Kamala Harris must make her breakthrough – and time is running out

The clock is ticking, and Kamala Harris is not yet where she should be in the key swing states. Despite all her joy and energy, she is inexplicably (for the Democrats) trailing Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton in their respective races against Donald Trump.

Before the debate with Trump, 28 percent of voters said they wanted to know more about Harris. 67.1 million people watched her take on Trump – a record audience, but questions remain. A quarter of respondents said after the debate they still don’t know enough about Harris, who she is and why they should trust her as commander in chief and on economic policy.

Kamala Harris: American women don’t need Trump’s “protection”

The good news for Harris is that she still has room to grow. Millions of voters are still reachable and persuadable, and she only needs thousands in a handful of key states. The bad news is that she is running out of time, and there are no major milestones to easily reach those voters if Trump refuses to debate.

It’s up to Harris’ campaign team to find or create a platform to reach voters every day, and anyone who follows her schedule can see the strategy behind every move.

The economy is the most important issue, and it is well behind Trump, who is benefiting from a collective oblivion of the 200,000 manufacturing jobs lost under his leadership. Harris fleshed out her “vision of opportunity” to the Economic Club of Pittsburgh on Wednesday, promising tax cuts for the middle class, child and elder care, and a pragmatic capitalist approach that, she hoped to applause, would “not be constrained by ideology.”

She described herself as someone who had spent her life serving the public and who also knew the limits of the state – a concession from a Democrat who was on a par with Bill Clinton, who declared in his 1996 State of the Union address: “The era of big government is over.”

She then sat down with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, a knowledgeable former business reporter who got to the point and explained what Harris’ economic pitch was really about. The vice president promised to create three million new housing units for rent and purchase by the end of her first term. To do that, she would have to overcome bureaucratic hurdles and work with state and local governments.

When asked by Ruhle to define good and bad tariffs, Harris showed how adept she is at taking Trump down, saying he is “just not very serious in his thinking on some of these issues. You have to be serious and have a plan, and a real plan that is not just a talking point that ends with an exclamation point at a rally.”

Finally, Harris said of Trump’s self-description as a “protector” of women: “I don’t think the women of America are asking him to protect them. They need him to trust them.”

On Tuesday, the vice president made no public appearances, an omission that sparked speculation in the White House press corps that she was in danger of being outdone by Trump. As if by magic, a note from a Harris campaign official to the president of the White House Correspondents Association appeared that same evening that the vice president “participated earlier today in a recorded interview for the podcast ‘All the Smoke,’ hosted by former NBA players Stephen Jackson and Matt Barnes.”

The legendary players chat about the latest happenings on and off the court, allowing Harris to reach black men, especially young black men, who are turning away from the Democratic Party and toward Trump.

Harris is trailing Biden among black voters, even though she is one of them, and she still has work to do with white women. In the latest CNN poll, Trump and Harris are tied at 50 percent, Harris at 47 percent. Hillary Clinton lost the presidency, among other things, because she lost 9 percentage points to Trump among white women (and she was one of them). Biden lost 11 percentage points among white women, a trend that Harris wants to reverse.

In any presidential campaign, the candidate faces the difficult task of making concrete proposals. Governor Bill Clinton and Senator Al Gore published Putting People First in September 1992. It was a handbook in which they laid out their proposals on the economy, crime, education, energy, the environment, health care, housing, national security, business, space, trade and welfare.

This success helped them enter the White House on the basis of the change they brought with them, as they were the first baby boomers to defeat a Greatest Generation Republican, George HW Bush, who had just won a war.

Harris should not be afraid to take a bold step or two. It’s good that she will visit the border when she’s in Arizona on Friday. She should be brutally honest about what went wrong (too much inaction) and what’s going on right now with the low numbers crossing the border. And she should criticize Trump for killing a conservative border bill because he wants to use the chaos as a campaign tool.

There are voters that Harris needs and that want to believe in her. She has found many slogans and phrases that are right for the times. We just ask her to dig a little deeper and trust herself as much as the voters know and want to trust her.

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