On Oct. 30, Donna Brazile and Karl Rove visited the Oakland Center, with just under a week until election day at the time. The event titled ‘All Eyes on the Great Lakes State: Michigan’s Importance in the 2024 Campaign’ focused on the swing state of Michigan and both speakers’ past experiences campaigning in the state. This event was run through the Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) at Oakland University and was moderated by Roop Raj.
Panelists discussed the challenges faced by Kamala Harris’s campaign, particularly the short window to define her as a candidate.
“We had to get posters. She had to select the vice president. That took a week. And then, of course, we just started doing focus groups. We didn’t finish doing focus groups on key constituencies within the Democratic party until almost three weeks ago,” Brazile explained.
Additionally, speakers talked about the tension between her past legacy working under the Biden Administration as vice president and her struggle to differentiate herself from the administration.
“Well, we heard from her, but citizens rarely pay attention to the vice president … Vice presidents are not the policymakers … That coalition [Biden-Harris] is not big enough for us to win in 2024, and so she’s in the process of defining herself, expanding our coalition,” Brazile said.
Raj posed the question of Harris’s media avoidance, and how only recently has she done interviews. Has her campaign been effective in getting her message across given this avoidance?
“I think this thing about her not doing enough interviews is inside baseball [smaller, minutiae details] from the perspective of the ordinary voter. They’ve seen her a lot, but they could have seen her more,” Rove said. “I mean, could you always try and do more? Yeah.”
Panelists also discussed Harris’s recent media appearance on The View. During her appearance, hosts asked Harris what she would have done differently than Biden. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris said.
“She was ill-prepared for The View, and she set a tone there that was problematic for her. They knew that question was coming. She should’ve had an answer other than ‘I can’t think of anything just off the top of my head.’ There’s a way around this that could have been acceptable, but you’ve got to have an answer,” Rove said.
Raj also asked about the recent assassination attempt on Trump and if it had an impact on Trump’s speech and his emotional message to voters at the Republican National Convention. Has Trump made a major mistake by not maintaining that original message at the convention?
“I’ve been to every convention since 1972, and I have never seen anything that came close to the first 18 minutes of that speech … People are not talking to their neighbor; they’re not looking at their phone. They are focused on him, and he is talking about what it was like to come this close to dying,” Rove said.
Rove also shared his opinion on the current state of the race.“[Trump] holds the lead on the issue of who can better handle inflation, economy and the border, the three biggest issues by far, and yet because he hasn’t been able to close that empathetic gap with the American people and say, ‘You can stand me for the next four years,’ we got a horse race,” Rove said.
The next event run by CCE will be on Nov. 12 in a Town Hall called ‘24 Election Debrief: Now What?’ where panelists will discuss the outcome of the election and future policy implications. Follow CCE on Instagram @cce_ou
