Last Thursday the Harris campaign began offering tickets for a campaign rally in Detroit the following Wednesday (tomorrow, August 7th). Over the first 24 hours they received 47,000 requests for tickets. 47,000. That spurred a multi-day search for a Detroit area venue that could handle the demand to see the Vice President. As Donald Trump never grasped, there’s no straight-line connection between rally attendance and votes. But at that scale they signal enthusiasm and energy that neither campaign (Trump or Biden) has seen at any time in this cycle. They demonstrate a purchase into the larger popular culture that President Biden never had and Donald Trump, for all his greater currency on social media, doesn’t either.
It’s that disconnect between the attention currency of the two campaigns that is driving Trump’s current meltdown likely much more than the polls which have shown Harris go from one or two points behind two weeks ago to two to three points ahead today. Trump’s approach to a political campaign is to grab hold of media dominance, dominate the attention economy and then try to maintain the initiative of the campaign from there. Media dominance doesn’t always work for him. As often as not, once he’s holding the national attention, he’s offending people and losing support. But without that, as a campaigner, he’s lost. He tried to get that back with his Black/Indian tirade at the NABJ conference. And it worked, until it didn’t, which was quickly. 36 hours later the attention had shifted back to Harris.
I don’t entirely understand it yet. But Harris’s campaign is reaching out beyond the ordinary political ecosystem, even the expanded one we know from the final months or a general election and into the broader popular culture. Some of that is energizing an array of celebrities, music artists and influencers who are adding excitement and attention to the campaign. But it’s not only that, not even primarily that. That’s more consequence than cause. Her campaign, at least for the moment, is operating in a much larger cultural space than conventional politics. Trump’s political magic has always been his ability to access a larger cultural space, even if it’s often negative attention. But Harris’s campaign is accessing something much larger. For the moment he cannot keep up.
I’m sure you’ve seen comparisons to the 2008 Obama campaign. I find those trite and inexact. It’s a different coalition. They’re different people. It’s an entirely different political moment. But there’s some commonality there. And here’s where the blitz campaign comes in. We noted two weeks ago that we were starting a rapid battle lasting two or three weeks to define Kamala Harris in the public mind. The window on that critical stretch of time is closing. And it’s been a blow out. Not only hasn’t the Trump campaign not made much headway. They don’t seem to have come up with a clear plan or message to use. Beyond Trump’s personal meltdown this has left Trump’s campaign strapped for options, struggling to get control of the public conversation, in a contest that only started two weeks ago and will be over in 91 days.
