No presidential candidate in history has had to field questions on grocery prices and her opponent’s alleged fascism at the same event.
But the almost absurd linkage between these two issues that Kamala Harris must confront perfectly tells the story of the 2024 election and America’s fierce estrangement nine years into the Donald Trump era.
Just after 1 p.m. on Wednesday, the Democratic nominee emerged from the front door of her official residence in Washington to pose this question: “What do the American people want?”
She got her answer eight hours later, at a CNN town hall in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, one of the Philadelphia suburbs where she needs a massive turnout to beat the former president in an election only 12 days away.
Thirty-two voters who were still undecided or persuadable sought answers from Harris on the country’s polarized political tumult, on punishing prices at the grocery store and on an immigration crisis the Biden administration struggled to address. She was asked about the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. Someone else worried about the surge in antisemitism in the United States. Harris was asked to explain her policy reversals on fracking and her plans to hike taxes on the rich. One voter asked about her weaknesses. Another wanted to know whether she’d increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court to 12 – a step that would water down the conservative majority.
Each question that Harris received represented not just a chance to interact with one single voter but to reach millions more countrywide with the same concerns.
The vice president’s comment about what voters want came after new questions surfaced in the last day about Trump’s fitness for office. His former White House chief of staff John Kelly said in new interviews that the ex-president met the definition of a “fascist” and that he wanted generals like the ones who served Adolf Hitler. “We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power,” Harris said. “The question in 13 days will be what do the American people want?”
Trump has denied Kelly’s allegations.
The vice president was eager to highlight the perceived threat from a possible Trump second term, saying she agreed that he was a fascist and “dangerous” and would use the Justice Department to go after his enemies and “sit there, unstable, unhinged, plotting his revenge, plotting his retribution, creating an enemies list.”
It’s too late to influence die-hard Trump voters. To break the tie in national and swing state polls Harris needs to flush out persuadable independents, disaffected Republicans — especially women – younger and low-propensity voters and bring home some Latino and Black men who are considering Trump.
So, the question is whether the best way to reach such audiences is by delivering an emergency warning that Trump represents a mortal threat to American democracy and the Constitution and could usher in a potential autocracy? Or is it to stress more mundane issues that nevertheless are existential to voters — like how much it costs them to feed their kids and to put a roof over their heads?
‘We don’t care’
The CNN town hall was one of the last chances for Harris to force significant changes in the race, but she didn’t appear to do much to alter the dynamic. (Trump was invited but declined to participate in a CNN town hall.)
At the end of Wednesday’s event, undecided voters were left to wrestle with this equation.
Do they pick the vice president despite lingering concerns about her capacity to quickly improve their economic situation — the issue that polls consistently show voters are most worried about?
Or, does nostalgia for the pre-Trump economy and the Republican strongman’s vow to fix the immigration crisis with hardline policies draw the final wavering voters, despite any concerns they may have about four more exhausting years of his assaults on the rule of law and democracy?
Pam Thistle, one of the voters who asked Harris a question, said that the personal clashes between Harris and Trump were doing voters a disservice.
“We don’t care, stop trashing Trump. Trump stop trashing the vice president. We don’t care, the voters don’t care. … We don’t even know the people they are talking about,” Thistle told CNN’s John King after the town hall. “How does that impact the voters, that is who you are talking to, that’s who you are serving.”
And even though the allegations against Trump conjure the possibility of a moment like none other in American history, undecided voters who took part in the event told King they’d prefer Harris to make a more positive case about what she’d do for them.
A mixed performance
The town hall was a rare challenge for Harris — who hasn’t typically taken many questions from non-partisan audiences during her three months atop the Democratic ticket. Her performance was mixed. She was empathetic. Her instinct to preach unity and her calm demeanor contrasted with Trump’s sound and fury. She was strongest on issues where she appears to have a solid policy grounding — like abortion rights.
Perhaps her most effective moment was when she put herself in the position of a voter who supported the overturning of a federal right to abortion but was anxious about the long-term consequences for women’s reproductive health care. “’I didn’t intend that women who are suffering a miscarriage would develop sepsis, as has happened many times. I didn’t intend that women would die,’” Harris said, paraphrasing concerns that such a voter might have.
But an undecided voter waiting for specific, actionable, day-one policies to cut the cost of groceries, which have not returned to levels before the now-extinguished spike in inflation early in Biden’s term, may have been disappointed. The vice president spoke about her plan to cut down on what she calls price gouging, to stop absentee landlords buying up whole blocks of property and stifling competition and to cut red tape to tackle new home building. But none of this really addressed how she would make voters’ lives better very soon.
On immigration, Harris slammed Trump for killing off the most conservative border bill in decades, which would have surged resources to an overwhelmed asylum system. But she had no good answer to CNN moderator Anderson Cooper’s question about why the Biden administration hadn’t taken executive action that considerably slowed border crossing three years earlier.
It reflects favorably on Harris that she loyally didn’t choose this moment to separate herself from President Joe Biden and say she would have done things differently herself. But successful politicians sometimes need to show a ruthless streak, and she might have helped her cause by doing so. In fact, while she insisted that “my administration will not be a continuation of the Biden administration,” she did not spell out a clear blueprint for what she’d do differently.
Throughout her political career, Harris has struggled in unscripted situations when she’s been asked to address policy in great depth or to give spontaneous answers. Her performance at the town hall again showed that she’s not a natural politician. When she avoided tough questions, she didn’t do so with the smooth finesse of more fluent political performers. She appeared less comfortable in this setting – in front of voters and Cooper, who forensically but respectfully probed her non-answers – than she was during her adversarial showdown with Fox News anchor Bret Baier last week.
A last chance to seal the election
But no one expects Harris to become a political natural overnight. The issue for a voter still agonizing over their choice is whether, for all her liabilities, she is a better bet than Trump and everything he brings.
After all, the spectacle of a former White House chief of staff warning that the Republican nominee is effectively a dictator in waiting constitutes a unique moment in the history of the republic.
Trump’s outlandish conduct and contempt for laws, decorum and decency might appear to make him unpalatable to millions of voters. But the last nine years demonstrate that that behavior is also a selling point to his vast numbers of supporters who think the elite establishment isn’t working for them. Trump might never have cracked 50% in a national election, but he’s arguably never been as strong politically as he is right now, on the cusp of an election that could restore him to power.
Still, the thousands of moderate Republicans and women voters who backed former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley — many of whom live in the so-called collar counties around Philadelphia — are exactly the kind of voters most likely to be offended by the latest apparent evidence of Trump’s extremism. They might just decide the fate of a Harris campaign that started in an explosion of joy but has now narrowed into dark warnings of looming autocracy.
As Harris said, Americans will show what they want in 13 days. Actually, make that 12 days.