In the fourth season of the HBO comedy Veep, Selina Meyer, the titular character played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, runs for reelection after having been elevated to the top office following the president’s resignation. She and her running mate, Tom James (Hugh Laurie), choose to campaign under the hilarious slogan “Continuity With Change,” precisely the sort of empty and nonsensical branding that 21st-century Democrats just can’t quit. And it’s hard to watch Vice President Kamala Harris’ suddenly flailing campaign for president without thinking of the fictional Meyer and (spoiler alert) her losing quest to hold on to the Oval Office. Although the real-life race remains a toss-up, Harris needs to shake up her deeply small-c conservative campaign, which nowadays often feels designed more to defend a clear lead against a two-minute drill than to urgently appeal to a dyspeptic electorate that clearly wants change.
For roughly a month following President Joe Biden’s departure from the race, Harris was able to consolidate the Democratic base and even opened up a small lead on Trump in national and swing-state polling. But she did so while steadfastly refusing interviews with major news organizations and avoiding as much policy substance as possible. Even after she selected as her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—who delighted Democratic base voters with his expansive record of progressive wins like paid family leave—her policy vision remained frustratingly out of reach. In the early weeks of the campaign, as she was getting her footing and preparing for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, this was understandable and perhaps even defensible. But the convention has come and gone, and very little has changed. And it’s really starting to hurt her, with Sunday’s gold-standard New York Times/Siena College poll showing Trump with a 1-point lead nationally.
To its credit, the Harris–Walz campaign finally put up a policy page over the weekend. But when you actually click on the various links, they don’t offer much detail that you couldn’t glean from one of their stump speeches. The campaign’s health care “plan,” for example, is 256 words long and consists largely of a recap of the Biden administration’s very limited accomplishments. Apart from a vague promise to cancel medical debt, it seems to rest on the laurels of past reforms and communicates no interest in or commitment to further improving America’s nightmare health care system. The child care plan promises only that a President Harris would work on “ensuring hardworking families can afford high-quality child care, all while ensuring that care workers are paid a living wage and treated with the dignity and respect they deserve.” That’s a lot of “ensuring” without very much “planning.”
After 2020, “popularist” analysts like Matthew Yglesias and David Shor convinced many Democrats that policy ideas associated with the progressive left, like reallocating some money from police departments to other social-service agencies, should be avoided because they make it harder for the party to win elections. The basis for this belief remains something of a mystery, a combination of retroactive contempt for Hillary Clinton’s comparatively wonky 2016 campaign; regret about seeing leading 2020 contenders, including Harris, race too far to the left during the early primary debates in 2019; and a sense that the excesses of the summer of 2020 kept Biden from winning in a blowout. All this because Sen. Elizabeth Warren was running a couple of points behind Biden against Trump in a handful of polls a year from the 2020 election? It’s hard to escape the conclusion that some bad polling around lightning-rod slogans like “Defund the Police” is being used by certain Democrats to execute a wholesale retreat from the hopeful, idea-driven agenda that the party coalesced around during the Trump administration.
This is not just extremely depressing but also strategically unwise. By refusing to define herself in policy terms, Harris has allowed the Trump campaign to do it for her, and he’s painting her as a loopy San Francisco Marxist. According to Sunday’s New York Times/Siena College poll, whose 1-point national lead for Trump instantly precipitated a mental-health crisis for Democrats, 47 percent of voters believe she’s “too liberal”—a particularly disappointing outcome given that the Chicago convention ostentatiously centered a gaggle of former Republicans, with the hosts embracing law enforcement and adopting hard-line positions on issues like crime and immigration. Since then, the campaign has made a conscious effort to appeal to Nikki Haley voters by collecting endorsements from people like Liz and Dick Cheney. This, of course, has been Biden’s strategy since he announced his candidacy in 2019 with appeals to bipartisanship and a roster of endorsements from Republicans like Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who recorded a video for the virtual 2020 DNC. None of it stopped high-profile MAGA Republicans from depicting Biden, and now Harris, as a radical leftist bent on destroying America. Harris is playing a track that has been in such heavy rotation throughout the Trump era that hardly anyone is even listening anymore. The outcome, then, seems inevitable: By a margin of nearly 30 points, likely voters say Trump would bring more change than Harris.
It’s not that Harris should be out there talking about police abolition, but there is a middle ground that has been abandoned. There is considerable risk that Democrats might ultimately feel resentful that they united to push Biden out of the race only to see him replaced by someone running to the right of John Kerry. As Perry Bacon Jr. wrote recently, “Everyone on the left is unlikely to sit quietly while the Democratic presidential candidate moves right.” The decision to exclude a Palestinian speaker from the DNC, for example, only reinforced the perception that the Harris campaign has decided to treat the party’s left flank as an adversary rather than an ally. Unsurprisingly, Harris’ numbers among young voters have slipped over the past month without any offsetting gains with 2020 Trump voters or independents.
