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October 8, 2024 - 2:54am
This evening, Kamala Harris sat down with the CBS programme 60 Minutes as part of a media reboot. After avoiding the national press throughout the past two months, her campaign has recently announced a series of appearances on podcasts and TV shows. However, this interview suggests that, while the media strategy might have changed, the campaign’s internal logic remains the same.
Harris’s 60 minutes interview has a wall-of-vibes dynamic. Policy details were scorned in favour of vague talking points. When asked about how she would pay for her expansive new spending programmes, she pivoted to claims about how the wealthy needed to pay their fair share. In a telling exchange, Harris refused three times to say whether or not it was a mistake for the Biden administration to loosen border controls as much as it did for the first three-and-a-half years in office. Where exactly Harris stood on many policy questions was no clearer by the end of the interview than at the beginning. Instead, viewers were treated to invocations of “consensus” — and a handy reminder that Liz Cheney is a Kamala Harris fan.
In recent years, the electorate has become increasingly polarised along educational lines, with college-educated voters becoming a pillar of the Democratic Party. Recent polling analysis from CNN gives Harris a historic advantage with college-educated Americans, winning this group by 21 points. By way of comparison, Hillary Clinton won this group by 15 points, and Barack Obama won voters with a college degree by only two points in 2012.
Harris’s vibes-based strategy seems optimised to appeal to this group. Many college-educated suburbanites are repelled by Donald Trump’s pugnacious brand of politics, and they are also sceptical of the adversarial tone that often accompanies populism of both the Left and the Right. In appearance, Harris seems distinctly non-threatening.
Perhaps her most spirited moment in the 60 Minutes interview came when she claimed that Vladimir Putin “would be sitting in Kyiv right now” if Trump were president. The domestic challenges that weigh on working families — such as inflation, the border crisis, or economic upward mobility — didn’t seem to generate the same passion.
Early on in the campaign, some observers on the Right worried that Harris could try to take the populist fight to Trump. By leaning into bread-and-butter issues like healthcare and benefits for families, she could outflank Trump from the populist Left. So far, the Vice-President has declined that strategy. Instead, she may be hoping to run up the score among the gentry progressive class.
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SubscribeI wish people would wake up and look around. Painting the populist as a fasc!st threat to democracy isn’t unique to Trump or the U.S. They’re doing the same thing in France, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands. They did it in Italy too, until Meloni was elected and the world didn’t end. These populists are not suddenly appearing at the same time by coincidence.