Trifecta of challenges unravel for Harris, White House ahead of Election Day

A compounding series of challenges are converging all at once for the White House — port workers are striking, fighting in the Middle East is escalating and Hurricane Helene has ravaged parts of the Southeastern U.S., all while a month away from Election Day.

The issues unraveling both domestically and internationally are putting Vice President Harris to the test as she spends the final weeks of her campaign trying to convince voters that the current administration should not be punished at the polls in November.

The unfortunate timing of the events has the potential to jolt the presidential race just over a month out, though the neck and neck contest has seen little movement in recent polls over a plethora of other issues.

As the nation braces for the homestretch of the 2024 presidential race, Harris and former President Trump are nearly tied nationally and in the pivotal swing and battleground states that will determine the outcome of the election. Harris is leading Trump by 4.6 percentage points nationally, according to Decision Desk HQ/ The Hill’s aggregation of polls.

Harris traveled to Georgia this week to survey Helene’s damage; photos showed her bowing in prayer with victims of the storm that has ravaged the state and its surrounding areas, in addition to a stop at an operational center in which she thanked first responders, and remarks she made outside in front of some of the damage.

As she was embarking on that trip, her campaign put out a statement supporting the striking port workers, a day after putting out a statement voicing her support for ensuring Israel has the ability to defend itself on the heels of an Iranian missile attack on Israel.

Strategists think the way she handles these three crises is a critical opportunity for voters to see her at work and get to know her — something she’s had an abbreviated amount of time to do since she became the nominee in August.

“The voters who will decide this election are the ones who don’t want to vote for Donald Trump but don’t know enough about the vice president to cast their vote for her. These kinds of moments give Harris a huge opportunity to not just tell voters she’s ready for the presidency — she’ll show them in real-time,” Jim Messina, former President Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, told The Hill.

He added, “There’s no better argument for her capability than proving she’s already handling the toughest challenges of leadership under intense scrutiny.”

October, the critical month before Election Day, roared in with the trifecta of events that President Biden and Harris are tackling in tandem.

As incumbents, strategists note, officials who occupy a public office during elections are almost always judged by their handling of a crisis much more harshly than their political opponents.

Stewart Verdery, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush, said administrations must apply a “do no harm” approach in order to not hurt the incumbent candidate on the campaign trail, which in this case is Harris.

“If you’re operating in the incumbent administration, you are desperate not to make things worse for your candidate, even if the issue or crisis defies easy solutions,” Verdery said.

“Normally issues like the Middle East crisis or a hurricane are a series of bad options for the executive branch, so the goal is to be seen as working hard under trying circumstances,” he said. “For a football analogy, people don’t blame the quarterback for failing to convert a 3rd and 20, but they will come down like a house of bricks if you fumble the ball trying to be a hero.”

Harris does, however, have a unique advantage in that she can address a crisis a bit more abstractly than the incumbent president, who carries the burden of having the final say.

“[I]ssues like the Middle East, hurricanes and strikes normally present leaders with a series of tough decisions. The odd dynamic this time is that neither VP Harris or President Trump actually is in charge of anything, so that gives both of them freedom to posit solutions without having to actually see them through,” said Verdery, founder and partner of Monument Advocacy.

The Harris campaign, meanwhile, is using the three issues to contrast her with her political opponent, who has had no shortage of criticism for the administration’s response.

Trump began the week in Georgia by claiming Gov. Brian Kemp (R) was having a “hard time getting the president on the phone,” in an effort to suggest the administration wasn’t responding effectively to a Republican state — but the two had actually already spoken.

In addition to the White House getting in touch with Kemp, Harris had also reached out to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) as soon as Sunday evening, according to her staff. It is not clear if the two talked.

“These three crises are significant and the vice president is addressing them. It’s an opportunity for voters to see the contrast between an erratic, chaotic person and someone who has the best interest of Americans, working every day to make sure Americans have what they need in response to these crises,” a source familiar with the Harris campaign said.

Biden, for his part, is also under some pressure to help bolster Harris’s trajectory on the campaign trail by dealing with the trio of issues in a way that the public sees as beneficial in order to give a boost to her election chances.

“This is the job of the president, right? Unfortunately, there are going to be events like this, and this is where you see the leadership of a president show up,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday. “I think this should send a message to Americans: It matters. It matters who sits behind that Resolute Desk. It matters what the leadership looks like.”