Why "playing it safe" could lead to disaster for Kamala Harris and the Democrats

When Joe Biden made the historic decision in July to step aside as the Democratic Party's 2024 nominee, Donald Trump was clearly taken off guard. Kamala Harris immediately leveraged a high-dominance leadership strategy, buttressed by positive messaging, to launch a sustained offensive that was immediately reflected in public opinion polls.

It took weeks for Trump and his surrogates to recalibrate and react — and when they did, the Trump campaign launched increasingly racist, authoritarian, sadistic and outright fascistic attacks — not just against Harris and the Democrats but against large segments of American society. In the days remaining before Nov. 5, Trump’s attacks are likely to escalate even further. In all, one could compare this election campaign to a fight inside a phone booth. Harris and Trump appear to have virtually equal odds of victory in what now appears to be one of the closest elections in American history, as well as one of the most important, the bitterest and the most highly combustible.

New polling from Howard University’s Initiative on Public Opinion reports that 84 percent of African-American likely voters in the seven key battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — support Harris. While that is obviously a large majority, it probably isn't enough. In 2020, Biden won 90 percent of the Black vote across the country. Harris will likely need the similar near-unanimous support from African-American voters — who are indispensable members of the Democratic base, generally speaking — to win this election. A new NBC News poll shows that young voters and Black voters, in particular, have low levels of interest and engagement with the 2024 election. Lack of interest among those groups appears to be at its lowest level in 20 years.

A New York Times report published earlier this month adds further context to this electoral problem:

Democrats have been banking on a tidal wave of support from Black voters, drawn by the chance to elect the first Black female president and by revulsion toward former President Donald J. Trump, whose questioning of Ms. Harris’s racial identity, comments on “Black jobs” and demonizing of Haitian immigrants pushed his long history of racist attacks to the forefront of the campaign.

Ms. Harris is no doubt on track to win an overwhelming majority of Black voters, but Mr. Trump appears to be chipping away broadly at a longstanding Democratic advantage. His campaign has relied on targeted advertising and sporadic outreach events to court African American voters — especially Black men — and has seen an uptick in support. About 15 percent of Black likely voters said they planned to vote for the former president, according to the new poll, a six-point increase from four years ago.

Donald Trump continues to experience what appear to be worsening challenges with his speaking, thinking and overall behavior, although his appeal is largely predicated on the notion that he is a vibrant and energetic personality, even at age 78. (If Trump takes office and serves a full term, he would become the oldest president in American history, surpassing the 81-year-old Biden.) 

At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, Trump’s erratic and frequently offensive behavior — which is a principal factor in the limitless adulation of his followers — reached a new low, even by his standards. Historian Heather Cox Richardson described it in her daily political newsletter, beginning with Trump's "long, meandering story" about golf legend Arnold Palmer "that ended with praise for Palmer's ... anatomy":

He went on to call Vice President Kamala Harris — whose name he deliberately mispronounced — “a s**t vice president. The worst. You’re the worst vice president. Kamala, you’re fired. Get the hell out of here, you’re fired. Get out of here. Get the hell out of here, Kamala.” 

As Trump’s remarks got weirder and weirder, the Fox News Channel cut away and instead showed Harris being cheered at a packed, exuberant, super-charged rally in Georgia.

Donald Trump has repeatedly implied or hinted at his desire to be America’s first dictator, and is escalating that rhetoric. Last week, he suggested, not for the first time, that he might invoke the Alien and Sedition Acts to crush “the left” and other “enemies," by using the military if necessary. By implication, those “enemies” include virtually anyone who opposes Trump and his MAGA movement.

M. Steven Fish is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He has appeared on BBC, CNN and other major networks, and has published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy and elsewhere. His new book is “Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy's Edge.”

