Harris has to turn the vibe into votes

By Emma Doyle | Australian Financial Review | August 23, 2024

The balloons have dropped, the stars are headed back to Hollywood, and that’s officially a wrap on the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

After a breathless month-long sprint to launch Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s new presidential nominee, the party pulled off an electrifying convention. Despite worries that pro-Palestinian protests could bring back echoes of the 1968 Chicago convention’s riots, the worst that can be said is that organisers couldn’t keep the schedule on track, leading to late nights for US East Coast viewers waiting to watch the headliners.

But behind all the glitz and glamour – the Grammy-winning musicians, the double-barrelled star power of the Obamas, the Oprah of it all – what do Americans know now about Kamala Harris that we didn’t know last Monday morning?

We know that she’s a caring stepmother who makes a mean brisket. We know athletes and actors have endorsed her candidacy. We heard testimonials attesting that she is both a loyal friend and a ferocious lawyer.

Make no mistake: this makes for compelling viewing, and Democrats have put on quite a show in Chicago. The overarching message is that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are good people and good listeners who also know how to have a good time; Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, on the other hand, are “dangerous” and “weird”. Michelle Obama leading attendees in a call and response to “do something!” is exactly the kind of speech that recruits the volunteers Democrats will need if they are to turbocharge voter turnout in critical states such as Georgia.

But Harris herself came into this convention as a cipher, a relatively undefined candidate whose tenure as vice president has taken as much damage from friendly fire as from partisan sniping. There are 74 days until election day, and this far out, good vibes may not be enough to translate to votes in the states she needs to win.

If you watched all four nights of the convention, you could be forgiven for thinking that unlike 2020, the Democratic Party has come to embrace funding police and the US military, free trade, country music and chanting “U-S-A.”

They support both gun control and gun owners, immigration reform and tougher border enforcement; they’re for protectionist US manufacturing policy but against Trump’s tariff proposal. Bernie Sanders railed against billionaires, and was immediately followed by billionaire hotel heir J.B. Pritzker and multimillionaire Ken Chenault.

Democrats even support Republicans, as long as they’re willing to turn on their party and speak at the DNC. Just don’t look too closely at the official DNC platform, which was written earlier this US summer and thus makes several promises about Joe Biden’s second term.

It’s a stark contrast from Harris’ partisan, policy-focused 2020 campaign, where she called for a ban on fracking, supported a government-funded single-payer healthcare system, and took strong progressive stances against police funding and immigration enforcement – positions Republicans have been quick to highlight in attack ads.

Harris’ staff have walked back many of those positions, and it’s not hard to see why: she needs San Francisco progressives and Minnesota moderates to turn out in equal strength, and the more she campaigns on policy rather than sticking to personality, the harder that becomes.

The underlying theme seems to be that with Harris, you can have it all – after all, she’s for the future, whatever that means to you. But platitudes don’t hold up as well under the type of scrutiny candidates face when they have to take direct questions or outline a plan for their first 100 days in office.

This strategy works only as long as Harris can control the narrative, and that control began to erode as soon as she walked off the stage on Thursday.

She’s committed to debating Trump next month and pledged to get a formal interview scheduled by the end of this month, but both those formats mean the former prosecutor will have to be the one answering questions, not just asking them.

Going into the convention, more than a third of the voters told pollsters they did not know what Harris stood for, and they were similarly divided on how closely they associated her policy stances with the administration she now served in. Republicans will be watching post-convention polling closely to see if she’s closed that gap – and will then be looking for ways to widen it in the time that remains.

Without a greater sense of what she specifically stands for, what we’re left with after the DNC is a film with incredible cinematography and a killer soundtrack, but not much of a message.

Published by the Australian Financial Review