The Most Important Thing for Harris Isn’t the Economy. It’s This.

Kamala Harris’s economic vision speech (delivered in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, a mere two days after yours truly wrote that she needed to give an economic vision speech!) was … fine. Was she offering the second coming of the New Deal? No. Her rhetoric is cautious. More cautious, as American Prospect editor David Dayen interestingly pointed out this week (because Dayen is strongly of the economic populist school), than the plan itself as described in an 82-page “fact sheet” distributed by the campaign. The plan, he wrote, is more progressive than the rhetoric. But on the stump, Harris is not suddenly going to morph into Elizabeth Warren.

And today she goes to the Arizona border to try to establish more swing-voter cred. Am I loving the fact that it’s become a big Democratic applause line that she wants to sign conservative GOP Senator James Lankford’s border security bill? No, not by a long shot. On the other hand, in purely naked political terms, is it smart to go at your opponent’s strengths? Yes, it is.

It’s pretty basic politics. Trump, for all his extremism, does this frequently. Think of his twisted pitch to women this week. Campaigns that successfully neutralize the other side’s advantages tend to win (George W. Bush on John Kerry’s war record). Campaigns that let disadvantages fester tend to lose (Mitt Romney not convincingly answering Barack Obama’s Bain Capital–related attacks).

So Harris is cutting into Trump’s advantages on those two issues. That’s fine, especially with respect to the economy. But issues are the science of campaigning. There’s an art to campaigning too, and it’s on this front that the Harris campaign needs to keep pushing, because it’s here where her biggest advantage over Trump lies.

Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark had a smart piece this week reminding us that campaigns consist of news cycles, and the point of news cycles is to win them. Remember how Harris came out of the gate like a rocket in July? That’s because she was doing everything right. She was making news and winning news cycles. The early speeches, the choice and unveiling of Tim Walz, the near-flawless convention—Harris was firing on all cylinders.

Back then, practically everything about her was new to most people. But that was bound to end. Now we’re through that discovery phase. And she’s not dominating news cycles the way she was six weeks ago.

So, Last writes, the campaign needs to find ways to drive the news. It’s especially important when running against Trump, because he drives news nearly every day. Most of it is madness. But the media machine, as we have learned and relearned, has little capacity to punish madness. It rewards performance. This is what Trump has known for 40 years.

The Harris campaign seemed to know this at first, but it has lost a little momentum in these recent weeks as she’s settled more into normalcy—and, I’d say, defense. The economic speech and the border appearance are essentially defense: They’re defending or inoculating her against possible Trump attacks. As I said, they’re justifiable as politics. But they’re not offense.

So it’s time to play offense. This is where the art of campaigning comes in, and subconsciously taking advantage of her greatest strengths over Trump:

1.     She’s not mentally unfit to be the president of the United States.
2.     She’s not pushing 80.
3.     People seem to like her. They even seem to like, or at least not dislike, her once-infamous laugh.
4.     She proved in the debate that she is smarter than he is, sharper on her feet, his mental and intellectual superior in every way.
5.     She knows how to get under his skin while keeping her cool.

What do these factors add up to? The idea that the Harris campaign should be tossing grenades at Trump that mock and expose him and that make news. Force him to respond. Make him explain. As an analogy, think of a tennis match: One player is sitting calmly at the center of the base line firing ground strokes left and right, while the other is running side to side, panting, covering 25 feet between each shot. It’s pretty obvious who’s going to win most of the points, and the match.

Here’s an example. Just yesterday, Trump spoke on Mark Robinson for the first time since the latter’s insane past comments (“I’m a Black NAZI!”) became public. He was making remarks at Trump Tower. As he finished and walked toward a bank of elevators, a reporter asked him if he was “going to pull” his Robinson endorsement. Trump, who once called Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids,” paused and said: “Uh, I don’t know the situation.”

Obviously, he knows the situation. The Harris campaign should be out with an ad today mocking this, tying it to other similar remarks of his, like when he pretended he didn’t know who David Duke was. But more: Harris herself should talk to reporters mocking Trump’s lame denial. It needs to be Harris herself, not Walz or Doug Emhoff.

There are tons of opportunities. Trump’s liquid rhetoric is such that he constantly contradicts himself and often just makes no sense. It makes me crazy that Harris is being knocked for not having “positions.” Do those critics seriously think that what Trump is saying constitutes “positions”? Remember that answer of his a few weeks ago when the woman asked him about childcare? It was embarrassing to listen to. He does that all the time. Make sure voters know it. Attack. In a mocking way. Make news. Play offense.

People like me aren’t supposed to say things like this, but here it is: A lot of these swing voters, they’re not voting on issues. The economy, maybe. But generally, they vote on vibes. Who has the look of a winner? Who looks fresh and ready to tackle this big job, and who looks tired? Who appears to be having fun?

That was the Harris of July and August. She had some magic. It’s hardly panic time. A raft of swing state polls came out Thursday night, and she leads in every state except Georgia, where it’s tied. She’s ahead, and he’s weak and worried and knows he might lose (and then face sentencing). He’s crumbling, psychologically. Now is the time to step on the gas.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.