Kamala Harris revives the Biden playbook
Harris resurrects the “Dobbs and Democracy” approach as Trump embraces January 6th.
Good morning! It’s Thursday, October 17, 2024. Election Day is 19 days away.
Breaking news: The Israeli military is investigating the possibility that it killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Gaza this morning. According to the Times of Israel, members of the country’s security cabinet have been told that Sinwar is “very likely dead.”
Sinwar, the architect of the October 7th attacks, is Israel’s most wanted enemy; his death, if confirmed, could reshape the war in Gaza and — potentially — create a path to a ceasefire.
I’ll have more tomorrow as we learn more information. For now, your regularly scheduled programming, about Kamala Harris’ new old message in the campaign’s final days…
Back in November 2023, when President Joe Biden was still on track to be re-nominated, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff reportedly laid out for allies what he believed would be the Democratic path to victory this cycle: “Dobbs and Democracy.”
Since Emhoff’s wife, Vice President Kamala Harris, replaced Biden atop the party’s ticket in July, she has mostly focused on the first half of that formula.
Abortion (the issue at the center of the Dobbs decision) has been at the forefront of her campaign, featuring heavily in her advertising and her speeches on the trail.
From the beginning of her bid, it was always seen as one of Harris’ greatest strengths compared to Biden. Abortion is one of Democrats’ best issues, and while he was famously uneasy talking about it, she had made it a signature cause of her vice presidency.
On the other hand, Biden was the one more comfortable focusing on the second half of Emhoff’s blueprint: democracy, and former President Donald Trump’s relationship to it.
It’s not that Harris couldn’t talk about that topic; she just made a conscious decision not to. In her last month as Biden’s vice presidential candidate — when her campaign account was still controlled by his communications team — Harris tweeted three separate times about Trump being a “threat to our democracy.” Since taking over the campaign, her account hasn’t used that language once.
The democracy rhetoric seemed to slowly fall out of the Democratic playbook, as Harris and her running mate Tim Walz sought to minimize Trump rather than portray him as a looming danger. For a while there, the strategy seemed to be “Dobbs and weird” all the way down.
Now, with less than 20 days left in the campaign, Harris appears to be making a late-stage resurrection of Emhoff’s two-prong approach. In addition to continuing to emphasize abortion (including in two new ads put out by the campaign), Harris has also made democracy a key point in her closing message.
On Tuesday, Harris called Trump “unhinged” — a significant escalation in her rheetoric — and agreed with Charlamagne Tha God when he said that Trump was “about fascism.” Then, on Wednesday, she told reporters that Trump was “unstable” and “unfit to be president,” before dedicating an entire speech in Pennsylvania to the democratic threat she said Trump poses.
“Now, in a typical election, you all being here with me would be surprising,” Harris told the audience, which included many Republicans who have endorsed her. “But not in this election. Because at stake in this race are the democratic ideals that our founders, and generations of Americans, have fought for. At stake in this election is the Constitution itself.”
Finally, last night, out of the 26 minutes she spent on Fox News (her first-ever interview with the network), the segment where Harris grew most passionate was unmistakable. “This is a democracy!” the vice president said forcefully. “And, in a democracy, the president of the United States — in the United States of America — should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it. And this is what is at stake.”
As that Fox answer indicates, Harris’ return to democracy messaging also comes as Trump has given her more fodder for it, growing more extreme in his rhetoric and his embrace of January 6th.
In a Fox interview on Sunday, Trump said that he was less worried about foreign adversaries than he was about “the enemy from within” — meaning his own domestic critics. “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen,” Trump added, the line that Harris was referring to in her own Fox interview.
At a Georgia town hall event that aired yesterday (also on Fox), Trump declined to walk back the comment. “It is the enemy from within,” he said, referring to Democrats. “They’re very dangerous. They’re Marxists and communists and fascists, and they’re sick… We have China, we have Russia, we have all these countries. If you have a smart president, they can all be handled. The more difficult are, you know, the Pelosis, these people, they’re so sick and they’re so evil.”
In recent days, Trump has also repeatedly sought to sanitize January 6th, the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters. “It was love and peace and some people went to the Capitol and a lot of strange things happened there,” Trump told Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief on Tuesday at the Economic Club of Chicago. “You had a very peaceful transfer…Not one of those people had a gun,” he added, despite the fact that 140 police officers were injured and several rioters have been charged with carrying guns. (Notably, Trump also did not respond directly when asked if he would commit to a peaceful transition next year.)
Yesterday, at a Univision town hall, Trump repeated that January 6th was a “day of love” with “nothing done wrong at all.”
“There were no guns down there,” he continued, falsely. “We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns. And when I say ‘we,’ these are people that walked down [to the Capitol].”
Perhaps the most interesting part about that Univision answer — besides the part where he seemed to group himself in with the Capitol rioters (“we”), in opposition to the police officers (“the others”) — was watching the reaction by the voter who asked the question.
