Kamala Harris has a gun, now she’s only 43,000 votes short of beating Trump (a chasm)

Public opinion of Kamala Harris was largely negative until she was nominated as presidential candidate. Overnight, Harris went from hell to heaven, without a political commentator so much as batting an eye. And this was long before Tuesday’s debate (we will get into that later). So what happened? Nothing, simply that Harris was a vice president, and the White House doesn’t usually give them an easy time until they’re set to replace the No. 1.

There is a juicy literature on the subject: one of the nation’s founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, is credited with jokingly suggesting that vice presidents be called “superfluous excellency” — in reference to the fact that the position is both high profile and powerless. Many years later, Nelson Rockefeller, who served as president Gerald Ford’s number VP, snidely summed up his occupations: “I go to funerals,” he said, “I go to earthquakes.” And in 1960, the year that JFK won the election, president Dwight Eisenhower was asked to cite examples of how Richard Nixon (his vice president and Kennedy’s rival in the election) had helped him. He replied as if he were Nixon’s worst enemy: “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”

In addition to inhabiting that strange space between the glitter of power and nothingness, vice presidents are also usually handed a hot potato, like when Joe Biden put Harris in charge of managing the migratory flows on the U.S. southern border with Mexico — a task from which Harris did not emerge unscathed — or when Donald Trump put Mike Pence in charge of the task force for the coronavirus crisis. History has illuminated some vice presidents (see Dick Cheney), but, generally speaking, their halo is not seen until they are presidential candidates. Why was anything else expected of Harris? Because Biden was old, and she should have assumed more roles? As if a guy who has been dreaming of being president for half a century and finally gets after defeating someone like Trump is going to settle for a decaffeinated presidency. Or because she was the first Black woman in history to be vice president, and it was clear she was under pressure to prove herself more than other VPs.

Never mind that, we wanted to talk about the debate. On Tuesday, Harris proved that she can win the election; it was already known that she is good in dialectic battles — Biden saw this first hand in the 2020 Democratic primaries. Don’t you remember how she overwhelmed him in the Miami debate when she launched her famous: “That little girl was me”?

On Tuesday, she uttered a phrase that perhaps went more unnoticed, but which is worth remembering: she stressed that she also had a gun and that she did not plan to take away anyone’s weapons. The gun culture in the U.S. goes beyond the horrific school shootings and transcends the left-right ideological barrier: many families hunt and parents gift their 12-year-old their first shotguns. Many others live in isolated areas and have a gun for protection. And they’ve grown up with it all their lives. Trump whips up those voters, and while Democrats advocate for more gun restrictions — especially for minors — it would be a mistake to respond to fears with radical positions. Harris was also helped in the debate when Trump showed his most unhinged side and claimed that migrants in Ohio were eating the cats and dogs of good Americans.

But winning a debate does not mean winning an election. Just ask Hillary Clinton, who won the 2016 televised contests, but to no avail; she beat Trump by more than three million votes and it didn’t matter either, because the devilishness of the US electoral system means that — in a country of 330 million inhabitants — a candidate can win the popular vote by three million ballots and lose the election because of 80,000 votes in three states: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which is what happened in 2016.

In 2020, Biden won seven million more votes than Trump in the popular vote. His campaign also had some help from the Republican, who did not say anything about migrants eating dogs, but did encourage the public to inject bleach as a way of fighting Covid. And, even with that, if just 43,000 votes in three states (Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin) had swung in the other direction, Trump would have won the election.

Taylor Swift has endorsed Harris, which is a headline-grabbing call, but on November 5, her vote is worth as much as anyone’s, or maybe less, depending on which state she votes in. Harris has Swift and she has a gun, now she’s only 43,000 votes short, but this is a gaping chasm.

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