Several weeks ago, as Vice President Kamala Harris began campaigning alongside conservative politicians — including former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), whom, along with her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, have endorsed Harris’s campaign for president — I began to worry about how it could negatively affect things overall within the presidential race.

Harris had just successfully outperformed Donald Trump in the only debate the two would have with one another. She was on the upswing with voters. By all accounts, this was becoming her race to lose.

Then, she started touting the “big tent” her candidacy was creating — a coalition of voters and politicos from across a diverse set of interests and ideologies who, despite their differences, understood that another Trump presidency would be disastrous, and potentially the death knell of American democracy as we know it.

Such coalitions are good, to some degree, and every presidential election has them (Trump is touting former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s endorsement, for example). SOME focus should be given to such coalitions because they enforce the ethos-based argument that a candidate is appealing beyond their own partisan bubble.

But I had deep concerns about how much I was seeing this become the main part of Harris’s campaign strategy. 

Shifting focus to this “big tent” ideal, rather than putting more attention on what you plan to do as president if you’re elected, had the potential to confuse voters over what Harris’s stands for. And the incorporation of far-right figures from the past two decades as tolerable risked alienating tried-and-true progressive (and even left-of-center) voters that comprised her base.

Those worries now seem to have come to fruition, as new nationwide polling shows a closer race than before, and new predictors also show Trump has the slightest of edges in his chances within the Electoral College versus Harris. 

There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that focus on the “big tent” and not on her policies has hurt Harris — indeed, a recent YouGov poll shows that, when you ask voters about the two candidates’ policy proposals (without telling those voters which candidate stands for what), they overwhelmingly like Harris’s more but are unaware that they are even her stances. 

Had she put more focus on those matters — had she advertised her plans more positively, and spoke about them more rigorously on the campaign trail — rather than saying “I have the support of the Cheneys” or of former Trump officials, it’s likely her campaign wouldn’t be sweating the current poll numbers right now. People who back those ideas would know they came from her, instead of wondering which candidate might be backing them.

There’s also evidence that the “big tent” is pushing people away. In speaking to The New York Times, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who has been campaigning on behalf of Harris, says working-class voters don’t understand that she’ll work for them more than Trump would. 

“They want to hear her to be more aggressive in making it clear that she’s going to stand up for the working class of this country. You lose the working class, I don’t know how you win an election,” Sanders said.

Sanders is absolutely right: you cannot win an election on being a champion for the working class without making it your complete identity throughout the campaign. 

Harris saw huge success at the beginning of her presidential run, after President Joe Biden dropped out because she was pushing several ideas that matter to voters — a restoration of reproductive rights across the country, help for small businesses, aid to families struggling with finances, and a plan to address costs for goods due to greedflation. 

But when she shifted away from that focus — when it became all about the “big tent” and focus was put on her anti-Trumpness — that burst of energy she started out with flickered into a small, matchstick-sized flame.

There’s no doubt in my mind that that flame can grow again, and that her campaign can re-energize itself by shifting it’s focus again, away from the “big tent” stuff and more toward what she will do for everyday people if elected. 

To be sure, she should still discuss the problems associated with Trump. Her calling him a fascist was a bold move, but one that one-in-two voters agree with. 

But her anti-Trumpness can’t be her sole focus, especially if it requires her to include warhawks (and war criminals) into her coalition, at the expense of pushing away progressive voters.

If there is to be any shift from Harris, it has to start NOW. We are just 10 days away from Election Day, and millions of voters have already cast their ballots. To make sure she doesn’t blow the election entirely, Harris has to renew how voters felt about her in early August — and move away from how she tried to court them in September.

Featured image credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr