Can Kamala Harris overcome her campaign’s biggest challenge?

The Trump campaign wants to run against an anti-cop, open borders “communist” — and believes that it can cast Vice President Kamala Harris in that role. 

Harris, for her part, has taken pains to beat such charges of ideological extremism. By abandoning certain progressive commitments, embracing conservative rhetorical tropes, and claiming the mantle of economic populism, she has sought to define herself as the kind of Democrat who swing voters can trust. Much of this week’s Democratic National Convention will likely be focused on that rebranding effort. 

Still, there’s reason to think that the GOP may succeed in tarring Harris as a radical. During her ill-fated 2020 primary campaign, today’s Democratic nominee embraced a wide array of profoundly left-wing positions. As a large field of presidential aspirants vied for highly engaged progressives’ attention and donations, Harris said she would ban fracking; reduce funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement; decriminalize unauthorized border crossing; replace all private health insurance with Medicare-for-all; and establish a “mandatory buyback program” for assault weapons. After her campaign ended, in the summer of 2020, she praised the “defund the police” movement. Many of these stances are exceptionally unpopular with the general public. In a poll from 2019, just 27 percent of voters supported the decriminalization of unauthorized border crossing, while in 2020
only 37 percent backed abolishing private health insurance, and in 2021 a mere 15 percent wanted lower police spending in their area. And although some versions of Medicare-for-all poll well, only 37 percent of voters supported it when told that it would involve banning all private health insurance, according to a 2019 KFF poll.

In a recent New York Times poll of three battleground states, 44 percent of voters said Harris was “too liberal,” (while only 34 percent said Trump was “too conservative”). And in a Gallup poll taken in June, 56 percent of voters said that Biden was “too liberal,” while 44 percent deemed Trump “too conservative.”

Given all this, it isn’t surprising that Trump’s team is hammering the charge that Harris is “dangerously liberal” — or, in the Republican nominee’s characteristically hyperbolic telling, that she “would want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner.”

For the moment, swing voters don’t seem to believe that Harris and and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are the second coming of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Democratic nominee has risen steadily in the polls, and currently leads Trump in three of the most hotly contested battleground states. 

But the campaign is young. The GOP has just started airing its attacks on Harris’s record. And Trump has undermined his own campaign’s messaging in recent weeks by steering public attention away from, say, Harris’s past stance on fracking and toward his own belief that he is the arbiter of whether she is truly Black. With more ad spending and message discipline, Trump’s team could plausibly dent Harris’s standing with attacks on her ideology.

Or at least, the Democratic nominee is taking that possibility seriously. 

Since her campaign’s launch a month ago, Harris has sought to align herself with majority opinion in (at least) three distinct ways. First, she has moderated substantively, disavowing her most left-wing issue positions from 2020, while touting her support of a bipartisan border security bill and the toughness of her prosecutorial record. 

Second, she has made the case for liberal issue positions in philosophically conservative terms — framing her social policies as attempts to safeguard individual freedom from government overreach and her fiscal agenda as, among other things, a plan for helping strivers “build intergenerational wealth.”

Finally, Harris has painted herself as a tribune of the middle class and her opponent as a servant of the wealthy few. To claim the mantle of economic populism, Harris has not been afraid to tout ideas that are substantively left-wing yet broadly popular.

All three of these tactics have merit; political scientists have demonstrated that each offers a potential electoral benefit. 

At the same time, Harris’s strategy risks increasing the salience of issues that are unfavorable for her party. And in the absence of a coherent account of why her views changed so markedly over the past four years, some voters are liable to see her current ideological positioning as more cynical than sensible.

To this point, Harris’s campaign is going better than most Democrats dared to hope. But if there is one thing that could sour the Democratic ticket’s good vibes, it is a smear campaign that tars her as a radical. The future of our republic may therefore hinge on how well Harris parries that attack. 

Harris 2024 is unburdened by what has been

Harris’s primary approach to moderating her image is straightforward: She has disavowed her most unpopular past positions, while pledging to get “tough” on crime and the border.

In recent weeks, the Harris campaign has told various press outlets that she no longer supports a ban on fracking, the decriminalization of unauthorized border crossings, and single-payer health care.

Meanwhile, Harris has played a tough-as-nails prosecutor and border hawk on TV. In one recent campaign advertisement, a grave-voiced narrator tells swing-state voters:

Kamala Harris has spent decades fighting violent crime. As a border state prosecutor, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling weapons and drugs across the border. As vice president, she backed the toughest border control bill in decades. And as president, she will hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking. Fixing the border is tough, so is Kamala Harris.

In both this ad and her stump speeches, Harris has committed herself to the Senate’s bipartisan border security bill. That legislation would curtail the right to seek asylum when too many migrants try to cross the US border at once, while also raising the legal threshold for asylum claims. This represents a departure from mainstream Democrats’ traditional position on border security, which held that measures fortifying the border should be paired with some form of amnesty for longtime, law-abiding undocumented US residents. And the bill is even more starkly contrary to Harris’s 2019 position on immigration, which privileged humanitarian concerns above law enforcement. 

