The 8 Words That Could Lose Harris the Election
Is her offhand comment a one-off, or a sign that Kamala Harris is losing the beat on messaging?
Let’s get one thing out of the way at the jump: That headline is meant to be provocative. Of course, eight words alone cannot swing an election, especially not one for the President of the United States.
But they can signal trends.
When pro-life protesters interrupted Vice President Kamala Harris’s speech at a rally in La Crosse, Wisc., her witty comeback may have been her smartest off-the-cuff comment of the campaign so far: “Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally,” she told them, while joking that they wanted the “smaller one down the street.” The pro-Harris crowd ate it up, showering her with cheers and applause. The campaign proudly promoted it on social media, and some opportunistic entrepreneur is selling t-shirts with the quote.
The problem: It’s off-brand for the image Harris has built for the 2024 campaign so far. And it isn’t the only example of Harris straying off message lately.
Until now, Harris had avoided a trap that other opponents of Donald Trump have fallen into — including the former Democratic nominee, President Joe Biden. Instead of boasting about getting multiple pieces of bipartisan legislation through Congress or rallying supporters of his so-far stymied student loan forgiveness plans, the incumbent President ignored his own accomplishments and defined his reelection case almost entirely on his opponent’s shortcomings. It was a losing message even before Biden’s disastrous June debate.
When she became the presumptive Democratic nominee in July, Harris immediately moved to fix that mistake. Her campaign tagline, “A New Way Forward,” nods at the polls that showed voters dissatisfied with both major party choices; in doing so she managed to create a point of contrast between herself and both previous candidates.
Harris and her campaign have been even more intelligent in how they talked about Trump. Biden tried to portray Trump as an existential threat to American democracy who has the ability to end the country as we know it — a preposterous claim for many, since Trump has already been president and the world did not end. (Even if the COVID-19 pandemic did feel a bit like the exposition of a post-apocalyptic horror/sci-fi picture.)
Harris, on the other hand, scoffed at Trump and chose to talk about the future rather than the past.
From her public appearances to her ads to her performance in the debate, Harris replaced Biden’s clumsy demonstrations of anger and moral outrage with an eye roll and detached bemusement — an approach made more effective when the Trump team stumbled to find a new messaging lane of their own after Biden stepped aside. Some voices on the right have mocked the idea that Harris was campaigning with “joy,” but voters are attracted to optimistic candidates. (It’s one reason why a grinning Trump working the fry-o-lator at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s was such an effective campaign stunt.)
This messaging construct allowed Harris to jab at Trump without inadvertently punching down on his supporters — another mistake common to previous Trump opponents (who railed about “MAGA Republicans” and a “basket of deplorables”). She even pointedly refused to bash Trump supporters in her Fox News Channel interview. This built credibility for a specific brand identity, casting Harris as the mature, above-the-fray, adult-in-the-room candidate, the quietly competent person seeking to be President of “all Americans” and get government working again.
It may sound cynical to talk about political candidates in terms of “brand identity” the way we might discuss soft drink companies or retailers. But it speaks to how the human mind works. Companies with strong brand identities earn our business because we trust them. Notably, it’s not a trust that they have our best interest at heart, but a trust that our expectations will be fulfilled. We may not know what’s in a McNugget, but we know what it’s supposed to taste like and expect to get that taste whether we buy a nine-piece in Los Angeles or Boston.
After her initial splash, Harris has predictably faced her share of challenges. She has struggled in interviews and media appearances, and Trump has managed to seize back some messaging initiative around illegal immigration. The polls have tightened (as they are wont to do in any election), but Harris remains in a good position in key swing states — and, by all accounts, appears to have the better campaign infrastructure to take advantage of it.
Yet there has been that notable tone shift from Harris in recent weeks. Mixed in with the eye-rolling, can-you-believe-this-schmuck jokes about Trump at rallies are more pointed criticisms of Trump’s past rhetoric. At times, her speeches have crept closer to the podium-pounding histrionics that Biden favored or the stone-faced concern for the health of the American experiment espoused by Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Which brings us back to Wisconsin, and Harris’s admonishment to those pro-life protesters: “Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally!”
Despite the comment going over well with the crowd, it does something Harris has been careful to avoid: It casts certain voters out of her big tent. Sure, she was talking about these specific protesters, and she was completely justified in clapping back against hecklers. But it was and is different from how her campaign has operated so far. It’s divisive, and divisive language is supposed to be the other campaign’s bailiwick.
It’s off-brand. It’s a mistake. It’s a bad McNugget.
It may only be an eight-word stumble that no one remembers. Harris may right her ship, get back to being the happy warrior who broke a cycle of candidates who might as well have been running for president of Shady Pines, and win over enough support to pull off a big victory on November 5.
Or, it could signal a campaign panicked by tightening polls, abandoning the messages that made it successful in the first place, and shifting to an “us-versus-them” strategy more favored by their opponents.
Eight words can’t end a campaign on their own — but they can show evidence of a deeper problem.
