her candidacy.
More than seven million tuned in on Wednesday as she tried to distance herself from Biden while defending the administration’s policies.
It was a bold pitch to win viewers of the right-wing channel but she faced unprecedented scrutiny from host Bret Baier over her role as Biden’s border czar and her collusion over his faltering mental state.
And her aides ordered the host to bring his interview to a jolting halt when they decided his time was up.
‘Kamala Harris just ran into a Bret Baier buzzsaw when asked about the number of illegal aliens in the country,’ wrote conservative communicator Steve Guest as the interview aired.
‘Kamala Harris is wagging her finger and yelling during the Bret Baier interview,’ added Minnesota Republican Dustin Grage. ‘This is a total disaster for her.’
The interview did little to reverse her sagging poll trajectory and several market makers have placed multi-million dollar bets against her candidacy in recent days.
A betting average calculated by Realclearpolling.com has seen Trump surge to a 17 percentage point lead from near parity on October 6.
But Harris looks keen to double down on her new strategy with negotiations now underway for an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast in a bid to avoid an October demise. Rogan’s audience is generally young and male.
At the same time she is struggling to shore up her left flank with a series of controversial adverts aimed at black men.
Kamala Harris has raised eyebrows with her latest campaign advert which targets black men’s love lives and has been labelled ‘desperate’ by critics
The digital ads are being run on Snapchat and Instagram and use dating-game style videos to persuade young people to vote
In the advertisement, a man can be seen approaching a group of women holding balloons who question him on his earnings, height and whether he works out.
After receiving seemingly favorable answers, one asks if he has a ‘plan to vote’.
‘Uh, I didn’t plan on it,’ the man replies before the women all pop their balloons.
‘Wow. I don’t know what to say. Screams desperate,’ one person wrote on X.
‘Reeks of desperation,’ another.
The desperation has seeped into her election rallies as the campaign enters its final fraught days and Harris increasingly resorts to personal attacks on her opponent.
Positive TV ads have been sidelined for ones claiming that Trump would be more ‘unhinged, unstable’ and ‘unchecked’ in his second term.
‘He’s talking about the enemy within Pennsylvania. He’s talking about the enemy within our country, Pennsylvania,’ she told a rally in the state on Monday night.
‘He’s talking about – that he considers anyone who doesn’t support him or who will not bend to his will, an enemy of our country.
‘It’s a serious issue. He’s saying that he would use the military to go after them. Think about this?’
Harris said ‘we know who he would target’ from similar comments he’s made in the past.
‘Journalists whose stories he doesn’t like. Election officials who refuse to cheat by fielding extra votes or finding extra votes for him. Judges who insist on following the law instead of bending to his will.
‘This is among the reasons I believe so strongly that a second Trump term would be a huge risk for America and dangerous.’
But those working for her increasingly fractious campaign warn that scare stories about her rival will not cut the mustard in the Keystone State.
‘Everybody’s very nervous,’ said State Rep Danilo Burgos.
‘And I think that as we get closer, people get more tense. And they’re more vocal.’
The Harris campaign has been contacted for comment.
