Why Kamala's Do-Nothing Approach Could Backfire
All seems rosy for the Democrats, but the campaign is too timid.
On November 1, 2016, a few days before the election, Nicholas Lemann wrote a piece in The New Yorker called “The Quiet Ruthlessness of the Clinton Campaign.” In it, he claimed that Hillary Clinton, in an electioneering masterstroke, had taken a page from Sun Tzu’s Art of War and allowed Donald Trump to burn himself out. “Clinton seems to exemplify its famous maxim that in order to win you have to know both yourself and your enemy,” Lemann wrote. “She realizes that she doesn’t have the spectacular political talent of her husband or of Barack Obama, and she makes up for it by being obsessively prepared and organized.”
Well, we all know how Clinton’s masterful strategy worked out, and my heart sank this week as it hasn’t since, oh, sometime around November 2016, when I read Ross Douthat’s New York Times column favorably comparing Kamala Harris to that famous military strategist Marie Kondo and her Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. “To understand Kamala Harris’s narrow victory over Donald Trump,” Douthat wrote from a hypothetical post-election future, “you have to think about Marie Kondo, the Japanese style guru famous for her ruthless minimalism.”
Sound familiar? Douthat went on to explicate the counter-intuitive genius of Harris’ “say nothing, do nothing” approach. “She offered a form of progressive minimalism, reducing a cluttered agenda to a few popular promises and just leaving everything else out,” Douthat wrote of the Harris platform, contending that that would take all of the oxygen out of GOP attacks. “To Republicans this was all incredibly frustrating, as was the minimalist media strategy that accompanied the minimalist agenda,” Douthat continued.
For Democrats, that’s a cozy, comforting narrative—just as Lemann’s was in 2016—and it is as doomed now as it was then. Because as our dearly departed (well, ok, still-technically-in-office) president might say, here’s the deal. Modern politics is not about seizing the high ground or pulling up the drawbridge or employing some scorched earth strategy. It’s not about tidying up a cluttered house. It’s all about attack and visibility and dirtying the other side just a little more than they are able to dirty you. It’s a knife fight in a jello vat on a mud pile in a swamp—and the Democrats are kidding themselves if they think it’s anything other than that.
Everybody who plans on voting Democrat has already gone through the collective sigh of relief from Biden stepping aside, Harris smoothly taking his place, and then Harris presiding over a well-conducted convention. But that should have been the starting gun for a race to the airwaves, for a media blitz and an attempt to get Harris in front of as many cameras and on as many podcasts as possible. Instead, she took a significant step back, waiting over a week before giving a single interview and then preaching to the choir on CNN.
It’s possible that this delay was just a matter of shoring up strength before she debates Trump next Tuesday, but, to me, it indicates a deep sense of insecurity on the Democratic side, as well as a flawed understanding of election tactics. It also, in retrospect, sours much of last month’s Democratic National Convention. The convention did what it was supposed to do in terms of ensuring a smooth handoff between Biden and Harris, but it was also, in so many ways, an opportunity lost. The Democrats picked an absolutely safe, do-no-evil running mate in Tim Walz as opposed to a figure who could deliver a swing state or a younger candidate who could energize the base and point towards the future of the party. They skipped over the tradition of giving a primetime speaking spot to an up-and-comer, instead handing the plum slots to the Bidens, the Clintons, and the Obamas. Their platform seems to be, in descending order of emphasis, “freedom,” “democracy,” “justice,” and, I think, “world peace.” They were strong at making the case for reproductive rights, but offered little to male voters whom they have to wrest back from Trump.
Above all, what they failed to do was to reset and rebrand the party. This was the golden opportunity that everybody on the Democratic side has been waiting for since, really, November 8, 2016. It was the chance to move past the party’s gerontocracy problem, to rally around a (comparatively) young candidate in Harris and get the kind of energy that the Dems had in 1992 or 2008. But what that required was a soaring vision of what the Democratic Party represented—and that was nowhere on offer at the convention.
The Democrats’ strategy, unchanged from 2016 or 2020, clearly relies on the assumption that Donald Trump will do himself in. As Thomas Edsall writes in The New York Times, “Trump’s standing in the polls has remained consistently firm in the range of 45 percent to 48 percent,” but it has “calcified” there. His unfavorability rating is over 50% and the idea is that if Harris doesn’t commit any gaffes, doesn’t overextend herself, then her current three-point lead should hold.
