There’s Still Time to Define Kamala Harris for Voters

T he punditocracy is convinced that Donald Trump’s campaign had one objective in the days immediately following Kamala Harris’s assumption of her party’s reins from Joe Biden: “Define Harris early.” And it’s not as though the campaign didn’t try. Ultimately, however, the consensus verdict is that the Trump camp’s narrow window to act has now closed.

“Donald Trump’s campaign had to take her down early or at least hit her hard—and didn’t,” the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan wrote. And because failure is an orphan, the blame for missing this opportunity has fallen at Trump’s feet. “A number of Republicans have publicly and privately worried Trump’s freelancing has undermined the campaign’s efforts to define Harris early on,” according to Semafor’s Shelby Talcott.

It’s true enough that Trump’s attempt to highlight Harris’s inauthenticity as a political personality by questioning her racial identity blew up on the launch pad, that evaluating her level of physical attractiveness as wanting when compared to his own is likely to backfire, that calling her “stupid” invites unfavorable comparisons to him, and that insisting Democrats should be unhappy with her elevation over Biden has fallen on deaf ears. . . . Where was I going with this? Oh, right: the many, many blind alleys down which Trump has gotten himself lost since July 21.

But for all his hapless misadventures, the opportunity to “define” Harris in negative terms has not yet escaped Trump’s grasp. Not if the polling over the weekend is to be believed.

“Nearly 6 in 10 Americans say they believe Harris has had ‘just some’ or ‘very little’ influence on the administration’s immigration policies,” the Washington Post’s write-up of the latest Post/ABC News/Ipsos survey read, “and more than 6 in 10 say she’s had limited influence on the administration’s economic policies.” Indeed, Republicans and independent voters are less likely to say Harris had any substantial influence over the president and his policies than are Democrats, who probably believe that Harris’s presumed powers of persuasion over Biden were a net plus.

This finding dovetails with the findings of a CBS News/YouGov poll released on Sunday. While close to 90 percent of respondents said they know what Donald Trump “stands for,” only about two-thirds of respondents said the same of Harris. Once again, Democrats are more likely than Republicans and independents to say they have a fully formed opinion of Harris. But nearly 40 percent of self-described moderates, just under half of independent voters, and a majority of Republicans said she has not sufficiently explained “what she stands for.”

To a certain extent, these results substantiate the allegation that Trump and the GOP have not yet laid a glove on Harris. But the poll identifies openings for the former president and his party, too. For example, almost two-thirds of respondents — including 65 percent of independents and 67 percent of self-described moderates — say Harris’s views are “mostly the same” as Joe Biden’s, “but not entirely.” The GOP would be well-advised to latch onto this result like a junkyard dog. How, precisely, are Harris’s views similar to those shared by the deeply unpopular incumbent president? And when they diverge, is that because Harris has indulged her reliable impulse to cater to the far Left?

To a certain extent, both Trump and Harris benefit from the willingness of each party’s partisans to fill in their candidates’ blanks with their own preferences. When they are asked why they think food prices will decrease when their candidate is president, both Trump and Harris supporters cite “general confidence” over “specific polices” by wide margins. But while a plurality of all voters believes grocery prices will decline under Trump, a near-majority thinks the cost of groceries will increase under a Harris administration. Insofar as this question represents a proxy for the overall burden of inflation, it suggests that Trump is still better trusted on the pocketbook issues that often — but not always — determine the course of electoral politics.

Republicans know Trump’s political prospects are better served if he sticks to the issues that voters care about this cycle. Democrats, too, understand that the issue environment favors the party out of power. They’re all, however, equally convinced that Trump resents having to forgo the gratification he gets from giving his crowds what they want. Sure, he can rattle through a prepared speech, occasionally departing from the text to argue with himself (as he did when he wondered if voters don’t care about the economy as much as he had just claimed they did). But he can also be relied upon to divert from the subject matter and riff extemporaneously in ways that sabotage the campaign’s preferred messages.

The Harris campaign is content to rely on this dynamic, presumably operating under the assumption that it will hold for the remainder of the election. What’s more, the Harris operation seems to understand that providing the public with too many specifics about its own candidate only undermines her chances in November. “We all know how this works: The more details you share, the more your policies are going to get picked apart,” said Harris campaign surrogate Kaivan Shroff on Monday. “She’s saying, ‘I trust the American people, I trust the journalists to explain these policies and our values to folks,’” he added. “And I think, when that happens, it will be successful for Democrats.”

If the Harris campaign’s strategy is dependent on Trump’s indiscipline and the media’s willingness to promote “joy” in lieu of a cogent governing agenda, it may yet be surprised. Republicans have an opening to tie Harris to the unpopular policies with which voters already associate her. The saving grace for Harris in the minds of potential swing voters is that they don’t know exactly where she diverges from Biden. Some may be inclined toward charity on that front, but it’s the GOP’s job to disabuse them of their benevolence.

It is far from clear that the Republican Party and its standard-bearer can settle on a single message that tethers Harris to Biden and highlights her artificiality, repeating it like a mantra until the point at which voters have internalized it without having their hands held by the press. But if the Trump campaign demonstrated that level of seriousness, it’s also clear that the Harris campaign wouldn’t have a plan to contend with it.

The vice president’s vulnerabilities are glaring, and she’s hoping that her maladroit opponent will paper over them in voters’ minds. So far, it looks like a smart bet. But the edifice of competence and popularity that Harris and her media abettors are erecting is a hollow façade. A few consistent nudges in the right places and the whole thing could come crashing down.