Though we’re in the penultimate weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s 2023 all over again. That’s because Vice President Kamala Harris has largely settled on a closing campaign message that sounds a lot like the idea President Joe Biden made the centerpiece of his campaign: that Donald Trump presents an existential threat to American democracy.
It’s the message she hammered home on Wednesday, amid reports from the Atlantic and the New York Times in which Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, said — on the record — that Trump is “certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators,” fits “the general definition of fascist,” and once said he needs “the kind of generals that Hitler had.”
In a Wednesday afternoon press conference from her official residence in Washington, DC, Harris argued the reports were “further evidence for the American people of who Donald Trump really is … We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power.” She followed that with similar hits on Trump at a Wednesday night town hall on CNN, saying plainly that she considers Trump a “fascist,” and believes voters “care about our democracy” and “not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”
This change in tone represents a shift, but is not an anomaly. After a “Brat summer” of good vibes, memes, and uplifting messages about “not going back,” Harris’s last few weeks of messaging have struck a graver tone about the threats Trump poses.
On Fox News last week, she invoked Trump’s comments this month about the US needing to defend against “the enemy from within” and the potential need to handle those supposed foes “if necessary, by National Guard or if really necessary by the military.”
Then on NBC News this week, Harris painted the election as an opportunity for voters to choose “whether we are a country that values a president who respects their duty to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Donald Trump has said he would terminate the Constitution of the United States.” And next week, Harris is expected to make the same argument in her final case to the American people from the National Mall.
Why the shift?
For Biden, this “threats to democracy” argument seemed like an attempt to rally the Democratic base, inject a sense of urgency in his unpopular reelection bid, and hope that the anti-Trump energy that fueled his 2020 victory and Democratic wins in the 2018 and 2022 midterms could power one final repudiation of Trump. It was the “Dobbs and Democracy” strategy — one premised on reminding people that Trump was responsible for the loss of national abortion protections and that he repeatedly disregarded democratic norms during his tenure. Based on Biden’s polling, that message wasn’t working.
Harris’s recent return to a democracy message seems to be in response to the closeness of the presidential contest in battleground states. According to polling, she’s been largely unable to make more inroads with independents or continue making gains with swing-state voters after an initial burst of support after taking up her party’s nomination. There’s an ever-so-small chunk of undecided voters left in those states — so peeling away at the margins of Trump’s support could make all the difference.
That’s partially why these appeals to protecting democracy are being made in front of moderate and disaffected Republican audiences. Starting with an event with former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney in September — in which Cheney said that as “someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution,” she was backing Harris “because of the danger that Donald Trump poses” — Harris has been on a multi-state campaign swing specifically aimed at giving moderate Republicans cover to cross party lines and support a Harris bid.
Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, summed up that strategy on Tuesday night while being questioned by Daily Show host Jon Stewart about Harris’s embrace of Cheney.
“On the constitutional piece, there are a lot of people out there. I think Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney give permission to those folks who want to find a reason to do the right thing,” Walz said.
Per reporting from the Associated Press, Harris’s team thinks these kinds of appeals and reminders of Trump’s extreme rhetoric — like running digital ads highlighting Trump’s rebranding of January 6 as a “day of love” — can help chip into the “roughly 10% of voters in the battleground states” who might be persuadable because they are undecided or soft supporters of Trump.
The share of undecideds will only continue to decrease the closer we get to Election Day — and the results will reveal just how successful Harris’s strategy was.
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