Harris and Trump lose momentum

The “Big Mo," short for big momentum, was brought into the political lexicon in 1980 by George H.W. Bush after he won the Iowa caucuses. In fact, Ronald Reagan had the Big Mo that year, winning 44 states in November to defeat President Jimmy Carter. But Big Mo stuck. Borrowed by Bush from sports to describe a team that had caught fire, it captured what every presidential campaign wants in a close race.

The 2024 presidential election has arrived at the opposite of the Big Mo. Somehow, this election has become the Big Meh.

Opinion polling across the seven swing states has been static for weeks, with both candidates rotating around 49%. Some of this is embedded polarization. Meanwhile, the political schedule shows up every day. TV attack ads engulf voters. During this week’s “media blitz," Kamala Harris announced a new, budget-detonating Medicare home-care benefit on ABC’s “The View."

At the Trump rally last weekend in Butler, Pa., Elon Musk said, “This is the most important election." He’s right. But if the stakes are as high as Mr. Musk says, there are two reasons this election seems to have gone flat: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

Kamala Harris is the political equivalent of a fireworks display. One’s first reaction is: Wow, look at that! Then in a blink, it’s gone. Ms. Harris always spikes on entry, but never quite delivers.

Expectations were high when she entered the 2019 Democratic presidential primary debates, but by the fifth debate she was gone. Andrew Yang lasted longer. This year, notwithstanding her elevation to the party’s presidential nomination after the Biden dethronement, the momentum she got from the Democratic convention in August looked substantial. Then it fell away.

The primary-free circumstances of Ms. Harris’s accession into this role remain a problem. She’s just a vice president who was plucked four years ago to be a running mate. When the dockworkers threatened an economy-crushing strike, eyes turned to still-President Joe Biden and whether he would invoke the Taft-Hartley Act. A presidential candidate became a bystander.

But where’s the Trump bump? The past argument that Donald Trump always “underpolls" is not implausible, but it would be surprising if Mr. Trump’s “shy voter" phenomenon was happening simultaneously for the third time in seven separate states.

A legitimate campaign question: How much Trump can the country take? I’m not talking about the Democratic notion that Mr. Trump is a “threat to democracy." The more interesting question is whether the infinitely repeated image of the fellow in the white shirt, red tie, dark suit and blond hair simply has reached saturation with the public.

One might have expected that two shocking assassination attempts would have boosted the former president, but it didn’t happen. Mr. Trump’s modus operandi, after all these years, is the Trump rally, which has become more an experience than an expression of forward-looking political ideas.

Mr. Trump remains a charismatic political personality with unlimited confidence in his own appeal. But as a former TV performer, he should know that even the most popular series and characters eventually become familiar and fade.

An irony is that the two candidacies have gone flat amid a shaking world. Domestic disasters, such as Hurricane Helene, sometimes turn into challenges for presidential leadership. The disorder in the Middle East and Ukraine should be presidential campaign issues. Neither really is.

Serious questions have been raised about the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to Hurricane Helene. But with the onset of Hurricane Milton’s path through Florida, the overwhelming scale of the human tragedy isn’t giving the relief debate much political traction.

In the 1960 presidential contest between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, the Cold War with the Soviet Union preoccupied the candidates and voters. That’s not happening today despite politically significant wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East that could disrupt the world order. Both call out for presidential leadership.

Here, Ms. Harris may pay a higher political price. She, not Mr. Trump, is the current officeholder, but she has chosen to subordinate her views on Israel to Mr. Biden’s, whose “cease-fire" mantra looks increasingly irrelevant to the battle’s daily realities.

Her “60 Minutes" answer on Israel was a trip to the Harris salad bar: “. . . an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles, which include the need for humanitarian aid, the need for this war to end . . ." The world is giving Vice President Harris an opportunity to reveal her commander-in-chief skills, and she isn’t taking it.

Mr. Trump’s default answer is that none of this happened when he was president, but that doesn’t provide much clarity on his current views. The candidates’ stand-offishness is sucking the importance out of an issue on voters’ minds.

If a generalized enthusiasm gap emerges in these final weeks, it will be hard to predict its effect on turnout among key demographic groups—undecided voters, young Democrats, college students or minority voters. But at the moment, the most exciting thing out there is taking place on baseball and football fields.

Write henninger@wsj.com.