In the second part of my conversation with Fish, he argues that Harris' "joyful warrior" campaign strategy can be combined with an aggressive, sustained effort to highlight Trump’s flaws of personality and character and his overall failures of leadership. Fish warns that one of the Harris campaign’s greatest weaknesses has been a failure to dominate the news cycle. He is concerned that Democrats may love a highly winnable election against a greatly weakened opponent through being overly careful, restrained and passive — in other words, defaulting to the party's worst habits rather than highlighting its successes and defining the terms of political battle.

This is the second part of a two-part conversation.

How is Kamala Harris' campaign doing at this point? She has increasingly turned to podcast appearances instead of focusing on the legacy news media. Is that a viable strategy?

The joyful-warrior approach is a winner. Exuberance projects confidence, which voters experience as strength. From the moment Harris took the helm on July 21 through the early aftermath of the Sept. 10 debate [with Trump], the Democrats weren’t just joyful; they also displayed the marks of warriors. But over the next few weeks, they started sinking back into their old risk-aversion, lying low and hoping Trump would discredit himself. It’s encouraging that Harris seems to be picking up the pace of interviews.

But her success will depend on what she says and how she says it. In recent interviews she has made a habit of stonewalling, dodging and reformulating questions to render them amenable to stock, scripted responses. When she was confronted with this matter recently, she said that her approach was a sign of discipline. She might see it that way, but many voters — including those she most needs to impress — are more likely to see it as annoying and craven. Warriors don’t lack the courage to answer questions directly. What’s more, if the candidates are unwilling to say anything new and provocative from day to day, the media, to the extent they cover them at all, will focus on their misstatements and artless dodges. Thus, the New York Times' only top-of-the-news story on Harris recently was headlined, “In Interviews, Kamala Harris Continues to Bob and Weave.” She can’t afford those kinds of headlines. At this point, playing it safe is the most dangerous thing Harris can do.

The medium in which she broadcasts her message — traditional media, podcasts, whatever — is of little importance, though some non-traditional outlets could be helpful in broadening the campaign’s reach. What matters most is that Harris and Walz stay on offensive against Trump while offering dramatic narratives of their own lives and careers, including times when they won big, fell short or changed their minds due to their own deeply-held values. If they do that, they will command coverage across all media. 

As we discussed in one of our previous conversations, I don't know why Harris and her campaign aren't constantly attacking and mocking Trump everywhere he goes. They should counter-program every Trump event. They should be across the street from every major Trump event.

Absolutely. You’d think the Democrats would get this all the more, since when they did bear down on ridiculing Trump it worked magnificently and Harris shot up in the polls. The proof of concept could not be clearer.

But after mid-September, the Democrats seemed to fall back on their old fear-driven messaging: How will Trump’s campaign react? Will voters turn against us if we admit a past mistake? Won’t Trump’s base be so offended by attacks on their hero that they’ll rush to the polls in record numbers?

Again, in recent days there are signs that the Harris-Walz campaign is taking a more aggressive tone, and they have gotten off some good shots. Last week Harris mocked Trump for cutting off questions at a recent town hall event in Pennsylvania to sway awkwardly onstage as a musical playlist blared for over 30 minutes. It was funny, and it made news.

Harris is explicitly discussing Trump's apparently damaged capacity. Is that a bad idea, or is it too little too late?

It’s great that she’s doing so, and now she’s got to escalate. Trump’s derangement shines forth more brilliantly every day, so she’s getting a constant stream of great material to work with.

But Harris can’t expect to prevail if she falls back on the Democrats’ old practice of standing back and ceding the spotlight, hoping that it will be enough to just let Trump be Trump. Nor should she or other top Democrats breathlessly repeat his outrageous statements and implore voters to join them in being offended.

