Kamala Harris has orchestrated a brilliant launch to her foreshortened campaign. Her choice of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as running mate proved brilliant. The energy of the Chicago Democratic National Convention was contagious. Harris presented herself as the agent of change and Trump as a relic of the failed past. In their debate, Harris eviscerated Trump, goading him into exposing just how delusional and demented he is. Taylor Swift’s endorsement followed, with celebrities, pundits, comedians joining in. She’s consolidated the support of Democrats, and roused energy among the young, women, and minorities.

Yet, with all this, with less than 50 days left, the election is still a toss-up, with Trump and Harris virtually tied in the various swing states. And now Harris must fight her way out of the Trump derangement trap (TDT).

The trap is that Trump’s grotesqueries enrage his opponents, consume the media, and make the campaign about him. “They are eating the dogs,” he says in the debate. The media goes into hyper-frenzy. He and his noxious running mate feed the libel they know to be false. The haters make bomb threats; schools close in Springfield. Pundits denounce his racism. Harris almost literally disappears from the news.

Inevitably, she is forced to respond to his outrages. He becomes the issue. In the debate, in the face of his provocations, Harris called out his racist history. “We are not going back,” she said, “It’s time to turn the page…. and to end the chaos.”

But for most voters, the election isn’t about Donald Trump. It’s about their own struggles. Americans know Trump; they are only now learning about Harris. With over 60 percent of the country convinced the country is on the wrong track, they care less about what she thinks of Donald Trump. They want to know what she is for, whom she will fight for and whom she will fight against, and how she plans to help with the challenges they face. The TDT drowns out her efforts to answer those questions.

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign fixated on Trump’s preposterous lies and antics and slighted the justified anger of working people left behind in the neoliberal economy. In 2020, in the wake of the pandemic and the economic collapse, Trump’s trap didn’t work. Joe Biden won, promising to end the chaos of Trump’s presidency and return calm and competence to the White House. But today, calm represents more of the same. Voters—particularly working-class Americans who rightly feel that this economy doesn’t work for them—want change, not calm. A major reason the race is still a toss-up is that Harris is trailing among those that pollsters describe as non-college-educated, particularly among white men.

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December 2024 Issue

Many of these voters now are full MAGA. Some are put off by Trump’s malevolence but believe that at least he will take on the powers that be. He rails against the failed establishment, the “deep state,” the “loser” generals. As he sows division with his race-baiting politics, he declares himself their champion, offering sweeping economic promises: imposing across-the-board tariffs to force companies to build in America, ejecting millions of immigrants to open up jobs and housing. He’ll “drill baby drill,” and repeal the “green scam,” lowering energy prices and ending inflation. And of course he promises lower taxes, less regulation, and stronger growth. In this cycle, he has larded on specific promises targeted at people struggling paycheck to paycheck—no taxes on tips, overtime, or Social Security income. Establishment economists may rightly point out the poisonous effects of this brew—but they have far less credibility with those struggling than Trump does.

Attacking Trump as unfit is not an adequate response. Nor are vacuous political brand names—“a new way forward,” an “opportunity economy.” Falling into Trump’s trap and endlessly responding to his transgressions is a loser’s game. With little time left, Harris needs to find her populist voice—and remain laser-focused on addressing what working people need, not Trump’s latest outrage.

She’s set the frame for it. By emphasizing her experience as a prosecutor, she described whom she fought for—“Harris for the people”—and whom she fought against—big banks defrauding homeowners, private universities scamming veterans, foreign cartels trafficking in drugs, guns, or humans. She’s put forth new plans on basic kitchen-table concerns: vowing to go after price gouging by grocery-store oligopolies and Big Pharma, offering a plan to build affordable housing. She’s promised help for young families with a tax break for first-time homeowners, a renewed child tax credit, affordable day care, a tax break in the first year of a newborn. She’s offered up a $50,000 tax break for small-business start-ups. And she’s made herself the champion of personal freedom—most notably, of course, a woman’s right to choose.

What’s missing, however, is a bold strategy to make this economy work for working people, one more compelling than Trump’s fever dreams.

Given voter concerns about inflation and immigration, Harris hasn’t said much about Biden’s economic strategy. But in fact, Biden represented a break from the failed policies of the past—and unlike Trump, the Biden-Harris administration got big things done. It passed key elements of an industrial policy that, combined with Buy America requirements, pro-union incentives, and targeted tariffs has resulted in the building of new plants and the creation of hundreds of thousands of new manufacturing jobs. Trump, meanwhile, relied on “trickle-down” economics—tax cuts to the rich and the corporations—and failed to create manufacturing jobs or to keep plants from moving abroad. Biden and Harris put construction workers to work rebuilding America’s decrepit infrastructure. Trump repeatedly touted an “infrastructure week” that never happened. They launched America into the global competition for emerging industries in renewable energy and cutting-edge technology. Trump denies the reality of catastrophic climate change while promising Big Oil CEOs that he’ll pass their full agenda in exchange for contributions to his campaign. He’ll leave America with more expensive energy, out of the running for the growth industries of the next decades, and out to lunch on the climate crisis.

In stark contrast to Trump, Harris can champion growth from the bottom up—raise the minimum wage, empower workers to organize, and crack down on corporations fleecing their workers while trampling labor laws and health and safety laws. Trump and his Republican colleagues have blocked any hike in the minimum wage, opposed empowering workers, stacked the NLRB with corporate lobbyists, and gutted the protections offered by OSHA in the workplace. Trump rails about inflation but offers plans that will only feed it. Harris can contrast that not only with the fact that inflation come down but promises to crack down on corporate collusion and corruption to curb price-fixing in food, rental housing, and more.

To date, ironically, Harris has distanced herself from Biden’s economic initiatives, while embracing his foreign policy, particularly in Gaza and Ukraine. This gets it exactly backward. Standing with Biden’s foreign policy gives Trump the license to run as the peace candidate, warning about World War III. Worse, when Harris lines up the endorsements of the generals and the national security operatives, everyone from Dick Cheney to Leon Panetta, she ties herself to a foreign policy establishment that has led this nation into endless wars—wars where, as JD Vance said at the Republican convention, “our children were sent to war, America’s ruling class wrote the check, and communities like mine paid the price.”

On economic policy, in contrast, Harris can do what Biden failed to do: lay out the bold strategy that the administration launched, the progress to date, and the next stages to come. Moreover, she can expose Trump’s empty promises, illustrating how his poisonous politics are part of a bigger con, even as he pockets campaign contributions from the entrenched interests he actually serves.

Harris, clearly worried about seeming too liberal, is tacking carefully to the supposed “center.” What she needs, however, is a populist promise, not a liberal wish list or a centrist status quo agenda. It’s possible that she can win without it. Trump lost the popular vote to both Hillary and Biden. He grows ever more unstable, his act growing old with him. And the repeal of Roe v. Wade has mobilized women across the country. One thing is clear, however. Harris has to break out of the Trump derangement trap. If she wants to build a governing majority, she needs a populist message and strategy that can speak to the legions of disaffected working people looking for change.