More than a month after Kamala Harris replaced U.S. President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, Donald Trump is still struggling to counter her.Stephen B. Morton/The Associated Press
Even by the standards of Donald Trump’s social-media use, it was a madcap week.
First, he took to his Truth Social platform to promote a series of memes backing the QAnon conspiracy theory. Then, he boosted a post by another user that crudely and baselessly suggested “blowjobs” had advanced Kamala Harris’s career. Finally, he unleashed a tirade about the Vice-President’s follower count.
“IT’S ALWAYS FAKE WITH KAMALA. WE’RE DOMINATING HER ON SOCIAL MEDIA, SO SHE MAKES UP A FAKE LIST OF HER NUMBERS,” he wrote. “WE’RE BEATING HER ‘LIKE A DRUM.’ ”
The episode underscored how, more than a month after Ms. Harris replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, Mr. Trump is still struggling to counter her.
And the polling suggests that Ms. Harris’s viral momentum has translated into tangible support. Most surveys show her with a small but durable lead nationally and competitive in every swing state – a contrast with Mr. Biden, who was regularly behind by the time he dropped out.
“[Trump] had five-plus years to sharpen his attacks and find the best arteries to tap with Joe Biden. He’s had five weeks with Harris and I don’t think he’s found his stride,” said Jason Cabel Roe, a Republican political strategist in Michigan. “The frustrating part is that Harris has created a lot of opportunities that a more effective communicator could take advantage of.”
Mr. Roe pointed to Ms. Harris’s lengthy wait before agreeing to a media interview, as well as her promise to introduce consumer price controls, as areas ripe for attack.
Mr. Trump, however, has been distracted from any effort to make hay out of these. At times, his flailing attacks have even distracted from his own campaign promises. At a Thursday rally in Michigan, he vowed to have the U.S. government or insurance companies fund in vitro fertilization treatments if he returns to the White House, in a bid to assuage voter anger over his role in ending abortion rights. But he also used part of his speech to mock Ms. Harris’s Sanskrit first name. “The name Kamala is a little complex. There’s about 19 different ways of pronouncing it,” he said.
In a CNN interview, Ms. Harris pithily dismissed Mr. Trump’s attacks on her racial identity. “Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please.”
Lesley Lopez, a political communications expert at George Washington University and Democratic member of the Maryland state legislature, said Mr. Trump’s campaign is the most candidate-controlled she has ever seen and, as a consequence, has had limited ability to retool in the face of Ms. Harris’s rise.
“If there has been a strategic redirection in the Trump campaign, I have not seen it. I don’t think the campaign has changed its messaging or its strategy for outreach, largely because it’s a very principal-led campaign effort,” she said.
By comparison, the Democrats swiftly revamped to match the switch from Mr. Biden to Ms. Harris. Their convention this month harnessed some of the candidate’s online popularity, staging dance parties and DJ appearances, and highlighted her biography as a former prosecutor and daughter of immigrants.
The campaign has also taken a mocking tone with Mr. Trump – borrowing from vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz, who describes Mr. Trump as “weird” – in contrast with Mr. Biden’s seriousness.
“The pivot we saw from the same campaign team working for Biden to working for Harris is a master class. They were able to turn on a dime and adapt to her personality,” Ms. Lopez said.
It didn’t help Mr. Trump this week that his campaign had to play defence when the Army said two of his male staffers pushed around a female employee of Arlington National Cemetery after she told them not to film the graves of recent war dead during a Trump photo-op.
The Democrats, meanwhile, are doing everything they can to bait Mr. Trump into more outbursts.
Ms. Harris’s campaign, for instance, is demanding a change to the previously agreed-upon rules of the Sept. 10 presidential debate to keep both microphones live throughout the event, rather than turning them on only during a candidate’s turn to speak. The apparent calculation is that Mr. Trump’s interruptions will anger voters.
The Democrats are also running a new attack ad in Palm Beach, where Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate is. The spot takes aim at Project 2025, a hard-right policy blueprint for a second Trump term, issued by the Heritage Foundation think tank, that the former president has repeatedly tried to disavow. The ad is not running anywhere else in Florida, suggesting the only reason to air it in Palm Beach is to make sure Mr. Trump sees it.
It all follows weeks of Ms. Harris benefiting from an explosion of memes boosting her candidacy. Supporters have posted coconut emojis, in reference to an aphorism of Ms. Harris’s mother’s that the Vice-President once recounted in a speech. (“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live.”) Pop singer Charli XCX, meanwhile, labelled Ms. Harris “brat” – in this context, the term denotes coolness – after her own best-selling album.
Caroline Leicht, an expert on politics and media at the University of Southampton, said some of Ms. Harris’s social-media success is driven by her personality: videos of her dancing and laughing present a contrast with the usual seriousness of politics.
It has also helped that the Vice-President’s staff has found ways of acknowledging the memes without seeming too eager to co-opt them. One of the Harris campaign’s X accounts, for instance, uses the same lime-green background and black font as Charli XCX’s album cover.
“Her campaign team is making sure that she stays relevant by alluding to the memes, showing that she’s aware, but without going too overboard,” Ms. Leicht said. “If you do too much, you risk losing the humour of it.”