Sen. Chris Murphy’s recent barrage of frantic tweets reminding voters that Trump calls undocumented immigrants “rapists” is an example of what does not work. Those passive tactics have defined the Democrats’ approach to Trump since 2016, and they’ve left him in command of the news. They’ve also left many people who don’t like his message impressed with his cheek, gall and ability to drive the libs nuts. If Harris wants Trump’s extremism and apparent derangement to stick to him, she’s got to peel his Teflon off with her own hands. That means relentless, exuberant ridicule that is bold and entertaining enough to command attention, rattle Trump, thrill her base and earn her a reputation as a real fighter who is ready to rule.

The mainstream media is committed to its horserace narrative. Now they are in a phase of emphasizing anti-Harris stories. They are also continually upset that she is supposedly not giving enough interviews.

I’m always skeptical about blaming the messenger. The media report news that earns clicks and revenue, and the Democrats cannot expect the media to adhere to their narrative if they don’t offer a compelling one about themselves and entertaining takedowns of their opponents.

When the Democrats were raucously celebrating their own accomplishments and eviscerating Trump nonstop — as they did during the DNC, for example — that’s what the media covered. Once they seemed to be sinking back into fear-and-fretting mode, the race that they should have been running away with remained, predictably, a dead heat. The uptick in interviews may quiet some media critics, but the Democrats never should have opened the door to these complaints in the first place.

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Harris was smart to go on Fox News. Wandering into that jungle shows no fear, which is exactly what Harris must do every day from now until Nov. 5. Just agreeing to do it left her looking confident, while a sputtering Trump unloaded on Fox for inviting her. Bret Baier turned the interview into a belligerent joke, but Harris stood her ground, and you’d have to be pure MAGA to have seen her as anything other than the adult in the room.

At the same time, Baier predictably tried to make the whole thing about illegal immigration, and Harris failed to take advantage of that. Like Biden and Hillary Clinton before her, she keeps acting as if soft-pedaling the distinction between legal and illegal immigration is the way to the hearts of Hispanic voters, even though in a recent survey 53 percent of Hispanics, and 62 percent of all respondents, said they favored a plan to deport people who are here illegally. Other polls show that most Hispanic citizens don’t think Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric is aimed at them. This all helps explain why Hispanics have been going over to Trump in droves.

Of course Harris doesn’t have to ape Trump by calling for mass deportation, but she does have to make a hard distinction between legal immigration (glorious, the source of our nation’s people and power), and illegal immigration (bad, punishable by laws that Harris, as a longtime guardian of law and order, will vigorously enforce). Talking about prosecuting human traffickers and fentanyl smugglers isn’t enough.

Another warning sign is that Harris is struggling to get endorsements from the big labor unions.

The Democrats have often reflexively feared they just aren’t showing Jack and Diane enough love, but nobody has ever showered them with more of it than Biden and Harris, and it has not moved the needle.

The contest over who loves America more is far more important to blue-collar folks across the ethnic spectrum than the competition over who loves the middle class more. An overwhelming majority of working-class voters, and especially men, vote for Trump, and they do so above all because they think he is strong and patriotic and treats them like Americans. At least since Hillary Clinton, the Democrats have seemed to think that treating them like a low-status group in dire need of a government-supplied break would provide the terms of endearment.

Liberal elites have grown blind to the visceral power of patriotism, especially among working-class people. For a while, especially during the DNC, I thought the Democrats were correcting course, but I’ve yet to see a hardcore, relentless red-white-and-blue blitz. To be sure, the Democrats aren’t neglecting the flag entirely. But they should be dumping a fortune on ads that show Harris saluting troops, backgrounded by the fluttering Stars and Stripes, and ringed by generals and former national security officials calling Trump a disgrace and a menace to American security, honor and pre-eminence. We heard a lot about such patriotic heavyweights and their contempt for Trump at the DNC and during the debate. Now we need nonstop carpet-bombing. Harris is a red-blooded patriot, and Trump is a yellow-bellied traitor. The Democrats should be pounding that truth into voters’ heads around the clock. 

