The 2024 election cycle has come down to its final fortnight. Every moment of campaign time takes on huge importance, especially considering how close the presidential race appears to be. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris need to make every minute count in the places where this election will be won or lost.

And as much as I love my adopted state of Texas, this ain't one of those places. 

So why will Kamala Harris spend a day in Houston on Friday? Especially for an event that doesn't have a venue yet?

Vice President Kamala Harris will be in Houston Friday to cap off the first week of early voting in Texas with a campaign rally.

She will attend a rally from 3 to 8 p.m. at a location to be announced in Houston that day, according to an events page seeking RSVPs made public on Tuesday. ...

While the margins of victory have narrowed in recent presidential contests statewide, Texas is still not considered a swing state. Trump won Texas by 5.6% in 2020. But, Harris County has turned into the biggest generator of Democratic votes in the state. Biden won Harris County by 13 points in 2020.

Aaaaaaaand ... so? Harris may get a slight boost in Harris County by showing up here, but that won't translate to support in Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin -- three states she has to win to beat Trump. Texas not only isn't a battleground state, it's not even close. We haven't seen a ton of polling here in the presidential race because Texas will be reliably red, but every poll aggregated in RCP shows Trump ahead outside of the margins of error. His RCP average right now is +5.7 and 51/45.3, right in line with his +5.8 margin of victory over Biden in 2020.

Earlier in the cycle, we have seen both candidates show up outside of the battleground states. Trump went to both New York and California last month, but those were likely primarily for fundraising, with rallies scheduled around them. Harris has done the same, which makes sense for the same reason. (Trump will be in New York again this week, too, but he's already leading the polling and may hope to shore up Republican incumbents in the House.) But fundraising is irrelevant right now, especially for Harris, who has a significant money advantage already. Plus, there just isn't enough time to spend the money to make the distraction worthwhile. 

Why isn't Harris spending her time in the "blue wall" states exclusively at this stage of the campaign? That's where her biggest risk is, and where Democrats worry most about an electoral catastrophe. She could spend time in Michigan, for instance, which looks almost too far gone to salvage.

Instead, they're sending someone else to Detroit while Harris plans events outside the battlegrounds:

NEWS

Eminem is set to introduce former President Obama tonight at a rally in Detroit for Kamala Harris. pic.twitter.com/syMJX9MeRq

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) October 22, 2024

This smells a lot like panic. Democrats sent Obama racing for Michigan on the last weekend of the 2016 election in a desperate and unsuccessful bid to prevent losing the state to Trump. They didn't send Hillary Clinton, whose negatives climbed throughout the campaign -- especially in the blue-wall states. 

It looks as though Democrats have some polling that suggests that Harris hurts herself more than she helps in these appearances. Sending her to Houston could be a plan to get Harris out of the way so that more popular surrogates can make the closing arguments in these states. The problem with that strategy, however, will be the same as it was in 2016 -- the candidate has no real argument except a sense of entitlement. With Hillary, it was all about her gender; with Harris, it's all about how awful Donald Trump is. 

If Kamala is in Houston ten days before the election, she has a problem -- and Democrats know it. 

But even then, why Texas? Why not build some buzz in a friendlier state, or shore up near-purple states like Virginia and New Mexico? Harris may have decided to try to assist Colin Allred's campaign to unseat Ted Cruz in the US Senate, but this looks like it has the potential for backfiring:

Harris’ visit signals national Democrats’ renewed interest in the race between Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and his Democratic challenger, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred of Dallas. Though Cruz remains favored, the contest is seen as one of Democrats’ few viable options to pick up a seat in the upper chamber, and an Allred win would be critical to Harris’ hopes of working with a Democratic Senate majority should she win in November.

Cruz leads Allred by an average of about 4 percentage points, according to FiveThirtyEight’s rolling average of recent public polls.

True, and RCP has it almost the same, at Cruz +4.5, 49.5/45. The last three polls have Cruz at or over 50%, however, and Cruz' debate performance against Allred probably moved the needle further in his direction. Furthermore, Allred has campaigned in part by attempting to distance himself from the Biden-Harris administration, especially on the border crisis and the economy. Showing up in Houston to talk about how much Allred supports her agenda does not seem like a great closing argument in Texas after nearly four years of malicious incompetence on the border. 

The Cruz campaign hasn't exactly been energetic in this cycle, but they are jumping all over this new Harris-Allred rally. The campaign sent out this statement by e-mail, and one can bet they're working on a closing-pitch ad along the same lines:

"Colin Allred is Kamala Harris. They have spent the last four years working hand-in-hand against Texans and the American people with their radical policies, whether those be pushing to allow boys in girls' sports, allowing dangerous illegal aliens to come into our country, or trying to destroy the oil and gas industry in Texas.

Colin and Kamala share an agenda, and now they'll share a stage for all Texans to see.” 

Perhaps we'll get surprised by the results, but this looks like a very bizarre campaign strategy. Harris is losing where she needs to win and campaigning where she doesn't as the clock runs out. I'd bet this gets a big mention in the post-mortems after November 5 if the current trends hold up. 

Addendum: I wrote this before the news about Trump appearing on Joe Rogan's podcast, which puts them both in Texas with ten days to go. The difference is that Trump's leading in these states while Harris is falling behind, and he's in Texas to speak to a national audience rather than a local event. If Trump did decide to do something with Cruz, he'd be much more of a help to Cruz than Harris would be for Allred, too.