A liberal columnist says Kamala Harris has to repudiate the unpopular positions of Joe Biden and say how she’ll be a change from her current boss to beat Donald Trump.
Harris has struggled to differentiate herself from Biden, who was underwater in the polls before he dropped out of the race.
Jonathan Chait, a reliably left-wing pundit who pushed for the Dems to dump Biden after his debate disaster in Georgia, now says Harris has to ‘cut Biden loose’.
He slammed Harris’ CNN interview for ‘turning the page by contrasting herself exclusively against Donald Trump, rather than [Joe Biden]’.
Chait then asks, ahead of Tuesday night’s pivotal debate: ‘Why is this a struggle? Why not directly repudiate unpopular Biden positions?’
A liberal columnist says Kamala Harris has to repudiate the unpopular positions of Joe Biden and say how she’ll be a change from her current boss to beat Donald Trump
Harris has struggled to differentiate herself from Biden, who was underwater in the polls to Donald Trump before he dropped out of the race
He goes on to cite polls released by the New York Times Sunday which say 61% of voters want someone to bring ‘major change’ from Biden.
However, only 25% of those surveyed would see Harris as being a ‘major change’ from the president.
He says that these polling figures and Biden’s unpopularity before he dropped out of the race make him a ‘liability’ for Harris.
Chait argues ‘Harris’s strategy should focus entirely on catering to the public with no attention whatsoever to Biden’s feelings’.
He finishes his New York Magazine piece by disagreeing with a Trump spokesperson who claims Harris is tethered to Biden completely as the VP.
‘The vice-presidency is a strange office, lacking any formal authority. Its inhabitants have generally lamented the powerlessness of the job. Harris really ought to stop thinking about her position as a confining dilemma and realize that it is a liberating opportunity to define her campaign as whatever she wants it to be, unburdened by what has been.’
The latest polls – which include the Times’ poll Chait cited – have tilted the Daily Mail’s election model in Donald Trump’s direction giving him a decisive lead over Kamala Harris a day before he goes head to head with his Democratic rival on the debate stage.
The algorithms show he now has a 55 percent chance of becoming president, a 4.5-point boost since last week.
Jonathan Chait, a reliably left-wing pundit who pushed for the Dems to dump Biden after his debate disaster in Georgia, now says Harris has to ‘cut Biden loose’
Chait argues ‘Harris’s strategy should focus entirely on catering to the public with no attention whatsoever to Biden’s feelings’
The model works by crunching all the latest polling numbers—national and state—along with decades of historical trends and economic data before feeding the results through the electoral college to work out who is most likely to hit the 270 votes needed to win the election.
Our result comes hard on the heels of a New York Times/Siena College poll giving Trump a one-point lead at the weekend, suggesting Harris’s honeymoon is coming to an end.
Feeding that and other recent surveys into the model, developed for us by J.L. Partners, shows that the crucial battleground of Pennsylvania has now moved clearly into the Trump column.
Tuesday brings a potentially decisive moment when Harris meets Trump in a televised debate.
The Harris campaign’s goal for the debate is to create a viral moment similar to what Harris experienced during her questioning of Brett Kavanaugh in his Supreme Court confirmation hearing and during her vice presidential debate with Mike Pence, when she famously told him: ‘I’m speaking.’
Those moments played over and over again on social media, casting her in a good light. Her advisers expect many Americans will see the debate through those types of social media moments.
Trump, however, will be on mute while Harris answers questions, denying him the opportunity to interrupt and her the opportunity to snap back at him.
Harris is locked up with staff in Pittsburgh, going through five days of intense debate prep before the September 10th showdown in Philadelphia.
The debate will be the first time she and Trump actually meet.
The two have been in the same room before – Harris, as senator, attended Trump’s State of Union addresses in the House chamber when he was president but the two have never been formally introduced.
The pressure is on. Joe Biden’s performance in the first presidential debate resulted in his departure from the race. While no one expects the same result for Harris, she will need to show she can take on the former president.
