I don't think Bill Galston has a realistic model of how Harris could have done anything different.

1. Immigration was *Biden's* policy, not hers. It's not like she could have forced him to change course in 2022 when he was still clearly intending to be the nominee again, just so that she could have an easier time as... the nominee. Even if she'd just made a kerfuffle over it as a matter of honest policy, it wouldn't have helped the administration; it'd just have been another Dems In Disarray story.

2. Perhaps on the margins she could have made a clearer break and admitted that the crisis caught them off guard, and she's learned from the experience. But the hypocrisy play against Trump for blocking the Lankford bill was *right there*. If you spot a $20 on the sidewalk, and there's another $5 across a busy street, you pick up the $20 FIRST before risking your life playing Frogger for a measly $5.

3. Something that doesn't get acknowledged enough in the "propaganda" discussion is that although right-wing propaganda has a relatively small dedicated audience out of the whole population, the propaganda machine has achieved an EXCELLENT diffusion rate. It's not that normie/lazy voters who are just tuning in to the election this week are watching Fox News all the time; it's that they pick up on the falsely negative vibes that Fox et al create throughout the broader culture. They don't even KNOW that Republicans have been lying to them about inflation/immigration/whatever else, because they don't understand where the lies their vibes are based on are even coming from in the first place; they just know that the vibes are negative.

Think about a stereotypical non-political gas station clerk. Maybe they don't give much of a shit about politics. They've never read an inflation report in their life, and wouldn't be able to tell what one meant to SAVE their life. But if customers are always coming in and loudly bitching about inflation, then they all they are going to "know" is that "inflation is high".

It's not JUST that the country is polarized into information silos, or JUST that voters in the middle are "confused". The middle have ALWAYS been confused. What's different is that the polarization and separate information ecosystems means that the signals confused-middle voters get are now MUCH stronger than they used to be, and also tend to go in one direction or another, rather than in the direction of the truth. 60-70 years ago when things were less polarized and siloed, the average gas station clerk's customers would mostly agree on whether inflation was high or not, and would simply disagree about whether the party that deserved the credit for good inflation still deserved to be in power based on more aspirational issues -- maybe they were promising to build housing or deliver union jobs, etc. Today, the clerk's customers are loud and angry, and to someone who otherwise doesn't pay attention, that's a stronger signal in either direction, which means that whichever direction they're getting the signal from, they're going to break that way stronger than they would have 60-70 years ago.

4. Pursuant to that point, the whole "I don't know what she's about" thing is a product of this same polarized informational environment. The punditocracy is well aware that she sidestepped the Warren/Clinton-esque mistake of releasing dozens of white papers any time someone asked her for a simple opinion. But she's made her pitch PAINFULLY clear on a nice tight group of issues throughout her ENTIRE campaign:

- Pass the Lankford bill.

- Pass a bill enshrining Roe.

- Build 3 million houses.

- Goodies for people to take care of their parents.

- Win the war in Ukraine.

That's just off the top of my head. The point is, anyone who says they "don't know her" isn't uninformed by any failure of her or her campaign to deliver an un-muddled message like Clinton or Warren famously did. It's because they're uninformed. They don't read newspapers, they don't read the news much at all, they avoid talking about politics "because it's always so nasty and mean".

We have to start acknowledging that although campaign outreach can indeed perform well or poorly any given election, these voters are uninformed because they stubbornly avoid being informed at every opportunity, and are too fucking stupid to realize they're doing it to themselves. That is why outreach can be so freaking difficult and even the best-researched theories of outreach can fall flat on their faces.