In my time as a political consultant, I observed that carrying out a campaign strategy was surprisingly simple. You settled on a basic strategy, emphasizing the candidate’s strong points on issues and character, framing the election in terms favorable to most voters. Then you just carried it out.
Almost always, events would intrude — campaign gaffes, unfavorable public polls, media controversies or surprise initiatives by the opposition. At such points, you’d get lots of advice, from inside and outside the campaign, about how you had to change course and do things differently. The hard part was distinguishing between the nine times out of 10 in which you should — diplomatically, if possible — ignore such advice and stick to the strategy, and the one time out of 10 when you should change course.
Looking on from afar, I think there’s a good chance Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has reached such a point.
Much of Harris’ strategy from President Joe Biden’s withdrawal on July 21, and even before, was obvious: emphasize former President Donald Trump’s character flaws, build on Democratic voters’ enthusiasm that they were no longer stuck with a sure loser, show off the best candidate’s smile since Ronald Reagan’s.
The hard part was dealing with issues. The Biden-Harris record on inflation and immigration is highly unpopular. Beyond that, on her own as a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Harris had taken a number of “woke” positions on issues that are not shared by anything like a majority of general election voters.
Banning fracking, a major industry in Pennsylvania. Decriminalizing illegal border crossing. Abolishing nongovernment health insurance. A mandatory buyback (i.e., confiscation) of so-called assault weapons. Major cuts in funding for U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Government-paid gender transition surgery for detained illegal immigrants.
How to deal with these now-inconvenient facts? The Harris strategy has been to sweep them aside. Focus, as the candidate of change, on the future.
Otherwise, hide the candidate — and trust a mostly sympathetic press, something like 90% of whose members want to see Trump lose, not to press hard on any subject that might not help the campaign.
This has mostly seemed to work. In the single interview on Aug. 29 that Harris submitted to in her first month as presidential candidate, with Walz included, CNN’s Dana Bash did ask her to explain her changes on issues. “My values haven’t changed,” Harris said, not responding to the question.
This strategy has worked, up to a point. Poll averages two weeks after the debate show Harris a couple of points ahead of Trump nationally and competitive in target states. Poll analyst Nate Silver’s model Monday gave her a 53% chance of winning the Electoral College.
But that’s well below the 71% chance it gave former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just before the 2016 election. The RealClearPolitics average of recent polls shows Trump at least 1% ahead in states with 246 electoral votes, Harris that far ahead in states with 226.
Independent analyst Mark Halperin perceives a more pessimistic outlook among Democratic strategists than public polls suggest, particularly over what specifically she would do as president and whether she’s “super liberal.”
“The general worry among some Democrats is that she’s not trying to address these concerns,” Halperin said in a recent livestream on the YouTube channel 2WAY.
There’s an obvious strategy here for Republicans: fill in the blanks. Harris’ strategy left 28% of voters in the New York Times-Siena Sept. 3-8 survey saying they “felt they needed to know more” about Harris compared to only 9% for Trump. Republicans have less money than Democrats, but they can still run barrages of TV ads highlighting Harris’ previous liberal positions and questioning whether she’s going to pursue them once she’s elected.
There’s video of her support for government-paid inmate transgender surgeries, which prompted an embarrassing correction by Time and an unacknowledged error by the normally well-informed Susan Glasser in the legendarily fact-checked New Yorker. And the Daily Mail just unearthed video of Harris chanting, “Down, down with deportation” with hate hoaxer Jussie Smollett.
In 1988, as Post columnist Richard Cohen reported, Michael Dukakis, a much more serious practitioner of public policy than Harris, lost his huge poll lead in part because of ads pointing out that for 11 years, he had supported a policy of releasing on weekend furloughs prisoners who had been sentenced to life without parole.
Democratic strategists and much of the press tried to ignore the issue or dismiss the ads as racism. The better strategy would have been an early confession of error and a promise to avoid such extreme stands in the future.
Harris strategists rejected that strategy back in July and hoped they could glide to victory on joyful vibes and with the help of a press determined not to ferret out any inconvenient truths.
Now, six weeks out and with odds not significantly better than 50/50, they seem to be wondering whether this is one of the nine out of 10 times when they should not change their strategy, or the one out of 10 times when they should.
Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of “The Almanac of American Politics.”
