Democrats going back to a similar Biden basement strategy with Harris

Harris has been out there just enough to be seen, but everything is quick and scripted.

At the big event with whatever rap artist she was campaigning with, Harris took the stage towards the end of the festivities, spoke for about 30 minutes, and left without interacting or taking questions from the media. She is suppose to attend the funeral of Sheila Jackson Lee today where she will speak and then her next big planned event appears to be next week in Philadelphia. Between now and then, she is supposed to announce her VP pick. The idea would be that she would be campaigning in Philly with her newly picked VP nominee.

This has been all timed out so that the big VP announcement will split the difference from when Harris first was handed the nomination on a silver platter, to when the DNC opens their convention.

Sean Trende suggested that the Harris campaign was like one of those balloon or beach ball games where the entire game is simply to stop it from hitting the ground. It's you against gravity. The idea here would be to fight off the gravity of the true lackluster candidate that is Harris by propping her up with big announcements and events designed to create and keep momentum. Every time the campaign momentum starts to come down, you punch it back up. The hope is that they can keep punching it up until election day, or at least early voting. Of course the concept that we have such a limited time between now and the start of early voting makes this sort of game easier to win.

I believe that between the fairly well choreographed move to put Harris at the top of the ticket (it could have been way messier), the complete reinventing of who Harris actually is without much resistance, and the constant fawning by the legacy meeting, that Democrats have successfully "reset the race". If they can shield Harris from herself, as they did with Biden in 2020, then they expect that they have a decent chance to win. The one big difference being that Biden was up enormously in the polling as he hid in his basement, and the four corner strategy of running out the clock made perfect sense. As it stands right now, I still think Harris has some work to do to really secure a victory. But she is in much better shape than Biden was less than two weeks ago, and that was the whole point.

We have truly gotten to the point in American politics where the style is more important than the substance. The Democrats have come up with a plug and play strategy where they find a person and then with the help of a friendly legacy media they turn that person into the candidate of their dreams. The candidate's job is to do little more than not move of script and not expose themselves for who they really are. It worked like a charm in 2020, and so far it is working much better than anyone should have expected in 2024. Harris literally might be the worst Presidential candidate of our lifetime, but you cannot throw a rock and not hit a liberal who suddenly believes she is the female version of Barack Obama. Why? Well because that is what they are being told!