The message of the ‘Harris for President Messaging Guidance 101’ session in Chicago was essentially ‘we’ll get back to you.’
Chicago — Democrats may have hundreds of field offices and thousands of paid staffers dispatched all across the country to elect their new ticket. But what, exactly, is their message?
That’s what the dozen or so delegates and campaign volunteers who bothered to show up to Tuesday afternoon’s “Harris for President Messaging Guidance 101” panel — inside a giant Hyatt Regency ballroom on S. Martin Luther King Drive — wanted to know.
The phrase “more TK” is a familiar if not dreaded abbreviation in every reporter-editor relationship. Journalistic shorthand for text or details “to come,” this filler phrase typically communicates to an editor that the reporter is biding his or her time in anticipation of a brilliant quote or sentence that just hasn’t quite materialized yet. That might as well be the new slogan for the Harris-Walz campaign, which is leaning in on “joy,” “freedom” and progressive economics as it bides its time on all the rest.
“More TK” is quite literally the response Tuesday’s panel audience received from the Harris-Walz campaign when National Review asked what the strategy is behind not having an issues or policy tab on the Harris-Walz campaign website.
“So the Vice President has been traveling the country talking about her vision for the American people. Over the last several weeks, since this campaign launched, she obviously laid out a robust plan in North Carolina over this past week, where she was talking in great detail about the plans that she has to lower costs for families,” Harris spokeswoman Brooke Goren said in response. “So you can expect more to come from the campaign in terms of her talking about her specific plans.”
That wait-and-see disposition has made its way onto the convention floor, where delegates tell National Review they are optimistic that she will get more specific with her platform over time. “She needed to go out there and start campaigning and have people meet her, and that’s what she’s doing. I know she’ll get to more policy as things go on,” says California delegate Steve Bott.
Given that the new Trump-vs.-Harris race kicked off only four weeks ago, “I think what she’s doing now has been exactly what was needed to sort of jolt the Democratic Party and independents and hopefully others to start listening to her and listening to the campaign,” Bott added. “And I’m sure the policy is going to come in terms of concrete plans.”
Working in her favor, argues Representative Summer Lee (D., Pa.), is the reality that “most people recognize what the Democratic Party platform is.”
“A lot of people expect her to be thoughtful, to take her time, but only because they already know that the Democrats are the party that are going to stand for reproductive justice. We already know that the Democratic Party stands for infrastructure and workers’ rights. So we have that foundation that they are now building on, and they’ll get more into specificity” as the campaign goes on.
There’s a palpable sense of enthusiasm here in Chicago for this week’s convention, with delegate after delegate telling National Review on the convention floor Tuesday evening that, in Harris, the party finally has a reason to feel hopeful, joyful, and energetic again.
The Harris-Walz campaign strategy seems to be paying off politically, for now, at least, as the new Democratic nominee continues to benefit from a post-Biden polling bump that has her neck-and-neck with Donald Trump in the battleground states. But as the clock ticks, the campaign is not showing signs of recognition that there may be an expiration date on this honeymoon phase, and that a more specific, concrete platform may be necessary to convince independent voters to join the team.
It wasn’t until Friday — nearly a month after she first joined the race — that Harris offered voters a first concrete look at her economic-policy plan, which is in many ways an extension of her own boss’s policy priorities. If elected, Harris hopes to implement more than a dozen economic-policy proposals centered on lowering costs for middle-class Americans, including a plan to ban “price gouging” on food and groceries. In standard Harris campaign fashion, the anti-price-gouging plan was short on detail, leading critics to argue that the vice president intends to establish Soviet-style price controls — an allegation Harris’s supporters vehemently denied in several clean-up attempts in the press.
Other facets of her plan include capping insulin prices at $35 and out-of-pocket drug expenses at $2,000 for all Americans; enacting tax benefits and policies aimed at increasing the nation’s housing stock, including a plan to provide $25,000 in down-payment support to first-time homebuyers, and to create a $40 billion fund to support innovative housing construction; and a crackdown on alleged “price-fixing” by rental-data firms and the purchasing of homes by large financial firms and wealthy investors.
While Biden and Harris have pointed to “historic” job growth time and time again as major evidence of their economic prowess (though they regularly mislead on the fact that much of this job growth was just a rebound from the massive job loss of the early days of the pandemic) — a new revision from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals that job growth over the last year was actually much less than it reported in March: there were 818,000 fewer jobs created between April 2023 and March 2024 than first reported.
Outside of her foray into economic policy and the fact that she carries the baggage of the current administration, Harris is now seen by some voters and activists as a blank slate on a number of issues, including the Israel-Hamas war, immigration, and even climate change.
No one at this year’s convention appears to be losing sleep over any of this. Georgia delegate Tim Bailey says that, based on what he’s seeing here in Chicago and hearing on the ground in his battleground home state, Democrats don’t have any blind spots heading into November.
“Think about the timeline we’ve been dealing with here,” he said in a brief interview on the floor Tuesday evening. “We have an unprecedented situation where Joe Biden — God bless him, what a brave man — withdraws from the presidential race. And think about having to basically reboot and basically start a campaign over, you’ve got to introduce her and to get her known as the presidential candidate, while you’re developing those policies into a cohesive product that you can put out there and have people understand.”
Around NR
• Kamala Harris is “wafer thin,” says Rich Lowry:
It is appropriate that Kamala Harris is from the town of Oakland, Calif., of which it was famously said there was no there there. It is hard to think of another presidential nominee who has felt so utterly superficial — not as a campaign tactic, but as a reality.
• For a moment on Tuesday, it was 2008 all over again at the Democratic National Convention,” writes Ryan Mills, who explains how former president Barack Obama tried to resurrect the magic of that election cycle in his DNC speech last night:
There were the chants of “Yes, we can” and “Yes, she can.” There was the talk of “hope making a comeback,” a blatant effort by the Democrats to try to inject some of Obama’s 2008 magic into Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.
• Republican congressman Matt Gaetz won his Florida primary election Tuesday against a challenger backed by former House speaker Kevin McCarthy, whose removal Gaetz helped orchestrate last year. James Lynch has more here.
• Audrey Fahlberg reports on the ground in Chicago about the “disorganized” DNC:
I knew the moment I arrived at the Hyatt Regency’s press check-in Monday morning that this year’s Democratic convention would be mired in logistical failures. DNC volunteers gave reporters inaccurate directions, security officers sounded confused about protocol, and press organizers told me they would not be surprised if there were serious scheduling and security issues throughout the week.
• With RFK Jr.’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, revealing that the campaign is considering dropping out and endorsing Trump, Philip Klein says any decision the Kennedy campaign makes “could end up having more of an impact on the election than anything that happens in Chicago” at the DNC:
The RFK Jr. factor is a major wildcard in the race that nobody should sleep on.
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