How Harris Beat Trump
How did Kamala Harris succeed where dozens of Republicans, Hillary Clinton, and (ultimately) Joe Biden failed?
As of this writing — just after what was technically the second presidential debate of the 2024 cycle — Vice President Kamala Harris is well on her way to an easy victory against former President Donald Trump. It may not be on the level of George H.W. Bush’s 1988 landslide, but something similar to Barack Obama’s no-sweat-in-hindsight 2012 re-election win looks feasible.
How does just one debate — and one that didn’t seem to move the needle — tell us that? Read on.
Harris “won” the debate itself in the eyes of most viewers. That represents a significant victory for her less-than-two-month-old candidacy. Debates rarely change minds, but they do underscore overall messages and themes in an election.
Since Harris replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, she has avoided media interviews and revealed little about her platform. Her campaign website’s policy section was a cut-and-paste job from the old Biden-Harris site.
No matter: Elections are not won and lost on policy minutiae but on over-arching narratives. They are won and lost based on the answer to that big question: “What is this election all about?”
During Biden’s disastrous June debate against Trump, the current President appeared inept and confused. Worse, he had a bad message: That Trump was and is an existential threat to the country. It’s been a losing message for nine years. In 2015 and 2016, Republican primary challengers fell like dominoes, each one claiming Trump was unfit for office. Hillary Clinton took her turn, and suffered one of the most surprising defeats in United States election history.
Since beating Trump in 2020 (thanks in part to the government’s uneven response to the COVID-19 pandemic), Biden hammered his predecessor’s unfitness to serve, likening Trump to the European fascists who ascended in the 1920s and 1930s to form the core of the Axis powers in World War II. Biden tried to channel righteous indignation against Trump and his “Ultra-MAGA” followers seeking to take back the halls of power. Up through his ill-fated debate, Biden continued to claim that if installed in the White House, Trump would never leave.
This was incredible messaging — as in, it wasn’t credible. Trump had already been President. The world had not, so far as we know, ended. Despite his incitement of the riot on January 6 and the uncouth move of ghosting his successor’s inauguration, Trump had indeed left the White House when he was supposed to. Biden’s attempts to frame Trump as a historic threat, rather than simply as a failed President, didn’t pass muster.
But more troubling for Biden was the unspoken question of why a sitting President, rather than running on his record, would spend all his time talking about how bad the last guy was? The Biden administration had passed legislation dealing with gun safety, inflation, and infrastructure. He would have had border security but for Republicans’ reneged support, too. Not all of those measures were popular, but getting legislation through Congress with bipartisan support isn’t nothing.
In most two-candidate elections, the big messages boil down to a simple construct: Somebody vs. Somebody Else. In this model, one candidate (“Somebody”) drives the messages, and the other (“Somebody Else”) reacts; Somebody Else’s main message is usually something like, “Hey, don’t vote for that guy!” In most elections, “Somebody” — for all their faults — winds up ahead, because voters and supporters get more motivated for the candidate making a positive case than for the candidate making a negative case.
Incredibly — as in, it’s hard to believe it happened — sitting President Biden completely vacated the “Somebody” role, and let himself become the “Somebody Else” in his own reelection bid.
In her debate against Trump, Harris did what Biden wouldn’t (or possibly couldn’t): She took control of the election’s narrative. She discussed her plans (the “opportunity economy”) and boasted about what she considered the current administration’s successes. She echoed the forward-facing themes from her campaign speeches about representing a new generation of leaders, and reiterated her ubiquitous tagline, “We’re not going back!”
This messaging put Trump in the rare position of playing defense. Through his roughshod run through two Republican primaries and two-and-a-half general elections, Trump typically operated as the 800-pound gorilla on stage (even when, as during the 2024 GOP debates, he isn’t even on the stage). In his debate against Harris, he became the “Somebody Else.”
And it wasn’t just messaging, either. Harris made her victory complete with her non-verbal behavior during the debate. When Trump spoke, she frequently looked at him with a mix of bemusement, disbelief, and even pity — as if she were watching an overserved uncle making himself a spectacle on the dance floor at a family wedding. When she chided Trump, she traded Biden’s self-righteous anger for the weary exasperation of a middle-school teacher. (Trump, in contrast, rarely looked at Harris when he wasn’t speaking; he mostly looked down to gather his thoughts or stared forward with a gloomy expression.)
In short, Harris treated Trump like a joke that everyone was in on except him.
Unsurprisingly, the debate was not a decisive event. Immediate post-debate polls show that this week’s spectacle did little to move preferences in the near term. But it did provide Harris with her biggest platform yet on which to demonstrate the messaging strategy she has executed so well over the first weeks of her candidacy. More than that, it allowed her to show that she could stick to that strategy while going head-to-head on the same stage as Trump.
With less than two months left in the 2024 Presidential campaign, Harris has dictated the big narratives — and in doing so, has taken a big step toward victory in November.
