Can Kamala charm swing voters? Most of them have already fallen for Trump

Donald Trump, love him or hate him, has by any measure succeeded in forging the most intense charismatic bond with his supporters of any American politician in recent memory — perhaps, of any in history. Part of the reason is that he projects an image of strength — even if it is the strength of a bully, and mostly false. He also knows, instinctively, how to reach supporters in their own language. Elite commentators mock Trump for his garbled syntax and spelling, for his love of crude insults, for his language of “us versus them”. They compare him with the proverbial drunk uncle ranting at the holiday table. But, of course, many people have ranting relatives. You may not take them seriously, but they are still family. And social media only heightens the sense of familiarity that Trump instils — and that is crucial to the charismatic bond — because their feeds deliberately mix posts from politicians with ones from family members and friends. Trump fits right into the feed in a way that most Democratic politicians have failed to do. Harris sounds like a politician on social media. Trump does not.

Most important — and this is a point that elite commentators generally miss — Trump’s charismatic bond with his supporters is reinforced, rather than shaken, by his constant outrages: his lying, his law-breaking, his racism, his threats of violence. The point is not whether his supporters believe him, take him seriously, or are ready to follow him in an attack on democracy. The point is that he so flagrantly, and joyfully, breaks the rules of American society and politics, again and again. For men and women who believe that those rules are rigged against them by corrupt and feckless elites, this behaviour is thrilling. The fact that Trump is transgressing matters far more than the particular rules being transgressed.

Of course, the hard core of MAGA supporters who feel the bond most intensely amounts only to a minority of the electorate, concentrated among whites with non-elite educations — although not just struggling ones (if one paradigmatic Trump voter is an unemployed factory worker on disability, another is a successful car dealer). But the elections of 2016 and 2020 have both shown that plenty of other Americans are sufficiently tolerant of Trump and receptive to his message to keep the presidential election agonisingly close.

Which brings us to Kamala Harris, and her brand of charisma. In most ways, it is much more conventional than Trump’s, in line with that of Democratic politicians going back to John F. Kennedy. Harris is unquestionably glamorous: a beautiful woman who dresses elegantly if not extravagantly and has a 500-watt smile. She speaks passionately and inspiringly about the subjects she cares about the most. During her debate with Trump, she was hesitant, even floundering for the first 15 minutes, and then came a question about abortion. In a moment, her voice grew stronger, her sentences more fluid, her emotions came to the fore. And as she gained confidence, she began to needle Trump more effectively, bringing the ranting uncle to the surface. Among her supporters, her gender and racial background are also, inescapably, central to her charismatic appeal. For voters who appreciate the continuing power of sexism and racism in American society, Harris’s story is naturally seen as that most instinctively appealing of narratives: the triumph of the underdog. But at the same time, most voters see Harris, with her long career in politics, as a member of the American elite — far more than Trump, the perennial angry outsider despite his vast fortune.

Harris has done an excellent job of exciting her base of supporters, but, overall, her support remains softer than Trump’s. Trump’s charismatic appeal has, by this point, turned the MAGA movement into a cult. He can do and say virtually anything, and his supporters will not desert him. The Democratic Party is a more normal political party. Members of its progressive wing support Harris, but also distrust her recent shifts towards the centre on economic policy, on immigration, on foreign policy in general (where she is hawkish in a way reminiscent of Hillary Clinton), and especially on Israel-Palestine. Put simply, Harris’s support is less stable than Trump’s. She has the tricky job of holding onto her base, while convincing the small number of centrist swing voters left in the swing states that she is not a madly woke socialist. This is what will decide the election. So far, she has accomplished the first task (thanks to the perceived danger of Trump and the lack of credible Left-wing alternatives) but not the second.

Harris’s challenge is similar to that of the only other person of colour to have received a presidential nomination (and another unquestioned member of the American elite): Barack Obama. Her charismatic appeal is also similar to his, as a (relatively) young, fresh, inspiring person of colour who has overcome great odds to rise to the top of the American political system. Obama is a far better orator than Harris, but Harris does better than Obama in personal interactions with voters. She has an instinctive ease and sympathy that Obama often seems to lack (he moves too easily into lecture mode). If I have one serious criticism of the Harris campaign so far, it is that it has not done nearly enough to highlight this side of the candidate, most likely out of fear that a verbal flub or mistake might go viral — and Harris is indeed prone to such moments. She has been criticised as well for her changes of position over the years, and her lack of specific policy proposals, but these are charges that could be levelled against most American politicians, and, in any case, Trump is far worse on both scores. But Harris should be doing town halls, and sit-downs with ordinary voters at every possible opportunity, and she is not.

