By Ezra Klein / The New York Times
Kamala Harris has a very different theory of this election than Joe Biden did.
In 2020, and then again in 2024, Biden ceded the battle for attention to Donald Trump. Whether as a matter of strategy or as a result of Biden’s own limitations, Biden adopted a low-key campaigning style, letting Trump dominate news cycle after news cycle. Trump wanted the election to be about Donald Trump, and Joe Biden wanted the election to be about Donald Trump. On that much, they agreed.
In 2020, when Trump was the unpopular incumbent, that strategy worked for Biden. In 2024, when Biden was the unpopular incumbent, it was failing him. It was failing in part because Biden no longer had the communication skills to foreground Trump’s sins and malignancies. It was failing in part because some voters had grown nostalgic for the Trump-era economy. It was failing in part because Biden’s age and stumbles kept turning attention back to Biden and his fitness for office, rather than keeping it on Trump and Trump’s fitness for office.
Then came the debate, and Biden’s decision to step aside, and Harris’ ascent as the Democratic nominee. Harris has been able to do what Biden could or would not: fight — and win — the battle for attention. She had help, to be sure. Online meme-makers who found viral gold in an anecdote about coconuts. Charli XCX’s “kamala IS brat.”
But much of it is strategy and talent. Harris holds the camera like no politician since Barack Obama. And while Harris’ campaign is largely composed of Biden’s staff members, the tenor has changed. Gone is the grave, stentorian tone of Biden’s news releases. Harris’ communications are playful, mocking, confident, even mean. Trump is “old” and “feeble”; J.D. Vance is “creepy.” Her campaign wants to be talked about and knows how to get people talking. It is trying to do something Democrats have treated as beneath them for years: win news cycles.
Biden’s communications strategy was designed to make Trump bigger. Harris’ strategy is to make him smaller. “These guys are just weird,” Tim Walz said on “Morning Joe,” and it stuck. Walz inverted the way Democrats talked about Trump. Don’t make a strongman look stronger. Make him look weaker. Biden’s argument was that Trump might end American democracy. Walz’s argument is that Trump might ruin Thanksgiving.
There are many reasons Walz was chosen as Harris’ running mate, not least the chemistry between the candidates. But he was on the shortlist in the first place because he proved himself able to do what Harris wanted done: Get people talking about the thing he wanted them talking about.
“A message is like a baton: It needs to be handed from person to person to person,” Anat Shenker-Osorio, founder of ASO Communications, a progressive messaging firm, once told me. “If it gets dropped, it’s not persuasive. Unless you’re testing for what the base — what I think of as the choir — is willing to sing, then you’re going to be hard-pressed to get the middle to hear that song, to get the congregation to hear that song.” Walz got Democrats to sing.
Not all elections take place in new media environments. But elections that do are often won by the candidate who best understands the way attention is changing. Franklin Roosevelt understood radio in a way that Herbert Hoover didn’t. John F. Kennedy understood television in a way that Richard Nixon didn’t. Obama rode the early wave of social media. Trump mastered the algorithmic era of social media, where outrage and controversy cashed out as engagement. The platforms have changed again, chasing TikTok’s dominance, and now memes and clipped and remixed videos rule.
Biden was adrift in that medium. His age and instincts left him bereft of the moments that now ricochet across social media. Biden was getting mauled so badly on TikTok that I often heard Democrats wondering if the platform’s Chinese owners were tilting the algorithm against him.
I don’t hear Democrats worrying over that anymore. For very different reasons, Harris and Walz are both eminently meme-able, clippable, remixable. And the campaign has decided it wants to be memed, clipped, remixed. After Charli XCX called Harris “brat,” Harris’ team refashioned their social media header in the acid-washed chartreuse and lowercase font of that musician’s new album. Walz, in his first speech as Harris’ running mate, winkingly alluded to the (yes, baseless) memes about Vance’s affection for sofas. It was as clear a signal of the instincts of this ticket as could be asked for, a tip of the cap to the campaign’s army of posters.
This can go too far and often does. It’s easy for political movements with chaotic online energy to mistake what plays to the comment section for what plays to the electorate. This is the root of Vance’s weirdness: He’s a product of online MAGA subcultures that Trump inspired but doesn’t fully understand or reflect. He was reportedly pushed on Trump by Don Jr., Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk; the most terminally online of Trump’s supporters. Vance’s off-putting talk about punishing the childless and winning America back from the cat ladies is common in these circles but repellent everywhere else.
So far, Harris and Walz have been disciplined. The left’s 2020 energy, in which there was pressure for ever more self-destructive displays of purity, has given way to an on-message ruthlessness. “Kamala is a cop” became a slur in 2020. “Kamala is a cop” is closer to a slogan in 2024.
There’s been little pressure for Harris to move left and easy acceptance of her swings back to the center: In a matter of days, she disavowed past support for fracking bans, single-payer health care and redirecting funds for the police. One of her first ads frames her as “a border-state prosecutor” and focuses on the human traffickers she’s jailed and the thousands of additional border agents she’s promised to hire. The spot ends: “Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris.”
The result is that Trump is starved for the resource he craves most: attention. As is often the case when he loses control of the headlines, he’s making loonier and more self-destructive arguments; that “nobody knew” Harris was Black, that his crowds stretch past 100,000 people, that Biden has changed his mind and wants to wrench the nomination back from Harris. And now, increasingly desperate, he has agreed to the ABC News debate he’d previously backed out of, and proposed additional debates to be hosted by Fox News and NBC.
Two months ago, Trump had control of the attentional field; now he’s struggling to get a word in edgewise.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.
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