Don’t get me wrong. I am a fan of joy, hope, kindness and optimism. As political auras, such vibes are clearly superior to weirdness, despair, misanthropy and pessimism. At least I hope they are. I am also a sceptic of those who say that Kamala Harris should churn out more wonkish economic plans. As the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Jeremy Shapiro points out, we are living in a post-policy world. Shapiro’s lament over the “unbearable lightness of policy” in America’s 2024 election rightly observes that Donald Trump has been running from Project 2025 — his side’s labyrinthine stab at wonkishness. It is a sober truism of politics today that the more policies you lay out, the larger a target you present. Just ask Hillary Clinton, the Olympic gold medallist of lists and plans. The last Republican nominee to publish conventional policy blueprints was Mitt Romney in 2012. Look what happened to him.
Yet positive vibes are unlikely to be enough for Harris. In the last week, she and her running mate Tim Walz have been blitzing the late night shows and various podcasts, most of them soft interviews. We also live in a post-literate world. From the Call her Daddy podcast to The Howard Stern Show, and Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, Harris has been on a tour of personality-revealing interactions with sympathetic interviewers (a better term would be “conversationalists”).
From these we have learned that her favourite Prince album is 1999, that she does not share her husband Doug Emhoff’s taste for Depeche Mode, that she owns a Glock, that she likes Formula One racing, works out for 30 to 45 minutes a day and is thoroughly genial company. Brick by brick, podcast by podcast, the Harris-Walz campaign’s goal is to tap the world of semi-apathetic voters. In an age of hyper-fragmented media, America has an archipelago of hard-to-reach potential voters, each small island of which could tip the race.
But she faces a macro problem with men, especially younger male voters who Trump is relentlessly targeting with his so-called “bro outreach”. Trump leads Harris by 11 points with male voters, according to the latest New York Times/Siena poll. For a great account of Trump’s testosterone-centred podcast itinerary read this New Yorker piece on his drive to recruit “terminally online young men”. It is worth noting that Trump’s most talked about television ads in the past few weeks — and a relentless focus of his campaign — target Harris’s previous stance in favour of gender-affirming surgery for detained migrants and federal prisoners. It comes from an answer she provided to an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire in 2019.
“Kamala is for they/them,” says the Trump ad. “President Trump is for you.” That message resonates with a lot of voters, including the suburban women who are otherwise so receptive to Harris’s message of female bodily autonomy. They have daughters too and can easily be riled by stories of transgender girls joining the school athletics team, or transgender women in jails. We should not forget the scandal over a transgender rapist in a woman’s jail that added to the woes of the formidable first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, and helped force her resignation from office. Scotland is arguably the most woke part of the UK.
The vibe Harris still needs to project is anti-Berkeley. Too many Americans are questioning whether she has the toughness to be commander-in-chief. My partial remedy for this would be for Harris to demonstrate via a Bill Clinton-style “sister Souljah” moment that she is not a weird Californian liberal. She could really pick any issue — such as opposing puberty blockers for adolescents, mocking the more outlandish DEI Orwellianisms of Robin DiAngelo, or perhaps making clear she disapproved of the Covid-era law enforcement no-go zones in Seattle or Portland. The specific hook is not as important as the general message she would be sending. The argument against this is that she would provoke howls of betrayal from the progressive left. But that would be exactly the point. Harris should also come up with an answer to the question of what she would have done differently to Joe Biden. The response she gave on The View this week — “there is not a thing that comes to mind” — was a mistake. Harris cannot claim to be turning the page without giving concrete examples of how she would differ from Biden.
I am turning this week to William Galston, the Brookings Institution senior fellow, veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns, and now a columnist at the Wall Street Journal. Bill, you have kindly spent countless hours with me over a longer period than I care to remember patiently tutoring me in the idiosyncrasies of American politics. You worked for Bill Clinton’s triumphant 1992 campaign and also Walter Mondale’s ill-fated 1984 one. What does your experience tell you that Harris should do in the remaining 26 days of this one? Or are we living in such a different media world that the lessons of past campaigns are less relevant?
