Basement blitz: Harris borrows one tactic from Biden, another from Trump

If Vice President Kamala Harris wins the top job, it will be because she can convince voters she represents a change from the last two unpopular presidents.

But Harris’s current campaign strategy is a fusion of the contrasting approaches that won former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden the White House.

Harris is flooding the zone with free media like Trump in 2016 while at the same time relying on Biden’s “basement” strategy when it comes to tough interviews or unscripted moments.

In a truncated campaign, Democrats hope this will be enough to get her across the finish line. Harris doesn’t have to last 18 months like a normal presidential candidate. She just has to make it from the rest of the summer to November, with early voting starting in multiple battleground states before that.

“Kamala Harris is highly given to gaffes,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told the Washington Examiner. “So I expect over the next 100 days for them to lock her in the basement as they’ve done to Joe Biden for the last five years. To very tightly script every word that comes out of her mouth, put it on her teleprompter and to create an artificial candidate.”

Unlike Biden in 2020, however, Harris will keep an active campaign schedule. When she rolls out her running mate early next week, they will fan out across multiple swing states. She has brought new energy to Democratic campaign rallies, giving some that old Obama 2008 feeling. The media coverage, which became unusually adversarial toward the Democrats in the weeks between Biden’s bad debate performance on June 27 and his eventual withdrawal from the race, has become unrelentingly positive. Top entertainers and celebrities have rallied to Harris’s side.

While Harris has raised a lot of money, she is getting a great deal of her exposure for free, much like Trump in 2016, but without the hostility. 

“The media is doing all her work for her,” Republican pollster Brent Buchanan told the Washington Examiner. “Trump is having to spend money to counteract that. In a Biden versus Trump race, ads weren’t going to be very important. Now they matter a whole lot.”

Harris is a more effective and energetic communicator than an aging Biden, who at 81 has slipped in his ability to even read teleprompter speeches. She is also a more disciplined communicator than Trump, who often speaks extemporaneously and can veer off-script in dangerous ways.

But most of Harris’s gaffes have come in contentious interviews or debates. She also could face tough questions about the wholesale abandonment of her 2019-20 campaign platform as she reboots — if she is ever put in the position where she must answer them. Because no one is concerned about Harris’s age or mental acuity, there is not the same political downside to ducking such encounters.

“The media and the campaign are desperately trying to run away from her record whether it is her disastrous failure as the border czar or her being ranked by the nonpartisan trackers as the single most liberal senator in the United States Senate,” Cruz said.

“Kamala Harris has never run a real general election campaign,” Buchanan said, noting the leftward tilt of the California electorate “even compared to New York state.” Even there, Harris won her first California attorney general’s race in 2010 by less than 1 point over Republican Steve Cooley.

A carefully stage-managed campaign augmented by fawning press coverage could maximize Harris’s assets and minimize the public exposure of her liabilities. Biden couldn’t do the kinds of rallies Harris can because of his deficits and then couldn’t hide from them anymore after the debate.

“In a change election people are willing to vote for the unknown over the disliked known,” Buchanan said. “In 2020, the dude I don’t know much about in the basement seemed like a safer, calmer choice than the guy in the White House.” 

The key for the Trump campaign is to remind voters why they disliked Harris in the first place and make the unknowns known.

“They have to educate voters about her positioning as they define her,” Republican pollster Neil Newhouse told the Washington Examiner. “For most voters, this will be new information and will need to be credentialed and repeated often.”

This is why tying Harris to the Biden administration, reminding voters she has often been to her boss’s left on major issues, and pointing out the extent of her flip-flops since ascending to the top of the ticket is crucial.

“This is clearly not the race anyone was expecting or had planned for,” Newhouse said. “That increases the degree of difficulty for the Trump campaign. After all, they have spent the last two years plus preparing for a run against President Biden. The Trump campaign is extremely capable, but it takes time to make the pivot to running against Harris. While she’s been an integral part of the Biden administration and can be saddled with many of the administration’s negatives, she’s clearly not Joe Biden.”

For many Democrats, that’s good enough.