It is unclear whether Harris’s pivot on criminal justice issues has any substantive content. During her 2020 campaign, Harris generally sought to emphasize the most liberal aspects of her prosecutorial record, such as her support for alternatives to incarceration for first-time offenders under 31 years old. With violent crime still near historic lows and the Black Lives Matter movement foregrounding the harms of abusive policing and mass incarceration, Harris chose not to advertise her success in locking up alleged criminals. 

Now, she clearly has no compunction about touting her imprisonment of killers and drug dealers. As of yet, this change in tone and emphasis does not appear to signal large changes in concrete policy positions. But it stands to reason that a Democratic nominee who wins on Harris’s 2024 message may be reluctant to sign off on major reductions in criminal sentencing — and eager to expand police department head counts. 

These shifts could pay electoral dividends (even if Harris’s new border security policy seems unlikely to resolve our present immigration system’s dysfunction). 

American voters’ views on both crime and immigration have trended rightward over the past four years. As of February, 77 percent of Americans considered the situation at the US southern border to be either a “crisis” or a “major problem, according to Pew Research. In a Gallup poll published in July, meanwhile, a majority of Americans said they wanted immigration “decreased” for the first time since 2005. 

When the Democratic pollster Navigator asked Americans whether they supported the bipartisan border security bill — when described as legislation that would increase “funding for border security and make it harder for migrants to claim asylum” — 66 percent did, while just 21 percent opposed it. 

At the same time, the percentage of Americans who consider crime an extremely serious or very serious problem in the United States has surged during the Biden era in Gallup’s polling (and this year’s decline in violent crime has not quelled the public’s concerns).

The fact that voters have moved right on immigration doesn’t necessarily mean that Democrats would benefit electorally from doing the same.  Some commentators and academics question whether candidates’ issue positions exert a significant influence on voter behavior. After all, many swing voters do not follow politics closely and are ignorant of even the most basic policy distinctions between the two parties. And research suggests that voters’ social identities and candidates’ non-ideological qualities (such as attractiveness) have considerable political impacts. 

Nevertheless, the idea that there is no benefit to aligning your positions with popular opinion is untenable. 

In a 2022 paper, political scientists from Baylor University attempted to gauge the importance of policy proximity — the extent to which a candidate’s policies align with one’s own — to voter behavior. They found that more than 80 percent of voters support the candidate who most closely represents their views. And on the issues that such voters deem “extremely important,” policy proximity can be as influential on vote choice as partisanship. 

Given that voters have been listing “crime” and “immigration” high on their list of top concerns, it’s plausible that Harris could win some votes by aligning herself more closely with public opinion on those subjects. And in an election that could be decided by tens of thousands of votes in a handful of states, “some votes” could be decisive. 

Harris is selling liberal policies in conservative packaging

In addition to substantively moderating on select issues, Harris and Walz have been trying to make their liberal agenda sound maximally appealing (and unthreatening) to moderate and conservative voters.

Harris has a conventionally Democratic economic agenda, which includes support for labor unions, higher taxes on the rich, and expanded social welfare spending for the poor and middle-class. Instead of selling these ideas solely with reference to progressive values such as equality, however, Harris has framed them as a means of ensuring that “every person has the opportunity to build a business, to own a home, to build intergenerational wealth.” Similarly, Harris has framed her labor agenda as an attempt to increase workers’ personal liberty, rather than to reduce inequality, promising on the stump to fight for “a future where every worker has the freedom to join a union.” 

Harris and Walz have simultaneously framed their liberal social agenda as a reflection of their commitment to personal liberty and skepticism of intrusive government. 

“We respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make, even if we wouldn’t make the same choices for ourselves,” Walz recently told a crowd in Wisconsin. “Because we know there’s a golden rule — mind your own damn business. I don’t need you telling me about our health care. I don’t need you telling us who we love. And I sure the hell don’t need you telling us what books we’re going to read.”

The Democratic ticket has also framed its commitment to democracy as an expression of patriotism and reverence for the constitution. 

Academic research indicates that this general framing technique can be effective. In 2019, sociologists at Stanford University conducted a survey experiment to test how different moral framings influence support for progressive policies. They presented one group of voters with a fictional Democratic politician who defined their agenda with reference to progressive values — saying that his “vision for our country is based on principles of economic justice, fairness and compassion.” They then presented a second group of voters with the same hypothetical politician, but who framed his policy agenda in conservative terms, saying that his “vision for America is based on respect for the values and traditions that were handed down to us: hard work, loyalty to our country and the freedom to forge your own path.”

They found that support for the fictional Democrat was higher among the latter group, as appealing to conservative moral values won over a significant number of conservative and moderate voters without alienating liberal respondents. 

