Kamala Harris has a gun, now she is only 43,000 votes away from beating Trump (a gap) | Elections 2024

Public opinion of Kamala Harris was largely negative until she was nominated as the presidential candidate. Overnight, Harris went from hell to heaven without a political commentator batting an eyelid. And that was well before Tuesday’s debate (we’ll get to that later). So what happened? Nothing, simply that Harris was vice president and the White House doesn’t usually make it easy for them until they replace the number one guy.

There is an interesting literature on this topic: one of the founding fathers of the United States, Benjamin Franklin, is said to have jokingly suggested calling vice presidents “superfluous excellencies” – alluding to the fact that the position is both highly prestigious and powerless. Many years later, Nelson Rockefeller, who served as Vice President No. 1 under President Gerald Ford, summed up his occupations disparagingly: “I go to funerals,” he said, “I go to earthquakes.” And in 1960, the year JFK won the election, President Dwight Eisenhower was asked to give examples of how Richard Nixon (his vice president and Kennedy’s rival in the election) had helped him. He replied as if he were Nixon’s worst enemy: “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”

Not only do vice presidents occupy that strange space between the glamour of power and nothingness, they also usually get a hot potato handed to them, as when Joe Biden put Harris in charge of managing migration flows at the US southern border with Mexico—a task Harris did not emerge unscathed—or when Donald Trump put Mike Pence in charge of the coronavirus crisis task force. History has illuminated some vice presidents (see Dick Cheney), but generally their halo does not become visible until they are presidential candidates. Why was Harris expected to be different? Because Biden was old and she should have taken on more roles? As if a man who has dreamed of being president for half a century and finally gets it after defeating someone like Trump would settle for a decaf presidency. Or because she was the first black woman in history to become vice president, and it was clear she was under more pressure to prove herself than other vice presidents.

But that doesn’t matter, we wanted to talk about the debate. On Tuesday, Harris proved that she can win the election. It was already known that she is good at dialectical battles – Biden experienced this firsthand in the 2020 Democratic primaries. Don’t you remember how she overwhelmed him in the debate in Miami when she uttered her famous “That little girl was me”?

On Tuesday, she uttered a sentence that may have gone more unnoticed but is worth remembering: She emphasized that she, too, has a gun and has no intention of taking anyone’s guns away. Gun culture in the U.S. goes beyond the horrific school shootings and crosses the ideological barrier between left and right: Many families hunt and parents give their 12-year-old their first shotgun. Many others live in remote areas and have a gun for protection. And they’ve grown up with it their entire lives. Trump is egging on those voters, and while Democrats are advocating for more gun restrictions – especially for minors – it would be a mistake to respond to fears with radical positions. Harris was also helped in the debate when Trump showed his craziest side, claiming that migrants in Ohio were eating the cats and dogs of good Americans.

But winning a debate does not mean winning an election. Just ask Hillary Clinton, who won the televised 2016 election, albeit to no avail. She beat Trump by more than three million votes, and it didn’t matter, because the devilry of the US electoral system means that – in a country of 330 million people – a candidate can win the majority of the vote by three million votes and lose the election by 80,000 votes in three states: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, as happened in 2016.

In 2020, Biden received seven million more votes than Trump in the popular vote. His campaign also received some support from the Republican who said nothing about migrants eating dogs but encouraged the public to inject themselves with bleach to fight Covid. And even if just 43,000 votes had gone the other way in three states (Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin), Trump would have won the election.

Taylor Swift endorsed Harris, which made headlines, but on November 5, her vote is worth as much as anyone else’s – or maybe even less, depending on which state she casts her ballot in. Harris has Swift and she has a gun, now she’s just 43,000 votes short, but that’s a gaping chasm.

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