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William Galston responds
Vibes can be useful politically when they comport with the temper of the times. When they don’t, they can be damaging. In 1968, Hubert Humphrey tried to run on the “politics of joy.” While this was a fair representation of his chronic ebullience, it rang hollow in one of the least joyful moments in American history. By contrast, Ronald Reagan’s “It’s Morning in America” was one of the most effective political ads ever, mostly because it caught the national mood in the spring of 1984: It has been a long dark night, but a hopeful new dawn is breaking.
This year is more of a split decision. On the one hand, expressing joy and happiness usually makes a candidate seem more likeable, as it has for Kamala Harris. On the other, it won’t do much to persuade undecided voters that you have the vision and strength to lead effectively.
The election is close or tied in every state that matters, and there has been little change in the polls during the past month. To win, Harris will have to do something different in the campaign’s closing weeks.
Gender-based appeals have been more pervasive this year than in any other. Much of the Republican National Convention — and of Donald Trump’s campaign — has been directed at men without a college education, Hulk Hogan’s fans. Unlike Hillary Clinton, Harris has not made breaking the class ceiling a major theme. But her passionate defence of abortion rights and her emphasis on the “care economy” resonate far more with women than with men. (It speaks volumes that she chose to release her proposal for home healthcare on The View.)
This strategy threatens to undo a political achievement that helped propel Joe Biden to victory in 2020 — his strong performance among men, whom he lost to Trump by only 2 points while carrying women by 11. Four years earlier, Hillary Clinton did slightly better than Biden among women but lost men by 11 points, dooming her candidacy in the Blue Wall states. As Democrats are starting to recognise, this history could repeat itself next month.
What to do? It’s pretty late for a “Sista Souljah” moment, which probably would be dismissed as a transparently political stunt. Instead, Harris should retool her stump speech to emphasise strength and effective leadership. She should be tough on China’s unfair subsidies to its export industries and on domestic oligopolies that raise prices for American consumers. She should promise to veto new tax breaks to wealthy individuals and large corporations. She should denounce the proposition that a college education is the only path to success, and work to expand high-quality jobs for people with less than a bachelors degree. She should make it clear that fighting crime with better policing serves the interests of low-income and minority communities while underscoring her record in California as a hard-nosed prosecutor. She should talk tough on immigration, but she won’t be believed unless she acknowledges that the administration’s pre-2024 immigration policies were flawed. At the same time, she should attack Trump’s planned mass deportation of immigrants who arrived in the US illegally as brutal and unworkable. And she should say forthrightly that resorting to violence undermines the legitimacy of any cause, even movements for racial justice.
None of this means that Harris should stop talking about reproductive freedom or aid for young children and the homebound sick and elderly. But the people who care about these issues have already gotten the message.
This said, I don’t see how she can undo the self-inflicted damage from her ill-judged promise to provide taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgery for prisoners and illegal immigrants in detention. This is the kind of thing politicians who spent their early careers in San Francisco find unproblematic, but it plays poorly on the national stage. She may be able to mitigate the damage by changing her position, as she did with fracking to give herself a chance in Pennsylvania. While she’s at it, she might consider softening her stance on electric vehicle subsidies and incentives, which 57 per cent of Michigan voters oppose.
Some Democratic strategists would dismiss my strategy as unduly defensive and self-defeating. You’ve done what you can to introduce yourself positively to the American people, they would advise Harris. Now you should go on offence by mounting a fierce attack on Trump’s character and intentions. Your best bet is to make Trump unacceptable to those of his supporters who back him reluctantly. They may not end up voting for you, but you’ll gain nevertheless if they just decide not to vote at all.
I believe that Harris needs to focus on shoring up her defences where she is weak. Others believe that she should give priority to attacking Trump where he is weak. This is a strategic choice that only Harris can make. Her worst mistake would be to assume that she’s holding a winning hand and needs only to play it out to the end. Given the stakes, retooling Harris’s message may sound like a meagre response to an existential challenge. But in a country divided evenly as well as deeply, even a modest strategic change could prove decisive.
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