Presidents have to do things, and they need the public behind those things.
This election season has managed to be grimmer and more dispiriting even than the last two. On their third run through a general election with Donald Trump, both parties have thoroughly acclimated themselves to running entirely negative campaigns, offering little in the way of positive policy or vision and even less that would be inspiring or exciting to anybody outside of the true believers in the candidates.
Sure, Donald Trump’s website actually has a 20-point platform and his own collection of “Agenda 47” promises narrated in video clips by Trump, while Kamala Harris has just in the past few weeks added an issues page and purported to flesh it out with an 82-page economic “policy book” that seems to exist mostly so she can say that she does actually have policies.
But campaigns aren’t just about formal proposals; they’re about campaigning on them, so people know what you stand for. When Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush ran for office, you knew exactly what they were running on, because they talked about it clearly and constantly. Even Trump, in 2016, at least had The Wall.
Of course, most voters implicitly understand that Trump is running on his record, while Harris is running on the Biden-Harris record. But beyond Trump wanting more deportations and tariffs and Harris wanting more abortions, there’s not a lot of positive argument going on. A vast amount of the campaign’s rhetoric has been consumed by a think tank white paper that Biden and Harris attack and that Trump has disavowed.
This may be coldly rational campaigning in terms of what drives people to vote these days, especially when the candidates themselves are so dreadful. But it’s a strategy that is doomed to expire on November 6. Presidents have to do things, and they need the public behind those things. It’s harder if you didn’t spend the election talking about them. Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, didn’t run on Court-packing in 1936, and even after his landslide victory, he was surprised to find that his proposal in 1937 was as unpopular as FDR was popular. Bill Clinton discovered to his dismay in 1994 that running a liberal White House after a centrist campaign was not what voters expected.
Sure, you can exercise power without regard to the voters if you don’t mind taking the political consequences, but if you govern that way, you will get those consequences. As I’ve discussed before (see here and here), presidents don’t need a mandate to exercise executive power, and Trump may not care about holding together his voting coalition for reelection, which he can’t seek. But Harris will care very much about reelection. And either of them, if they expect to get anything through Congress (even judges or budgets) will need a baseline level of public support that puts pressure on people in Congress to follow their lead.
Of course, presidents can win support after the election for things the voters want, or can be persuaded to want. George W. Bush spent the fall of 2002 stumping for the Department of Homeland Security and war in Iraq, for example, neither of which was on his agenda two years earlier. But winning the midterms helped him get those things backed by Congress. Still, we have two candidates now who seem to have lost even the skill or habit of trying to sell much of an agenda to the voters. Harris in particular, having only entered the race in July and postured herself as the “change” candidate in spite of running to continue the existing administration, may find in January that “what about Trump” isn’t much of a governing platform.