How Lincoln Can Help Trump

D onald Trump is reportedly frustrated by Kamala Harris’s rise in the polls. It’s clear that he needs to take her down a notch or two, but he and his advisers are flummoxed as to how to do it.

They should take a page from Abraham Lincoln’s playbook and lure Harris into doing the dirty work herself.

Lincoln’s 1858 Senate campaign versus Stephen Douglas is best known for its historic series of debates. Douglas’s eye was on the White House, however, which meant that he had to keep Northern and Southern Democrats on board even as he ran for reelection in the Senate. Alienate one branch of his party and his nomination would be doomed.

He naturally found it easier to do this when campaigning on his own, so Douglas started the race doing just that, traveling by rail from town to town giving speeches. In the pre-electronic-media days, candidates took their message directly to the people and relied on friendly journalists to amplify it in their newspapers.

Lincoln devised a clever way to counteract this tactic and ramp up pressure for a debate. He followed Douglas around the state, giving his own speeches in the same towns and even the same locations just hours after Douglas had spoken.

This gave Lincoln the last word every day. Following Douglas’s remarks, Lincoln could poke holes in his opponent’s arguments and raise whatever questions he wanted without risking similar treatment.

Douglas eventually struck a deal: Lincoln agreed to stop shadowing him in exchange for seven debates held in different locations across the state. Each side gave up something and risked committing a campaign-altering mistake. The alternative, however, was too risky for either man to seriously contemplate.

Lincoln used the debates to force Douglas into choosing between Southerners’ pro-slavery views and the more nuanced views held by Illinois voters. Douglas chose reelection first and said that his popular-sovereignty approach to slavery expansion could result in the barring of slavery in a territory. That saved his reelection but made him anathema to the Southerners who controlled Democratic Party conventions.

Trump faces a similar challenge in that Harris is trying to appear to be one thing to moderates without alienating the progressives who control her party. Like Douglas, she can do this so long as she is not challenged. That’s why she is avoiding the press and refusing to make policy statements on issues such as immigration. Besides, the administration in which she serves remains unpopular, as do her left-wing musings from 2019.

Even a weak interviewer would be compelled to ask some difficult questions. The vice president’s poor performance in interviews suggests that she cannot handle even the lightest scrutiny.

Trump’s challenge is to force her out of this self-imposed bubble. A nationally televised debate is one way to do it, but that alone would risk Trump’s putting all his eggs in one basket. He would need to get her talking with the expectation that her inability to think quickly and speak clearly reasserts itself.

This is where Lincoln’s tactic might be useful. Trump can adapt the basic approach to modern media and the needs of his campaign.

The best way to do this would be to schedule half-hour interviews with a leading local-television anchor every time he holds a rally. This would be a win–win. Local anchors never get that sort of access to presidential candidates, and they would lap it up. Trump would get free media exposure to lift his profile in target markets. More importantly, he’d issue a clear challenge to Harris to follow suit. Once local-television anchors got to interview one nominee, they would surely want to interview the other. That would put Harris in a bind: She either turns down the challenge, which paints her as weak and afraid, or she accepts.

Accepting means she’d have to face regular questions from the press every time she visited a swing state. It also means she’d have to explain how she differs from the president she serves and why she has abandoned her previous positions. Otherwise, she’d give Trump and the media fodder to criticize her.

This local-media gambit would have a further advantage for Trump. Once the national media saw that local anchors were getting the scoops, they would demand similar interviews or town halls. Trump could accept all of these, too, as he has shown that he can withstand brutal questioning. Harris hasn’t faced that type of scrutiny before, but, once again, she’d have to accept or risk losing the generally fawning press coverage from which her campaign has benefited thus far.

Abraham Lincoln, the father of the Republican Party, used debates to destroy his leading opponent and capture the White House. If Trump adopts a similar tactic, he might expect similar results.