This finding is consistent with one of the oldest and most broadly supported findings in political science: Americans tend to be symbolically conservative (in that they are attached to individual liberty and small government as abstract ideals) but operationally liberal (in that they tend to oppose virtually all cuts to the welfare state, and support higher taxes on the rich).

Harris’s campaign rhetoric embodies this insight, wrapping left-of-center economic policies in conservative moral sentiments.  

Progressive is not the opposite of pragmatic

Although Harris has moderated both substantively and rhetorically, she has not become an across-the-board centrist. Rather, she has stuck to a left-populist economic message, telling voters that she “knows what it’s like to be middle-class” and is therefore determined to “lower health care costs and make housing more affordable” — while “Donald Trump has no plan to help the middle class, just more tax cuts for billionaires.” 

To bolster her credentials as a champion of ordinary people and opponent of exploitative elites, Harris has embraced some markedly left-wing policies. She has not only championed Biden’s agenda on paid family leave, child care, and cash benefits to families with young children, but also promised to crack down on corporate price-gouging in the grocery and housing sectors.

On the latter front, Harris has vowed to “take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases,” likely referring to a recent Biden administration proposal to bar large landlords from increasing rents by more than 5 percent a year nationwide. 

The wisdom of these plans are disputable. Rent control measures are effective at increasing the affordability of housing units subject to control. But they often lead to higher rents for new tenants not covered by rent restrictions, in part because constraining the profitability of rental units reduces builders’ incentives to construct more housing. Similarly, when poorly designed, price controls can worsen poverty (as in rent) and induce shortages (as in foodstuffs). 

Nevertheless, imposing price caps on corporate landlords and grocery chains is undoubtedly a leftwing economic policy, which substantially increases the state’s involvement in commerce. 

Yet such policies nevertheless poll well with voters of all stripes. In Navigator’s polling, 86 percent of voters expressed support for “cracking down on rent gouging by corporate landlords and private equity firms involved in buying up rental properties, while a similar share said that “cracking down on corporations that are price gouging on things like food and gas” should be one of the government’s top priorities. Further, embracing a crusade against profiteers provides Harris with an account of inflation’s causes — and answer to the cost-of-living crisis — that does not implicate the Biden administration’s policies or threaten the interests of core Democratic constituencies. 

Harris’s evident belief that there is no inherent tension between broadening her appeal and embracing certain progressive economic policies is consistent with empirical evidence. 

According to Berkeley political scientist David Broockman, most swing voters view policies on an issue-by-issue basis, holding an ideologically diverse range of opinions, rather than uniformly “moderate” ones.

 “My sense of the efficacy in moderating is not so much that it sends a broad signal that Harris is centrist,” Broockman told Vox. Rather, he believes that moderating tends to work because it leads Democrats to disavow specific, unpopular left-wing stances. But even if moderate positions are more politically expedient than progressive ones on average, there are many cases in which that rule doesn’t hold. Democrats interested in ruthless pandering should therefore be ideologically flexible — veering right on some issues, and left on others — rather than reflexively moderate, in Broockman’s view.  

In a recent survey experiment, Broockman and Yale political scientist Josh Kalla tested how a variety of different, pro-Harris messages changed the voting intentions of 100,000 respondents. They found that some progressive messages (such as unequivocal support for abortion rights) increased Democratic vote-share by more than many moderate messages did.

Harris’s heterodox positioning — embracing Sen. Joe Manchin’s views on border policies and Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s on price regulation — may be electorally optimal. 

Harris has some explaining to do

Harris’s approach to combating allegations of extremism is largely sound. But it comes with at least two liabilities.

The first is that airing advertisements spotlighting her toughness on the border risks increasing the salience of immigration without persuading voters that Harris is the best candidate to handle that issue. 

“You kind of have to build on voters’ [preexisting] perceptions,” Michigan State University political scientist Matt Grossmann told Vox. Harris’s background as a prosecutor provides a basis for building up her reputation “as tough on crime,” Grossmann said, but it might be more difficult to persuade voters “that she’s tough on border security if that’s not what people started by believing.”

Polls have consistently found that voters trust Trump over both Biden and Harris to handle immigration.

The second risk in Harris’s strategy is that dramatically shifting her positions on a wide range of issues could invite the charge that she is a cynical “flip-flopper” lacking in strong principles. The best way to counter that attack would be for Harris to offer a clear explanation for why her views have changed so much over the past four years. 

There are a few different ways to approach that task. Harris could say that four years in national office has led her to update her understanding of what policies would be both substantively effective and politically realistic. Or she could cite a changing set of background facts. Crime is higher today than it was during her first presidential campaign, and the challenges associated with resettling large numbers of asylum seekers have become more acute. 

Regardless, she needs some narrative that makes her policy shifts appear genuine, firm, and well-considered. This week’s Democratic National Convention gives her an opportunity to tell that story.

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