If Kamala Harris Keeps Wonking, She Will Lose

Fight, Don't Wonk

Let me preface the following with a clear notice that I am in favor of political wonkery. We need policy wonks, we need leaders who either understand the wonky details of how to get things done or surround themselves with nerds who get excited about data and policy and making everything work. I’m not against wonking.

That said, Vice President Kamala Harris has to stop being as wonky as she was the last week of her campaign. If she keeps it up, she is in danger of simmering down the incredible momentum she has had since she became the lead in the presidential campaign.

Harris delivered a major address on economic issues, detailing some of the very good ideas she plans to implement if she becomes President. The ideas are well thought out and if put into place they will benefit millions of Americans, stimulate our domestic economy, and overall make life better.

The problem with the plans isn’t the substance, it is the fact that delivering a speech about those plans is a colossal bore. The minute Harris began talking about credits for homebuyers and incentives for small business, eyes began to glaze over. It is very good policy, but very bad politics.

The same is also true of her visit to the southern border, which became part of the great American tradition of politicians visiting the border to stare at the invisible line between our country and Mexico. The border visit is less of a problem with wonkery and more about buying into false right-wing frames of how to approach immigration with more of a “security” lens than one about reform and family.

When I bring up these criticisms on social media, the most common responses fall into more or less two camps. First, that she has to do this kind of thing to appeal to “swing” or “undecided” voters who are skeptical of liberal/left-wing positions. My response to that is simple: No, she doesn’t.

I am extremely skeptical that there’s any true swing voter left at this point in the campaign, which has gone on for nearly two years now once President Joe Biden first announced his plan to run for a second term. And if that mythical voter is a real-life unicorn, they are not going to have a fire lit under them to vote by a turgid policy speech.

In fact, most of those sway-able voters are more likely to react to the sort of campaign the vice president has been running so far, focusing on the theme of “freedom” and contrasting the Democratic approach – reproductive freedom, sexual freedom, intellectual freedom, religious freedom – to the dogmatic authoritarian conservative “Christian” nightmare offered by the right. Harris is far more likely to attract the support of a suburban white soccer mom or dad by talking trash about how Donald Trump triggered abortion bans than by discussing her ideas to put incentives in the tax code.

Like in sports, the bandwagon effect is very strong in politics. The two most recent examples of this are the groundswell of bigoted support that Trump first attracted in 2016, when Republican voters made clear they didn’t care about how much Jeb(!) Bush or Marco Rubio talked about cutting taxes versus Trump lying about immigrants. The other, better, version of this was in 2008 when Barack Obama turned the Democratic Party into a happening and before they even knew what they were doing, voters in Indiana and Iowa were pulling the lever for a guy with the middle name Hussein.

The best path for Harris is as a cultural moment and as the joyful warrior she has been. Not just because she would be the first woman president but because she is the avatar for the identity and ideology of millions who have been underrepresented or not represented at all – in recent years and throughout American history.

The other, and even less convincing response to my hectoring is that getting wonky stops the media from complaining that she isn’t giving out enough details. My response is, no it doesn’t.

The mainstream media has settled on a narrative about this election, and they did it years ago. They want excitement and book deals and gossip and trash talking and the best way to get this is through a Donald Trump win. In 2016 that meant advancing the right’s caricatures of Hillary Clinton, in 2020 this was done by playing down much of Trump’s incompetence the closer we got to the election, and so far this year the main thrust of this was the “Biden is too old” narrative.

Harris’ candidacy has made it harder to peddle that message but make no mistake that the consistent drumbeat from the mainstream press that Harris hasn’t offered up enough details or hasn;’t given an interview to the “right” media outlets (the New York Times, of course) is about getting their preferred candidate in. Only the mainstream press can absorb Trump speaking about turning Canadian rivers into water faucets and scrub it clean of wackiness.

Giving in to these guys won’t work. She could give a presentation with a mountain of PowerPoint slides and white papers from the world’s most prominent experts (aka what Hillary Clinton did, as well as Elizabeth Warren) and it won’t change the narrative.

Feeding the media beast is a wrong-headed approach, as is pandering to focus groups of people who say they want “detail” because the media has trained them well to ask for plans even if far too many wouldn’t know a policy plan if it bit them in the rear.

Giving in to these impulses is a time-honored tradition for Democratic campaigns at all levels and it is a big reason why the party – despite reflecting the positions of a majority of Americans on most issues – has such a relatively bad electoral record, considering. Legions of Democratic consultants continually tell each other to take the purportedly less risky path to electoral office, over and over, but it is a loser. This is too important of an election and losing cannot be a serious option.

I sincerely hope that Harris has exorcised this wonk demon. She can consider this (in my view) useless box checked and can get back to telling her (much larger) audience of supporters to rally to victory. People are all-in on electing her, and she and Tim Walz’s number one job until election day is to continue building on that frenzy, making it reach a fever pitch, then tripling it a thousand times over.

The candidate herself has encapsulated this concept in her statement, “When we fight, we win.” So, fight. Don’t wonk. And win. Please.

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— Oliver

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