Member Newsletter
We’ve spoken a few times about the ongoing discussion of when Kamala Harris’s “honeymoon” is going to come to an end. We had a lot of press conversation about how it had to end a week after she got into the race. There’s been a growing media hunger for it to end. I was prompted to write this post because of a piece I saw in New York Magazine headlined, “How Long can ‘Brat Summer’ Last? The vibes are good, but at some point, Kamala Harris has to leave her bubble.”
I need to be really clear about what I mean here. On the podcast, Kate and I keep saying that there are going to be reverses in this campaign, to be prepped for them, not to lose heart at the first ugly attack that lands or the first bad poll. I’ve said similar things in various posts. So when I talk about “honeymoonism,” I don’t mean to suggest that I think we’re in a straight-line progression from now until Election Day. Just as we should never lose heart in the bleakest moments, we should always be mindful to invest positive energy in future resilience. But through these discussions of Harris’ “honeymoon” and when it has to end or when she has to come out of the “honeymoon” bubble, we can see an assumption or claim that is a bit different. It’s that somehow what’s happened during the first month of Harris’ campaign isn’t quite real, that it’s a sugar high, if you will, a burst of excitement that can’t last.
I simply do not think that’s true. I don’t think there’s evidence for it in the poll data, or more anecdotal evidence. In the broadest sense, what we’ve seen since July 21st is two things. The first is the arrival of a lot of pent-up or latent Democratic support which was held up by disaffection with Joe Biden. The second is the more transformative and catalytic impact of Harris herself. She has improved on Biden’s numbers across the board, with basically every demographic. But she’s particularly connected with the two groups where he lagged most, Black voters and younger voters.
Harris has also managed a critical thematic transition. The Biden v. Trump contest was in a sense a grueling death match between two old men. On its face, Harris is Biden’s VP, very much holding the bag as the incumbent party. But she has managed to redefine the status quo to an important degree. Now Trump is the status quo and she is the candidate of change.
It’s basically impossible for us, in the midst of it, to make sense of how much of what we’re seeing now is the result of the first or the second of the two things I noted above, or how much is Harris’ skill as opposed to something that was always structural in the campaign environment. But I simply don’t buy this idea that there’s something ephemeral or less-than-real about what has happened over the last month. Some will see this as a semantic distinction. “You’re saying there will be rough moments to come. How is that any different from people saying eventually her honeymoon will end?” I think it’s a rather important distinction. Harris replacing Biden transformed the race. It exposed the decrepit, ghostly and predatory nature of Trump’s campaign, put in a new light how much a majority of the country simply doesn’t want to go back to Trump or to what we might call the stalemate of the Trump-Biden years. There’s a reason the Harris campaign puts that tagline — “We’re not going back” — everywhere they possibly can. It resonates for people, and at multiple levels.
The late July change in the 2024 campaign is as real as politics ever gets. It’s protein, complex carbs, fullafiber and not any sugar high. That doesn’t mean it’s permanent, just as nothing in political life ever is. But nothing in the data or evidence before us suggests it’s transitory. We should stop cheapening it by pretending otherwise.