Economy and immigration outweigh—not patents

In the end, Ms. Harris and the Democrats might win a coin-flip election by campaigning on abortion and democracy, just as Mr. Biden’s advocates hoped he would. But it’s far harder to be confident about that assumption today. After all, Mr. Biden had been trailing in the polls for essentially 10 straight months — long before the first presidential debate.

The polls have offered a long list of explanations for his weakness, and many of them had nothing to do with his age. A majority of voters have said the country is heading in the wrong direction. They have said the economic and political system in the country is broken. They’re deeply concerned about the economy and immigration — two of Mr. Trump’s strongest issues in surveys. In poll after poll, voters say they’re looking for change.

These challenges prevented Mr. Biden from making the election solely about democracy and abortion. It put him in a more challenging position than he was ahead of the 2020 election, when voters were most concerned by a pandemic and racial unrest that Mr. Trump was judged to have badly mishandled. The Biden campaign barely needed a vision for change in 2020: “Restore the soul of the nation” and a “return to normalcy” sufficed to capitalize on the desire for an end to the pandemic and the chaos of the Trump presidency.

Ms. Harris is a new face; to some extent, she might help satisfy the electorate’s desire for change, simply by being someone other than Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden. But she is still part of the Biden administration; she will be hobbled by many of the same challenges faced by Mr. Biden, and it’s not clear whether she is better positioned to overcome them. To do so, she would probably need to offer an optimistic and hopeful vision for the future, backed by a plausible agenda — something that her 2020 campaign largely failed to accomplish.

In fairness to Ms. Harris, it would be challenging for any Democrat today to advance a clear agenda for the future. Mr. Biden struggled to do so in his re-election campaign. The party has held power for almost 12 of the last 16 years, and it has exhausted much of its agenda; there aren’t many popular, liberal policies left in the cupboard. As long as voters remain dissatisfied with the status quo and the Democratic nominee, a campaign to defend the system might not be the slam dunk Democrats once thought it was.