Liberals campaigning conservatively

Vice President Kamala Harris has received a significant boost in polling since President Joe Biden announced his exit from the race at the end of last month. When Biden dropped out, the RealClearPolitics average of national polls had former President Donald Trump with a roughly 3-point lead. As of this writing, Harris leads Trump by approximately 1 point in the national polls. There have been similar movements in the swing states toward her, per the polling averages. Likewise, she has narrowly overtaken Trump in the betting markets, which are a good approximation of conventional wisdom.

Just what is driving this surge is unclear. One theory is that relieved Democrats are suddenly enthusiastic about the election, whereas they were downcast just a month ago. This could very easily be manifested in public opinion polling, which depends heavily on who is willing to take a survey. If Democrats are suddenly excited to talk to pollsters, that could shift the margins. Another theory is that Trump was an acceptable choice in the face of Biden, but with Harris in the mix, some of his soft support has shifted away from him.

Time will tell. But what is clear right now is that Harris is running perhaps the most conservative political campaign by any nonincumbent in 80 years.

To be clear, “conservative” in this sense is not meant ideologically. Harris’s record as a senator and presidential candidate in 2019 and her tenure as vice president indicate that she is anything but. Rather, the emphasis seems to be on taking no risks, even the slightest kind.

To date, she has done no press conferences or even any sitdown interviews. Her vice presidential choice, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), does not help Harris in any specific swing state but rather seems calculated to inflict minimal harm among must-win groups. Harris chose not to go with Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) despite his enormous popularity in the must-win Keystone State after relentless political pressure from within her party. 

And even as Harris has stuck to a prewritten script delivered via teleprompter, her remarks have been anodyne, vague, and general. Democrats and their allies in the press have celebrated this as the triumph of “joy,” and one can appreciate just how relieved many Democrats are to be rid of Biden. Still, one person’s joy is another’s “was this speech written by ChatGPT to impersonate a generic Democrat?” Insofar as she has moved beyond rote Democratic talking points — protect Obamacare, enact the John Lewis Voting Rights Act — she seems to be cribbing from Trump. At a speech in Las Vegas last week, she called for eliminating taxes on tips for service workers, the same idea Trump posited months back.

If this were the NFL, we might call this “Martyball.” Named after Marty Schottenheimer, the former head coach of the Cleveland Browns, the Kansas City Chiefs, and the San Diego Chargers, Martyball emphasized run over pass and a decidedly conservative outlook to offense. A typical set of downs, at least per Schottenheimer’s critics, went: run, run, pass, punt. No mistakes above all else. Of course, it should be noted that Schottenheimer never won the Super Bowl. 

To be sure, incumbent presidents run this kind of campaign all the time. When the wind is at their sails, they ease back. That was the way Richard Nixon won in 1972, Ronald Reagan won in 1984, and Bill Clinton won in 1996. In times when the country was less happy with the status quo, as was the case with George W. Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2012, the incumbent president has been more aggressive in framing the debate. 

This kind of candidacy has rarely been employed by a nonincumbent like Harris. In 1968, Nixon ran a carefully stage-managed campaign, as Harris is doing now, eschewing press conferences for pretaped interviews controlled by his campaign. But Nixon was clearly offering an agenda — a way out of Vietnam, opposing busing, and cracking down on crime, with the hope of picking up the border South. His vice presidential pick, Maryland Gov. Spiro Agnew, was meant to reinforce the idea. 

If there is a postwar corollary to the campaign Harris has been running to date, it is that of Thomas Dewey, the Republican nominee in 1948. 

Convinced the country was ready to vote GOP for the first time in 20 years, Dewey held off from controversy and generally stuck to positive, vague statements about the future, much as Harris is doing today. It did not work. Where Dewey miscalculated was that Harry Truman, in his relentless quest for victory, turned his candidacy into an anti-incumbent campaign against the congressional Republicans, who had swept into power during the 1946 midterm elections and passed controversial legislation such as the Taft-Hartley Act. Despite preelection polls declaring Dewey an easy victor, Truman won the race comfortably.

If the strategy did not work for Dewey, can it work for Harris? Perhaps. Prior to Dewey, the strategy did work for Franklin Roosevelt, whose 1932 promise of a “New Deal” was vague enough not to alienate any supporters. So, there is precedent for success. And Harris’s greatest advantage is Trump himself. Though his favorability rating has risen notably in the last two months, the RealClearPolitics average still finds him unpopular, by a 44% to 53% margin. Harris can possibly position herself as a generically likable alternative to Trump and win the election that way.

But there are downsides. For starters, Harris does not have nearly the kind of lead that Dewey did in the polls — and remember that his edge turned out to be ephemeral. As of this writing, the RealClearPolitics average of the toss-up states shows Trump narrowly winning the Electoral College and performing better in the national popular vote than either in 2016, when he was elected, or 2020, when he lost only narrowly. It makes some sense to adopt a play-it-safe approach when one has a clear lead. But the Schottenheimer “run-run-pass-punt” approach is not well suited for a tie game.

Moreover, it is not 1932 — the last time such a strategy worked for a nonincumbent candidate. That year, Roosevelt had the wind at his back because of the Great Depression. His party, the Democrats, had been out of office for over a decade, and thus, he could pin the blame on his Republican opponents. Today, the public mood is not nearly as grim as it was in 1932. But it is nevertheless sour, and Harris is now the leader of the incumbent party. To that end, the Trump campaign is clearly intent on yoking her with Biden in the public imagination. If it succeeds, she will be in jeopardy, for the issue matrix clearly favors Trump at this point — while Harris tends to have an advantage on the issue of abortion, the GOP has the edge on both immigration and the economy. 

It is certainly reasonable to imagine Harris escaping blame for what people take to be the mistakes of Biden, especially among those swing voters who do not like Trump. It becomes harder to envision such a scenario with the Seinfeld-style “campaign about nothing” she has been running to date. 

Perhaps Harris changes course. Her speech at the Democratic National Convention should give us a sense. Does she offer a bold break with the policies of Biden, or does she remain rooted in generalities with a decisive emphasis on how awful Trump is? Time will tell.

Ultimately, campaigns reflect the personalities of the people at the top of the ticket. Just as Schottenheimer was dispositionally inclined to play it safe, so also might Harris. Her campaign in 2019 was a transparent and ill-fated attempt to co-opt the Bernie Sanders wing of the party rather than offer something new. Perhaps her instinct is to replay the 2020 campaign, offering the country vague reassurances about normalcy. It might work, for sure. But 2024 is not 2020.  

Jay Cost is the Gerald R. Ford senior nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.