This is not the only reason why Harris, despite everything she has done right, has been unable to reach beyond her base and pull ahead of Trump in the polls. Many things have changed in America since 2008, and there are simply no longer many white swing voters left who might be swayed by Harris’s charisma — almost certainly fewer than was the case with Obama.

The problem, then, is not Harris’s lack of charisma, but a change in her audience. For one thing, populist distrust and resentment has grown far stronger than it was in 2008, turning many more voters against any candidate perceived as elite. In 2008, Obama carried Ohio, Indiana and Iowa, three midwestern states whose white working-class populations had already suffered strongly from the loss of factory jobs. These jobs have mostly not returned. In addition, Republicans have worked hard to present immigration as the principal cause of social decline and as a threat. In Indiana and Iowa, the percentage of foreign-born residents has doubled, or close to it, since 2008. In Ohio — where Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance have lied about Haitian immigrants eating household pets — it has gone up by 50%. Perhaps not surprisingly, all three states are now firmly in the Republican column. A large number of white voters in these states — even those without elite education — still saw Obama as charismatic 16 years ago. They don’t see Kamala Harris in the same way. The same factors challenge her in other swing states, especially all-crucial Pennsylvania (a state which, as a friend of mine quips, consists of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and “Pennsyltucky”).

Secondly, the partisan political divide in the US has petrified to an almost unbelievable extent, not only because of Trump, but because of the Republican Party more generally, and also a changed media environment. Soon after Obama’s inauguration in 2009, anger at Washington for not punishing the finance industry for the previous year’s financial crisis led to the birth of the “Tea Party”: the direct ancestor of Trumpism in its conservative nationalist populism, and its scorn for the niceties of American political life. In the House of Representatives, Tea Party members adopted scorched-earth policies towards the Obama administration, exciting their supporters, defeating perceived “RINOs” (“Republicans in Name Only”) in primary elections, and forcing the entire party to double down on the obstructionist brand of political total warfare first pioneered by Newt Gingrich in the Nineties. Meanwhile, Fox News expanded its influence and inspired imitators (notably the Sinclair group of local TV stations). Social media, still in its infancy in 2008 (Facebook was four years old that year; Twitter, two) grew into a behemoth. More than ever, today, Americans live in media bubbles, reading only heavily partisan stories that reinforce their existing opinions. For this reason as well, there are simply far fewer white voters than in 2008 who can be swayed by the charismatic appeal of a candidate like Obama or Harris, and these are the voters Harris needs to win.

And finally, Obama had one massive advantage that Harris lacks: he was running as the insurgent, against a Republican Party that had presided over a disastrous war and, in the fall of 2008, a terrifying economic collapse. His very simple campaign message — “change” — met the moment and drew enough swing voters to give him a powerful victory.

Kamala Harris cannot exactly run a “change” campaign. Yes, her core supporters hate Donald Trump even more than they hated George W. Bush. Trump’s own record in office — despite his absurd and mendacious boasts — was marked above all by his disastrous handling of the worst American health emergency in a century. Democrats don’t want him back and will turn out in large numbers to say so on 5 November, and this matters. But in the country at large, memories of the Trump administration’s failures have faded, and Joe Biden’s apparent inability to contain inflation has cast Trump’s good luck with the economy in a retrospective golden glow (in fact, the Biden administration dealt with what was a world-wide post-pandemic phenomenon far better than almost any other nation, but no matter — Americans don’t pay attention to foreign news).

And so, in an America where membership of “the elite” has become more politically toxic than ever, where Trump’s rule-breaking gains a sneaking sympathy from more people than ever, and where the political divide seems set in granite, Kamala Harris’s smile, passion and inspiring story may not be enough to get her over the top. It is Donald Trump’s brand of charisma that may yet win the day.

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David A. Bell is a history professor at Princeton with a particular interest in the political culture of Enlightenment and revolutionary France. His latest book is Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution.

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