There are just under three weeks until Election Day, which means Kamala Harris’ campaign is pulling out all the stops. She does everything: she takes part in television and podcast interviews and campaigns with supporters. She’s trying to appeal to the all-important swing voter who likes Nikki Haley and hates Trump by talking about her Glock, hanging out with Liz Cheney and saying she’d put a Republican in her Cabinet. And she reaches left to appeal to the disaffected Bernie voter by, uh…well, whatever.

And now the campaign has announced it is letting go of “the big dog”: former President Bill Clinton. Having just delivered a garbled and stale-sounding speech at the Democratic National Convention, Bill is hitting the road on behalf of Harris – not to woo Republicans who don’t particularly like the Democratic former president, but to woo voters on the Country and “Younger Black Men” in Georgia and North Carolina, according to CNN.

I’m willing to believe that this isn’t just to please old Bill; There is probably some private polling that has convinced the campaign that this will be beneficial. However, there is plenty of publicly available data that makes this step a headache or a hair-raising experience, depending on the case.

By YouGov’s unscientific standards, Bill Clinton isn’t particularly popular. In fact, he is only 1 percentage point more favorable than the hated current President Joe Biden, despite 25 years of respite from the scandals that marred Clinton’s second term and led to his impeachment. He is less popular than Harris, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, to name a few. You’re scratching your head here.

But given the specific demographics in these two states—rural voters and younger black men in North Carolina and Georgia—Bill Clinton is a fantastic and special liability. You’re tearing your hair out here.

Let’s start with North Carolina. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, North Carolina lost a staggering 328,126 manufacturing jobs from 1994 to 2018, right after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, arguably Clinton’s most important piece of legislation in his first term. Of course, it wasn’t just NAFTA – some of those job losses were also due to the China-World Trade Organization agreement that Clinton signed in his second term. North Carolina trailed only the much larger California in the number of manufacturing jobs lost: by one estimate, the Tar Heel State lost nearly half of its jobs in that sector.

Rural North Carolina was hit particularly hard. The textile, clothing and furniture industries, once mainstays of the state’s rural economy (which has a significant non-white rural population), were completely depleted. This was a long, slow and painful process, of which Clinton remains the face: “Even free trade advocates say the pact and subsequent trade agreements have dealt a severe blow to rural southeastern North Carolina,” an article in the Fayetteville Observer from 2014 NAFTA.

Rural voters’ leaning toward the Republican Party is believed to be partly a result of these policies. The political damage of these measures has been so lasting that the Biden administration has devoted significant political resources to attempting to undo it. The incumbent president broke decisively with the free trade orthodoxy of Clinton’s Democratic Party and pursued an aggressive industrial strategy, allocating significant resources to rebuilding the domestic manufacturing sector. Harris is the vice president of the administration that currently does this.

Equally ludicrous is the idea that Bill Clinton would be particularly persuasive to younger black voters. Also in his first term, Clinton passed the now infamous Crime Bill of 1994, his other signature bill. It is an oversimplification to say that the bill caused modern mass incarceration, a trend that was already widespread in the United States in the mid-1990s, and there is disagreement about what impact the bill even had on these shifts. But it was both a news law and a substance law; Clinton wanted the message to be that way tough on crimeand he wanted the Democrats, especially himself, to be the messengers.

From the ACLU’s perspective, the crime bill has “caused mass incarceration to increase even further.” It introduced mandatory minimums and longer sentences, entrenched racial disparities in drug sentencing between crack and cocaine, expanded eligibility for the death penalty, instituted mandatory life sentences for three-time offenders, and introduced harsher sentences for juveniles. All of these things have been overly experienced by black communities.

Thirty years after the bill’s passage, Harris is using Clinton to influence young black male voters in the South who may have been personally affected by his legacy, which has led them to face harsher punishments and more aggressive policing. Many may have a parent or family member who served an excessive amount of time in prison specifically because of Clinton’s policies. It doesn’t matter much whether the bill’s reputation outweighs its influence; His reputation is bad and Clinton goes on an embassy mission.

Not to mention the less policy-oriented and more lurid baggage Clinton carries with him, such as his connection to Jeffrey Epstein. Nor his allegations of sexual misconduct, which in and of themselves would make him a dubious replacement for a campaign that focuses on women’s rights, particularly the right to choose.

Democrats have used Bill before. In 2022, with Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Sean Patrick Maloney somehow on the ropes in a district that had beaten Biden by about 10 points two years earlier, Clinton reported to an event in his signature campaign croak back to the microphone if necessary. on Maloney’s behalf in the working-class New York suburbs where he lives. Maloney still lost.

Finally, if you’re still not convinced that this is a bad idea, let me tell you who thinks it’s brilliant: Newt Gingrich.