But that logic works the other way as well. The Democrats could view Harris’ small lead as a cushion to play with. They could reason that, if she flubs an interview with an unfriendly interviewer or makes a gaffe somewhere along the way, a small tactical miscue is unlikely to send swing voters swarming over to Trump.
And, if doing interviews and taking stands may seem like a risk, well, doing nothing is a real risk as well. It cedes the initiative, allowing Trump to shape the narrative of the race and, very simply, to make the direct case to more people. In the last weeks, Trump has “embarked on a cavalcade of interviews” and popped up in all sorts of unlikely places. He was interviewed on Lex Fridman’s podcast, garnering 3 million YouTube views. He appeared with Elon Musk (another 2 million views), at the Convention for the National Association of Black Journalists, and on Kick.com with 23-year-old video game celebrity Adin Ross (2.5 million more views). I can’t imagine that those interviews cost Trump any votes and, in any case, they likely brought him to the attention of low-engagement voters like the very youthful audience who would listen to Ross.
Why isn’t Kamala Harris doing any of that? Why isn’t she speaking to Lex Fridman or Joe Rogan or Howard Stern or Adin Ross or someone whom you wouldn’t expect her to speak with? Why isn’t she posting regularly, in something resembling her own voice, on social media? Why isn’t she proactively trying to shape the election or to create a narrative in voters’ minds about what she will concretely do for them? Because for every interview opportunity that she passes up, those hosts are still on the air, criticizing her, going after the tepidness of her campaign. (I heard Rogan do that last week—which is an indication of the kind of risks that inaction generates. Were Harris to appear on Rogan’s show, she would have little to lose—Rogan is a respectful interviewer—and she would make inroads with a vast audience.)
Harris’ rationale may be that she feels that she is the frontrunner and has little to gain by overexposing herself, but the election is still very close for comfort. Betting markets show a virtual tie, and Nate Silver has the election in the “toss-up range” with Trump significantly closing the gap after the Democrats’ convention bump. My bet would still be on Harris winning, since many of the fundamentals seem to favor Democrats in this cycle, but it is far from the kind of race where a frontrunner, however buoyed by “joy,” can coast to the finish line.
My real fear is that the reason Harris isn’t hitting the podcasts and TV studios is a concern that she won’t come across well. She was stiff in her CNN interview and she has struggled with interviews at times in the past. But if that’s the case, then the Democrats really should have had a brokered convention instead of coronating Harris. This isn’t electioneering in the 1870s or ‘80s where candidates stayed home, viewing direct campaigning to be beneath them, while surrogates did the dirty work. This is electioneering in the digital age, where voters expect to hear directly from their candidates and to connect with them on a human level. The candidates who have leaned into that the most—Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, etc.—have also been the most successful.
Everything seems rosy in Democrat-land, but that may well be because they are mistaking the normal convention bump for an unassailable lead. It’s two long months until November and Kamala Harris still needs to make her case to the American people. That means being a lot more dynamic and aggressive than she is at the moment. You can’t back your way into the White House. You have to fight for it.
Sam Kahn is an associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.
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I concur with Kahn that inactivity and withdrawal are dangerous for Kamala. I disagree with his claim that the best solution is mud-wrestling. The greatest political genius of my lifetime was Bill Clinton, who was able to connect with people without summoning the Dark Side. Everyone in the country already knows who Trump is, what he's like, etc. That he remains a strong candidate demonstrates not only the tribal polarization of the country, but the breathtaking toxicity of many of the Democrats' messages to non-progressive voters. I think Harris has already been trying to reduce that toxicity, and if she can continue in that direction while maintaining a sunny message, she will have done her best.
I disagree with your framing that she has said nothing, done nothing. She has said plenty! She's talked about supporting Ukraine, raising the minimum wage, ensuring reproductive rights for women,, continuing our energy independence and even approving of fracking. Her CNN interview was fine, and I feel her choice for a vice president in Tim Walz was genius, a better choice in authenticity vs Shapiro.