The polls from the swing states, including Michigan, are not looking good for Kamala Harris. While the difference is razor-thin, the momentum swing is clearly with the Trump campaign at the moment.

Now, there are still 18 days to go before Election Day, and that is a lifetime in politics. Still, with early voting now happening, the window of opportunity to change people’s minds is getting smaller and smaller. And with Kamala Harris putting in lackluster performances in interviews, and mailing in old jokes, her “JOY!” campaign seems to be faltering. Not that she would ever admit to that.

In a new interview, @PeterAlexander asks how she responds to critics who say the joy is gone.

Harris: "Oh I'm having a great time." pic.twitter.com/ud8ojRIIvn

— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) October 18, 2024

The numbers, however, tell a different story.

Gone is the strategy attributed to Abraham Lincoln that it is “better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” Silence is a luxury that Team Kamala can no longer afford. A look at Harris’ polling numbers will tell you why.

The RealClearPolitics Oct. 17 average of national two-way race polling shows Harris leading Trump, 49.2 percent to 47.7 percent. That’s close, but it’s still a lead —no reason to panic, right?

Wrong. Remember that Biden beat Trump by 4.4 percent in 2020’s popular vote, yet he barely squeaked by in the Electoral College. His margin of victory there came from winning Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin (with 43 electoral votes) by less than 77,000 votes combined.

The battleground states, however, are where the real story lies. RealClearPolitics’s Oct. 13 top battleground polling average has Trump leading Harris very narrowly, 48.3 percent to 47.9 percent. At this point in 2020, Biden led in this average by 5 points.

One of those must-win battleground states for Kamala is Michigan. On paper, it seems like an easy win for her. Michigan has a Democrat governor (the extremely creepy Gretchen Whitmer), a narrowly Democrat-controlled state House and state Senate, two Democrat U.S. Senators, and the House delegation is split 7 to 6 in favor of the Democrats. However, one of the U.S. Senators is retiring, and the Democrat running to replace her, Elissa Slotkin, has only a two point lead and has pointed out her connection to… Donald Trump.

Rep. Elissa Slotkin’s (D-Mich.) campaign for Senate also spent more than a $1 million starting mid-August on an ad saying she “wrote a law signed by President Trump forcing drug companies to show their actual prices,” according to AdImpact.

In other words, Michigan is a swing state, despite the current Democrat majorities, and there are no guarantees. One of the more interesting developments during this election cycle has been the importance placed on the Arab-American and Muslim vote in Michigan. Joe Biden had problems in the state, and the Arab-American voters made his campaign quite aware of it. Once Kamala Harris inherited the nomination from Old Joe, her campaign knew she was also inheriting those same problems. The activist groups within the Michigan Muslim community wanted nothing less than Kamala openly breaking with Israel in favor of Gaza. While she has paid lip service to Gaza, she has not made any promises to the Muslim community. And they know it. They know what Donald Trump’s position is, and they aren’t going to support him – they are going third party and supporting Green Party candidate Jill Stein. But their lack of support could cost Kamala Harris Michigan.

And these voters aren’t hiding the ball here.

Brutal. pic.twitter.com/JIqb2yTVKS

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) October 18, 2024

However, Kamala is still trying to convince those Michigan Muslims that she really does care about them and their feelings.

In a rare reference to Israel’s fight against Hamas and Hezbollah, Harris said, “This year has been very difficult, given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza and given the civilian casualties and displacement in Lebanon.” She said the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar “can and must be a turning point.”

“Everyone must seize this opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza, bring the hostages home and end the suffering once and for all,” she said.

But, in a move we have come to expect time and again from the Harris campaign, while she says – or long ago said – one thing, her staff is busy telling the media something completely different.

Last December, Vice President Kamala Harris flew to a climate conference in Dubai and quickly huddled with the leaders of three Arab nations to discuss Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The conflict, by then, was still weeks old, ignited by a terrorist attack in which militants killed roughly 1,200 people in Israel and took hundreds hostage. Ms. Harris saw a diplomatic opening for herself: to be the face of the future, and not of the current war. She told the assembled leaders, “The phase of fighting will end and we will begin implementing our plans for the day after.”

Planning for the phase after the war might have seemed rhetorically out of step with President Biden, who was managing growing domestic opposition to the conflict with his embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. But the visit publicly established Ms. Harris as a more compassionate voice for the administration, and she has publicly and privately been more empathetic than Mr. Biden about the plight of Palestinians in Gaza.

Still, according to U.S. officials and campaign advisers, the empathy she has expressed as vice president should not be confused with willingness to break from American foreign policy toward Israel as a presidential candidate.

The message is rhetorically empathetic but without any substantive difference from current policy, or ideas about the path forward. That work will be left to others, including Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, whom Mr. Biden said he would dispatch to Israel to try to help broker an end to the conflict.

Ms. Harris’s office and campaign declined to give specifics of what a Harris administration’s policy toward Israel and the war in Gaza would look like, in large part because the conflict is too volatile to predict how it might be managed days from now, let alone months from now.

But one senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail Ms. Harris’s thinking, said that if she won the election and the war were still going on, her policy was not expected to change.

So, while Kamala Harris is busy telling a crowd in Michigan that she understands their emotions regarding the war, her campaign is telling the New York Times that she’s just being “rhetorically empathetic” and she won’t do anything differently than Joe Biden has when it comes to Israel and the war. Oh yeah, THAT’S going to play well among the Muslim communities in Michigan!

The NYT article also details that the Harris campaign is still trying to appeal to Nikki Haley voters in Michigan – which would be a lot harder if Haley ends up campaigning for Trump.

In a presidential race that is likely to come down to the seven swing states, Kamala Harris cannot afford to lose or alienate a single potential voter. However, her “rhetorical empathy” may simply piss off Michigan Muslims at this point, and should they withhold their votes, it could very well cost her the state.

Featured image: Kamala Harris via Gage Skidmore, cropped, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)