The voter’s name was Ramiro González, a 56-year-old construction worker from Florida. González said that he was a former Republican who found Trump’s inaction on January 6th while his supporters stormed the Capitol “disturbing.” Nevertheless, he told Trump, “I want to give you the opportunity to try to win back my vote.”
Here is González’s reaction at the exact moment that Trump called January 6th a “day of love”:
If Trump loses, it may well be because of reaction shots like that. At least, that seems to be the strategy Harris has been pursuing.
Given the chance to win back this disaffected voter, Trump could have talked about the economy, or immigration, or any of his strong points in the election. Instead, he doubled down on defending January 6th, an issue that voter had already identified as one that disturbed him. Don’t be surprised if that moment soon makes its way into a Harris ad near you; it’s essentially Trump making Harris’ closing argument for her.
Harris’ bet at the denouement of this election seems to be that there are enough Ramiro Gonzálezes out there to put her over the top: disaffected Republicans who broke with Trump over January 6th and who aren’t being won back by his further descent into extreme rhetoric.
Many of her moves over the last few days have been made with reaching exactly this type of voter in mind, from going on Fox to her Pennsylvania event with the Republican endorsers. (As Harris spoke, the banner behind her read: “Country over party.” Not exactly subtle.)
After spending several weeks trying to define herself and her policies, Harris seems to have pivoted slightly back to Biden’s approach of centering Trump (to the consternation of some Democrats, who believe she needs to do more to build a positive, not negative, case for her candidacy). This was most obvious at her event on Tuesday, when she played a montage of Trump’s own words — but it was clear in the Fox interview as well, when she brought nearly every one of her answers (on immigration, on Iran, Biden’s mental acuity) back to Trump, including when the connection to the topic was tenuous.
Will that strategy work? It’s possible. In 2022, “Dobbs and democracy” was a successful strategy for Democrats.1 A recent New York Times/Siena poll of undecided voters found that — more than any specific policy area — their top concern about Trump was his “personality/behavior” and their top concern about Harris was “honesty/trustworthiness.”
Harris is hoping that a focus on democracy and January 6th — campaigning against Trump more than for herself — can win over undecideds (especially Republicans and Independents) by, in one fell swoop, emphasizing the top concern about her rival while calming the top concern about herself.
In the Fox interview, Harris made another thing clear: “My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency.” But her campaign — after briefly rowing in her own direction — is now, once again, a continuation of Biden’s. When was the last time you heard Harris or Walz call Trump “weird”? In the closing days of the campaign, Biden’s favored “threat to democracy” messaging is back.
More news to know
🎙️ CNN: Trump makes at least 19 false claims in one-hour Fox town hall with women
Including… WaPo: Trump says he is the ‘father of IVF’ at all-women town hall event
Also, from the Univision town hall… Reuters: Trump, at Latino event, stands by false claims of immigrants eating pets
❌ NYT: Asked if He Thinks Trump Lost in 2020, Vance Finally Gives an Answer: No
👀 AP: McConnell called Trump ‘stupid’ and ‘despicable’ in private after the 2020 election, a new book says
⚡️ The Hill: Supreme Court declines to block Biden’s climate rule for power plants — for now
The day ahead
President Joe Biden is en route to Germany for talks on Ukraine and the Middle East.
Vice President Kamala Harris will hold campaign events in Milwaukee, La Crosse, and Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Gov. Tim Walz will campaign in Durham, North Carolina, with former President Bill Clinton.
Former President Donald Trump has no public events scheduled.
Sen. JD Vance will hold a campaign event in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The House and Senate are on recess.
The Supreme Court has no oral arguments scheduled.
Before I go…
Here’s a fun fact: Former President Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 earlier this month, voted by mail on Wednesday, the second day of early voting in Georgia.
If Carter has voted in every election in which he was eligible, that would make this his 20th presidential ballot — and one of the few living Truman-Harris voters in the country.
But, it is always important to remember, not a “winning strategy” for them. Republicans still won the House in 2022 (including winning the House popular vote by 2.7 percentage points), as much as Democrats sometimes try to rewrite that election.
Oh Gabe plz check your patriarchy at the door. It was never Doug’s policy. At that point it was a mix of Harris and Biden. The other key point is that Harris has been speaking to more republicans and a wider audience (via podcasts). Many of these folks may not have been exposed to facts about 1/6 or the horrors of the orange guy’s attacks on our constitution and basic decency. She is making sure that they are exposed to his own words which are way beyond weird (maybe why they aren’t using the term so as not to sanewash his fascism. His words and tactics are straight out of the Mussolini and Hitler playbooks. I would think you’ve studied enough political science to recognize that. And you missed Harris’ biggest issue in the poll — other. I wonder what that is but could it be her gender, her race, her relatively recent experience with immigrants in her own family.
It seems to me that you not pick everything with her and remain relatively quiet about the orange guy’s mental descent into never never land. Did you even mention his fox interview?
Gabe, IMO you are way too critical of Harris when you wrote, “But her campaign — after briefly rowing in her own direction — is now, once again, a continuation of Biden’s.” It would be ridiculous for her to ignore the increasingly obvious danger of Trump simply for the sake of trying to create greater separation from Biden.