Another problem is that Harris’ turn to the right has left her incapable of defending her own administration’s record or offering a counterpoint to relentless Republican propaganda on top issues. Immigration is a particularly acute example of this problem. The Biden administration increased refugee caps and dramatically expanded temporary protected status for countries like Venezuela, leading to hundreds of thousands of migrants who are here legally but whose very visible presence on America’s streets is contributing to the perception that the border is out of control. The average voter could be forgiven for not understanding why they are being asked to help care for migrants when the people who are responsible for their presence refuse to defend or even explain it, let alone competently implement their own policy.
The Harris campaign’s searing rhetoric about immigration also leaves the U.S. with two major parties that seem to want to do the same thing: close the border and deport as many people as possible who have immigrated illegally. Judging from campaign talking points, the parties differ only in how humanely they plan to achieve these goals. The new Harris–Walz issue page gestures at comprehensive immigration reform, but it reads like an afterthought. The section consists mostly of a promise to sign the scuttled 2024 bipartisan border-security bill, which itself was a near-total capitulation for Democrats. This strategy also leaves Harris and down-ballot Democrats bereft of a positive policy agenda about the issue or the ability to explain immigration’s many benefits—that it is crucial to the economy, gives the U.S. a huge advantage over competitors, and is vital to maintaining the kind of age balance in the population that our peer countries are struggling with.
All of these decisions are motivated by a fear-driven misreading of public opinion and a strategic choice to use persuasion exclusively to convince wavering Republicans that Democrats aren’t too radical for them. The policy ambiguity also contributes, unfortunately, to the perception that Harris is a chameleon with no underlying principles. It’s OK for her to walk back or fine-tune some positions she adopted in 2019. That’s politics. But her ballyhooed CNN interview with Dana Bash showcased a candidate who wasn’t willing to even narrate the shift in her thinking on issues like fracking. She could have said, “I remain committed to moving away from dependence on fossil fuels, but after listening to Pennsylvanians as vice president, I became convinced that fracking has to remain part of our energy portfolio for the foreseeable future.” That would be much more convincing than saying, repeatedly, “My values haven’t changed.”
What is particularly maddening is that even if you concede that winning in politics is a simple game of doing whatever the public wants, fracking isn’t actually that popular! (Nor, incidentally, is Israel’s war in Gaza.) It wasn’t that long ago that a majority of Pennsylvanians wanted to end fracking, and even today the issue is basically a toss-up in the Keystone State. In this weekend’s Times/Siena poll, 43 percent of respondents opposed a fracking ban, and 39 percent supported it. This is a fluid issue with millions of people persuadable in either direction, not some public-opinion albatross that Harris must figure out how to shed at all costs. And yet her campaign is conducting itself—as it is on so many issues in which public opinion is not nearly as monolithic as some strategists believe—as if Democrats hold the losing hand and need to either keep it hidden for as long as possible or draw new cards from the dealer.
Four years ago, Joe Biden was planning “an FDR-size presidency,” and today Kamala Harris sounds as if she’s envisioning something more like Bill Clinton’s aimless second term. Our nation may not be a basket case on the verge of state failure—the impression you would get from listening to the apocalyptic rhetoric at a Trump rally—but it is still a country with many serious problems that demand innovative policy solutions. And Harris would be wise to embrace and campaign behind a small number of bold ideas to address intractable problems like soaring health care costs and to articulate and defend those ideas in as many public forums as possible, including interviews with the press. These ideas don’t necessarily have to sound as if they were concocted by Bernie Sanders. They just need to exist. Instead, the Harris campaign seems to think that the Biden policy record speaks for itself and, simultaneously and paradoxically, that all Democrats needed was a new nominee who says as little as possible about any of it.
A candidate kept under wraps offering little more than tax credits and vague promises not only says “continuity” rather than “change,” but is enervating the Democratic base at the very moment it needs to be mobilized. One source of change is freely available: Harris could jettison some of the overcautious, out-of-touch campaign staffers that she inherited from the abysmal Biden reelection campaign and replace them with outside-the-box thinkers committed to a bolder vision. After all, Tuesday night’s debate might be one of Harris’ last opportunities to regain her momentum by tapping into Americans’ desire for a new direction. If not, the “context of all in which you live and what came before you” will forever include another four years of Donald Trump.
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