After an exuberant summer, an autumn chill has descended on Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. The joyous rallies that were all over the news between mid-July, when Harris replaced Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket, and the August convention, where she and Tim Walz accepted the party nomination, have quieted into more familiar spectacles. Her once-ascendant polling numbers have stalled and her campaign has become cautious, granting TV interviews mostly to a handful of local news channels in swing states. If the first month of her candidacy was an exhalation after the suffocating defeatism under Biden, the last weeks before Election Day have felt like a collective holding of breath.

It’s a stark reversal from those early days, when it felt like Democrats were finally, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez jokingly put it, “in disconcerting levels of array.” Donald Trump was spiraling, his panicked indignation seemingly confirming that replacing the 81-year-old Biden was a blow from which the Republicans might not recover. Now, as we enter the homestretch, Harris’s shocking and historic candidacy has become oddly — perhaps even perilously — normal. Beltway pundits will tell you that, in a country as polarized as the U.S., the race was always going to tighten into a photo finish. But it’s impossible to escape the conclusion that the Harris campaign has betrayed its original promise of unbridled possibility, the consequences of which will reverberate beyond November 5 regardless of who wins.

The change in the campaign was most recently on display during the vice-presidential debate. If anyone deserves credit for making J. D. Vance the least popular figure on either presidential ticket, it is Walz. He single-handedly changed the Democratic messaging about the GOP this past summer, casting Republicans as creepy zealots who won’t keep their noses out of women’s exam rooms. Weird became derisive shorthand for the conservative movement of which Vance — with his scorn for “cat ladies” who choose not to reproduce — was the smug, youthful face. “I can’t wait to debate the guy,” Walz quipped at the Philadelphia rally........

© Daily Intelligencer