Donald Trump and Kamala Harris may be rivals for the White House, but they’re not exactly competing in the same race. Harris is running against Trump. Trump is running against everybody – against her, against his fellow Republicans, against pro-lifers and Project 2025, and ultimately against the most formidable opponent of all: Himself.
Elections are like word-association games or the conditioning used by scientists to get dogs salivating at the sound of a bell. Voters have an instant emotional reaction to candidates based on how they feel about the events they’ve been involved with.
This plays to Harris’ advantage: Like most vice presidents, she’s been a non-entity, hardly more visible as VP than she was before Joe Biden put her on his ticket four years ago.
Her earlier record as the most left-wing senator in the nation and a downright authoritarian attorney general of California might trouble voters, if they knew anything about it.
Then again, knowing isn’t enough – images and emotional resonances are far stronger. Trump supporters know this:
They feel a surge of pride whenever they recall the image of Trump standing and raising his fist in defiance after an assassin’s bullet came within an inch of ending his life.
Yet Trump has been a fixture of presidential politics, either in office or seeking it, for nine years now, and voters had formed long-term associations with his name well before the attempt to murder him.
For grassroots Republicans, those Pavlovian associations are overwhelmingly favorable, which is why few were prepared to listen to intellectual arguments about policy or electability from Ron DeSantis or any other rival in the primaries.
Ordinary Americans have happy memories of Trump’s years in the White House – but they also recall the endless drama of the media’s Russian collusion obsession, Trump’s firing of the FBI director and the subsequent independent counsel investigation, two impeachment trials, and an inexhaustible supply of lesser controversies.
The Trump years were peaceful and prosperous, but they ended with COVID and riots, those of summer 2020 and at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
That mix of associations, good and bad, played well in comparison to the feelings President Biden brought out – feelings of shame at the debacle that was withdrawal from Afghanistan, embarrassment at seeing the president’s obviously impaired condition, anger over out-of-control inflation and illegal immigration, and anxiety about wars in Europe and the Holy Land that Biden was unfit to tackle.
Harris, on the other hand, is an empty canvas.
And all Trump’s baggage – an emotional burden on voters – stands out vividly in contrast. Everyone, even Trump’s supporters, has episodes from the Trump years they would rather forget.
Harris is selling herself as a way to erase the painful memories and replace them with nothing but media-manufactured good feelings – a sugar pill.
How does Trump counter that? Not by renewing his feud with Brian Kemp, the popular Republican governor of battleground Georgia, yet that’s what Trump did at his Atlanta rally last Saturday.
Georgia is the only one of the five states that flipped from Trump to the Democrat between 2016 and 2020 that has a Republican governor today.
When Trump won the crucial Rust Belt states of Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016, both had Republican governors, as did the most hotly contested Sun Belt state, Arizona.
Today, those key pieces of the electoral map all have Democrats in their highest office – putting Georgia at risk too is gratuitous.
Pro-lifers and movement conservatives have long felt conflicted about Trump, whose behavior and stated positions often don’t align with their principles, even though his policies as president were greatly beneficial for their causes.
The Trump campaign has answered their unease by watering down the GOP’s pro-life plank at the convention and denouncing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 in the weeks afterward.
While her friends in the media have rallied to Harris, creating a sense of not only Democratic unity but widespread enthusiasm for the blank-slate VP, Trump’s advisers have picked fights that weaken the right’s morale.
Harris might not entirely escape the gravitational suck of the Biden-Harris administration’s record.
And the stock market’s troubles are bad for the incumbent party in the White House, even with Harris replacing Biden as the nominee.
An effective attack would also tie Harris in voters’ minds to their feelings about California, once America’s promised land of postwar prosperity, now losing population as the middle class flees an unaffordable single-party state whose Democrat-run cities are sunk in homelessness and crime.
Make America great again, or make America California now?
Trump can regain the momentum he’s lost since the convention – but only if he defines Harris in voters’ minds, so he’s running directly against her, not his party, his allies and himself.
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