When I look at Trump, I see a charismatic malign actor who in his own way is very intelligent, with dangerous people around him backed by hostile foreign powers who have been shaping the media and larger information space on his behalf. Many liberals and progressives instead choose to mock Trump and his allies or laugh at them, while feeling smug and superior. That will not stop Trump or save America's democracy and freedoms. What do you see?

The problem isn’t that liberals look down on Trump and regard themselves as superior, since Trump is laughable and most Americans are decent people who are far superior to Trump. The problem is that liberal elites apparently still don’t understand that Trump’s superpower is his ability to “own the libs” who look down on him and his followers. Still beholden to the mistaken notion that Trump’s bigotry is his greatest source of appeal, liberals too often take a pass on "owning" Trump instead, while murmuring among themselves about how racist the other half of America must be. By so doing, they fail to take out Trump’s dominance advantage while continuing to look like snooty elites.

Think about how Harris could deal with this effectively. Opportunities arise every hour. Bill Whitaker asked, in her "60 Minutes" interview, how millions and millions of Americans could support a man she called a racist. She evaded the question, leading Whitaker to ask it again. She dodged again, offering something about Trump being divisive and Americans wanting a uniter, not a divider. She could have given an answer that would blunt the perceptions of liberal condescension, seize the flag, earn herself a reputation as a bold truth-teller and crush Trump’s dominance game. Something like: “Trump is a racist and therefore an enemy of the United States, but most of those who voted for him aren’t racists. What they loved about him is how he owned the libs — but nobody owns this lib. No wonder he chickened out of a second debate; did you watch me whip him in the last one? And why are we even talking about Trump? Biden smoked him four years ago and I’m gonna smoke him in four weeks.”

Americans would get to see what we long for most, and that is a real leader — someone who tells the truth and is up to her ears in vitality, the courage of her convictions, and confidence in herself and her fellow Americans. Consistently answer questions like that and 300+ Electoral College votes would sit in Harris’s column on Nov. 6.

I predicted, quite early, that Trump would win in 2016. I was widely mocked for that. I think Trump has a much better chance of winning this year than many people would like to believe. To me, the 2024 election stinks of 2016. Please calm my anxiety, if you think it's unjustified. 

Harris has immense advantages, as we saw in spades during the initial stages of her campaign. The economy could hardly be better. There are signs that her campaign knows they must return to a high-dominance strategy. Harris recently has been saying that Trump is too weak, exhausted and mentally unstable to lead, which is exactly the kind of language she should be using. Trump’s apparently already addled mind and debauched morals are in terminal decline, and his campaign isn’t doing much right. Even without a shift in tactics, Harris might still win.

But the specter of 2016 looms, and for the same reason it did then: While Trump is ignoring the polls and saying anything he pleases, the Democratic candidate has too often been treating risk like kryptonite and exaggerating the importance of “the issues” while underestimating the importance of perceptions of candidates’ mettle. As a result, according to today’s 270-to-Win, Michigan and Nevada are tied, Harris is up in Pennsylvania and Trump is ahead in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Maine’s 2nd district. In this scenario, even if Harris took the tied states, Trump would win, 272-266. And by the way, Trump gained ground recently in Michigan after, as the Democrats put it, he “insulted Detroit.” Michiganders couldn’t care less; Trump’s remarks might have even lifted his numbers outside the Motor City and Ann Arbor. Relying on simply repeating Trump’s tirades to stoke voters’ umbrage has never worked, and it won’t work now.

All these states are of course extremely close, and Harris and Walz could sweep them and put a stake in Trumpism’s rotten heart. But to do so, they must recapture the news-making, Trump-owning, drama-rich spirit of mid-July to mid-September. They’ve got to gut Trump while telling their own compelling personal stories, loud and clear. For Harris, the key to motivating supporters, impressing the undecided and deflating turnout for Trump is telling her own truth and letting the chips fall where they may. In other words, the way to please the most voters is to show that she doesn’t care if she pleases anybody. Nothing else will suffice — and nothing more is necessary.