No one, as Donald Trump would say, has ever seen anything like it.
A presidential election that lasts just over 100 days, less time than it takes to complete a Major League Baseball season or become fluent in a second language.
The brevity is, of course, a function of Joe Biden’s catatonic debate performance, the resulting Democratic panic, and the president’s overnight replacement in midsummer with his vice presidential deputy, Kamala Harris.
Since then, every day has seemed like a week in normal campaign times. Every week has been like a whole month.
And while early elections are unprecedented, there is a rough analogy.
About 20 years ago, Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger unexpectedly appeared on a late-night television show and launched his bid for governor of California as part of a wild vote on whether to unseat Democrat Gray Davis. Schwarzenegger’s campaign lasted barely two months and ended with the Hollywood superstar elbowing aside the embattled incumbent.
These are different times, different circumstances, but there are notable parallels between the recall election and the current presidential semi-race. Not least of all are the advantages enjoyed by both Schwarzenegger and Harris as a result of the drastically truncated campaigns they embarked on.
One thing is new about the two candidates.
“She remains fresh and different,” said Don Sipple, a veteran political publicist and chief strategist for Schwarzenegger, who, like Harris, came in promising weary voters a change from the same old, same old. “That’s not something that’s going to last a year and a half.”
The shortened time frame has also allowed Harris to move, as Schwarzenegger did, from one big campaign event to the next with little lag in between.
According to Sipple, presidential races are often decided by a series of moments that generate headlines and memes: “Conventions. Acceptance speeches. Debate performances. His nomination was followed by a very successful convention and a very successful convention speech. And just when that was starting to fade, he took on Trump and performed well in the debate.”
All of this has given Harris a strong boost, less than six weeks before the election. Or, rather, less than six weeks before voting ends on November 5.
Voting has already begun in three states: Minnesota, South Dakota and Virginia. Voting will begin in four more states by this time next week, including the battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania. By mid-October, voting will begin in more than a dozen states, including California.
There is still much to be done in the campaign, but with each vote cast, the events of each day — an endorsement, a policy statement, a stumble, a blunder — fade in importance.
In addition to an abbreviated timeline, another benefit enjoyed by Harris and Schwarzenegger was avoiding a contentious partisan primary.
“That's something that would have been difficult for Schwarzenegger,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist who served as one of his spokesmen during the recall campaign.
Schwarzenegger, a staunch environmentalist with a laissez-faire attitude on social issues, stood clearly to the left of California's Republican base. The year before the 2003 election, Republican primary voters handily rejected a similarly moderate candidate, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, in favor of a far more conservative candidate, the bumbling Bill Simon Jr.
“The great advantage [Harris] “What Arnold had going for him was going straight to the general election,” Stutzman said. “Bypassing the primary allowed each of them to build a larger, broader coalition at the center, rather than at the margins.”
In fact, Harris leaned left in her failed 2020 presidential bid, and some of the positions she championed in that Democratic primary — on energy, immigration, health care — have become an issue in the current campaign, when many are just getting to know the vice president.
If there is a downside to this shortened election, Stutzman said, it is the limited time Harris has to present herself. Polls have consistently shown independent and other undecided voters bidding their time and saying they need to know more about her and her position.
For that reason, Stutzman believes Harris would benefit from opening up to more interactions with the media, especially since she has improved so much since her shaky early days as vice president.
Stutzman cited his humorous appearance last week alongside Oprah Winfrey when Harris let slip (was it really accidental?) that she keeps a gun at home and that if an intruder breaks in, “they'll get shot.”
“It was a very smart decision… to move away from a campaign that was going strongly toward the center,” Stutzman said.
Harris has enjoyed great luck in her hasty campaign for the presidency.
Among other assets, she inherited Biden's well-rounded reelection team, bolstered by several Obama campaign veterans, which spared her the drama and trauma that plagued Harris's last factional White House bid.
But Richie Ross, another recall veteran, said not to discount the months and years of Democratic strategy that preceded her entry into the race, or the skills Harris has demonstrated as Biden's replacement.
“There's nothing truncated in his preparation and nothing truncated in that a lot of people have worked really hard to crack the code,” said Ross, who sponsored Cruz Bustamante in 2003. (His message as an endorsement to his fellow Democrats: “'No' on impeachment and 'Yes' on Bustamante.”
“We're not looking at luck,” Ross said of the vice president. “We're looking at preparation.”
Call it luck, skill, or some combination of the two. We'll see if it lasts another six weeks.
