What Harris learned from Hillary Don't mention the 'deplorables'

The switch, at any rate, had an immediate effect, reversing Trump’s erstwhile advantage in the polls and putting Harris comfortably ahead, a lead she’s retained. The presidential race was transformed from one between a vigorous if obnoxious candidate (Trump), and one who is demonstrably incapable (Biden). It’s now a fight in which the 78-year-old Trump is the flailing maniac and Harris the younger and relatively normal politician.

It’s true that Harris is famously inarticulate, whipping up word salads with the skill of a master chef. But even that reinforces her relative normalcy. So far, the Harris campaign has shown that it has learned from the mistakes of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. The former California senator has not yet dismissed a quarter of voters as “a basket of deplorables”, as Clinton did in her infamous speech eight years ago. And unlike Clinton, Harris hasn’t neglected the Midwest, with its swing votes in the electoral college.

The widely ridiculed phrase “the politics of joy” to describe Harris’s banal and conventional campaign was rapidly abandoned. But the opposite of the politics of joy is the politics of fear, which Biden had made central to his floundering campaign. And unlike Biden, Harris has not made saving democracy a major issue of her campaign. Nor has she gratuitously offended millions of Republican voters by describing them as “quasi-fascist”.

Politics 101, in its American guise anyway, teaches that during general elections nominees should compete to win the political centre. Ever since her installation as the Democratic Party’s substitute presidential candidate, Harris, despite her long record of far-Left positions on social and cultural issues, has been sprinting to the Right as fast as she can. Consider guns. Rebutting accusations that she’s soft on crime and hostile to the Second Amendment, Harris has highlighted her own gun ownership, telling Oprah: “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.”

Another lesson of Politics 101 is that parties should try to win over independents and split the opposition. The disciplined, professional Harris campaign has been following the book in both respects.

To appeal to independents, Harris has been emphasising her support for abortion rights. And to win over disgruntled Bush Republican voters, dismayed by the rise of Trump and the populist Right, Harris has gone so far as to praise Dick Cheney. Despite being denounced by many Democrats as a war criminal, Cheney announced he would vote for her instead of Trump. Harris, for her part, was quick to thank the former vice president, praising him for “what he has done to serve our country”.

Not since the Nazi-Soviet Pact have so many Leftist heads exploded. But the cliché about politics and strange bedfellows remains as true as ever.

The competence of the Harris campaign is also evident from what she’s left unsaid. In her earlier political career, and as a product of the Left-wing San Francisco Democratic machine, Harris had been identified with hard-edged racial identity politics. Before dropping out in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Harris attacked Biden for his erstwhile opposition to busing, common in the Seventies to achieve quota-based racial balance in public schools. It was a policy so unpopular that even progressive Democrats stopped talking about it years ago.

In her presidential campaign, however, Harris wisely has taken care to distance herself from identity politics. Her campaign has not emphasised her black and Asian ancestry, nor has she made breaking the gender glass ceiling central to her campaign. In this, again she’s repudiated the example of Hillary Clinton.

Have Kamala Harris and her aides run the perfect campaign? Even though she has done an interview with tough questions on 60 Minutes in addition to being interviewed by friendlier hosts like Oprah Winfrey and Alex Cooper on the Call Her Daddy podcast, some in the media fault her for not doing more interviews with major media organisations. But then they would, wouldn’t they? To date, the interviews apparently have not hurt or helped in the polls, and as long as she has a respectable lead over Trump, Harris would be foolish to risk open-ended interviews in which something she said could be used against her. In any event, anyone who still hasn’t decided between Harris and Trump are probably “low-information voters” who pay little attention to politics — and so are unlikely to be swayed by wonkish proposals on tax benefits.

If, moreover, the Harris campaign has been a masterclass in how to run a presidential campaign at short notice, the opposition offers lessons in how to blow a lead. When it became clear that Trump would be the Republican presidential nominee for the third time running, many Republicans hoped that America and the world would see a “new Trump” — more disciplined and less abrasive.

In the event, their hopes were dashed. The wheels came off the Trump campaign bus during his speech at the Republican convention, when he squandered much of the goodwill he had gained after the assassination attempt, characteristically launching into a rambling and self-centred diatribe. Since then, Trump has thrashed about without gaining traction, as it has become clear that his lead over the deposed Biden reflected Biden’s unpopularity, not support for him.

In his televised debate with Harris, for instance, Trump engaged in bizarrely anachronistic red-baiting: “Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics, and he taught her well.” On his Truth Social account, and channelling Joe McCarthy, Trump riffed on the same theme. “Comrade Kamala Harris is terrible for our country,” he said. “She is a communist, has always been a communist, and will always be a communist.” It goes without saying that this kind of stuff may play well with the lunatic fringe. But when Trump should be appealing to undecided moderates, it counts as political malpractice, especially when Harris herself is totally at home on the corporate wing of the Democratic party alongside Hillary Clinton and Wall Street.

Nor did Trump stop there. An even greater example of political ineptitude was his questioning of Harris’s race — “Is she Indian or is she black?” — in front of the National Association of Black Journalists. This rhetorical incontinence is all the more self-defeating, of course, given that growing numbers of black and Hispanic voters have been casting their ballots for Republicans, though majorities of each group still support the Democrats.

With Trump as their standard-bearer, the Republicans cannot take advantage of Harris’s inanity. Trump himself seems unable to make a coherent case for his own candidacy. Quite apart from his own foibles, meanwhile, Trump’s choice of running mate also illustrates his failings as a candidate. J.D. Vance may impress even his opponents with his mastery of detail — but much of that comes by comparing the Ohio senator with Trump himself.

Will their different styles of campaigning translate into similar personal styles of governing? Probably not. In the case of Kamala Harris, who has hastily sought to reinvent herself as a bland and uncontroversial centrist during the campaign, pressure from progressive interest groups along with her own instincts would probably cause her to move to the Left on policies like immigration and climate change if elected.  In the case of Trump, his shambolic first term suggests that in a second term he would be as undisciplined as a chief executive as he has been as a candidate.

If presidential campaigning were an Olympic sport, then, the Harris campaign would bring home the gold. But in spite of her competence, she could still lose in November. As always, swing states are key. And though she’ll almost certainly win the popular vote, as the Democrats have done in every election bar one since 1992, a handful of voters in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin could yet deny Harris her prize.

One factor here is the “shy Trump voters” — and who knows how many there are. But a more important factor may be the burden of the last four years. Harris has had to signal that her presidency would be different, without criticising the Biden administration in which she served as vice president. The most effective criticism the Trump campaign has made against Harris is therefore this: if you propose doing this or that now, why didn’t you push for it as vice president over the last four years?

And then there’s the fickleness of voters, which can defeat even the most professional of campaigns. American political operatives are fond of the fable of the dog food company whose executives held an urgent meeting to discuss why an advertising campaign to sell their newest product had failed. After a number of senior executives had proposed various possible explanations, a junior executive speculated: “Maybe the dogs just don’t like the dog food.” In just a few weeks, the Harris campaign will discover whether America’s electoral canines are fans of what they’re offered.