The telltale signs that Kamala Harris knows she’s losing

If the election were held today, Donald Trump would likely emerge victorious

If you judge solely by the behaviour of the two campaigns, if the election were held today, former President Donald Trump would return to the White House next year.
Vice President Kamala Harris has abandoned a seemingly successful strategy of limiting her media exposure to highly scripted events, turning instead to a series of interviews.
To some degree, Harris is imitating Trump by going on podcasts and friendly niche programmes. Even so, she has turned in some shaky performances – how can she not have a more compelling answer for how she will differentiate herself from President Joe Biden, the man she replaced atop the Democratic ticket? – and appears less confident than in August. The joy is gone?
By contrast, Trump is beginning to campaign in blue states that don’t appear likely to go his way in the presidential contest. Most notably, he will campaign in California near Coachella and in New York City at Madison Square Garden. No Republican presidential candidate has won either state since the 1980s.
There are, however, competitive congressional races in both states. The Republicans’ slim House majority runs through California and New York, two states along with Florida where there actually was a bit of a red wave in 2022. Narrowing the Democrats’ margins in California and New York would also improve Trump’s chances of winning the popular vote. Biden and Hillary Clinton ran up the score in these two gigantic states in 2020 and 2016, respectively.
It’s possible that Trump is massively miscalculating in a manner reminiscent of Clinton’s hubristic failure to visit Wisconsin eight years ago. There’s a similar chance that Harris is simply overreacting to the vice presidential debate, when JD Vance beat her running mate Tim Walz in no small part because the former was doing a lot more challenging interviews than the latter. The reason for Walz’s relative absence from television studios was that he couldn’t upstage Harris, who was avoiding the spotlight.
The polls certainly tell a more complicated story, with the battleground states more or less tied and Harris narrowly ahead, albeit within the margin of error, nationally. A Cook Political Report poll of the top swing states paints the picture well: Harris leads 51 per cent to 47 per cent among the voters who most reliably turn out, but Trump is up 52 per cent to 45 per cent among the low-to-mid-propensity voters who failed Republicans in the last two elections.
But Biden didn’t drop out based just on the public polls. Democratic internal polls were more dire, showing Biden in danger of losing states like Minnesota, which hadn’t voted Republican at the presidential level since Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide in 1972. It was the only state that didn’t vote for Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1984.
Presidential candidates’ time is finite and we are now less than a month out from election day. You have to imagine the campaigns are basing how the candidates are spending their time on some kind of data. Trump’s behaviour signals confidence that could eventually prove to be foolhardiness. Harris’s activities suggest a certain nervousness. Her leads, where they exist, are behind those of Biden and Clinton. Trump outperformed his poll numbers in each of the last two presidential elections.
This could all prove to be a misreading of the public mood. Or perhaps Trump will be unable to turn out his lower-propensity voters, repeating the disappointment of the midterm elections for Republicans.
Yet this has for weeks been an election about vibes, often to Harris’s benefit. The vibes feel like they have shifted back in Trump’s favour.
W James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner