Reinvention of Harris is all hype, no heft: will she dupe America?

As Democrats gather in Chicago this weekend for their presidential nominating convention, they have united around the programme they plan to offer the country in November’s election: joy. The world may be sliding closer to all-out conflict; the American economy may be slowing into a possible recession even as high prices continue to cut into the living standards of working families; millions of migrants may be crossing the southern border unchallenged every year, undermining the cohesion and stability of the country; a Democratic administration may have presided for the past four years over all of this and been responsible for most of it.
But Kamala Harris and Tim Walz don’t want Americans to trouble themselves with any of that. They want voters simply to feel the glee they’re spreading across the political landscape, the giddy elation they hope will ensure their election against the Republicans Donald Trump and JD Vance.
After an unprecedented summer in American politics — the conviction on criminal charges of a former president and presidential candidate; a televised debate that revealed the alarming senility of the incumbent president seeking four more years in office; an assassination attempt that came within millimetres of success; the withdrawal from the contest of the sitting president after a primary election in which he won 80 per cent of the vote; and the elevation to the nomination of a candidate who has never won a single vote in a single primary contest — the Democrats are trying to add one more improbable reality.
They are aiming to pull off an electoral victory on a platform so light and vapid it might have been floated aloft on clouds of hype; after a presidential campaign so lacking in substance it might have been created by the men who used to write advertising jingles in the 1950s; to elect a candidate so electorally unproven she might have just fallen, to use a favourite epigram of hers, out of a coconut tree.
In the long month since Harris was anointed as the nominee of her party by acclamation, she has given no interviews or press conferences. She has outlined almost no plans for a four-year term except — through terse statements via a spokesman — to renounce just about everything she proposed when she ran for president five years ago. She hasn’t offered a single rhetorical defence of the Democratic administration of which she has been (if we are to believe her promoters) a key member for the past four years.
Instead she has relied on the inflation of a bubble of exuberance around her candidacy to lift her into contention, to project an aura of fun and happiness, illuminated by smiles and giggles and lots of the sort of oratorical bubble gum for which she has become famous. “As Tim Walz likes to point out, we are joyful warriors — joyful warriors — because we know that while fighting for a brighter future may be hard work, hard work is good work, hard work is good work,” she told an ecstatic crowd in Philadelphia this month, while her 60-year old running-mate wheeled energetically around the stage behind her.
She has been assisted in this of course by a client media that, instead of doing its traditional job of scrutinising a candidate and testing her aptitude and ideas, has for the most part simply joined in the fun. “Harris is pushing joy. Trump paints a darker picture,” ran a headline in the Associated Press last week. The New York Times, normally a plodding daily slog through the tilling fields of wokery and progressive ideology, smiles benevolently on the spectacle: “Harris used to worry about laughing, Now joy is fueling her campaign,” ran a recent headline.
In its first month, in fact, the Harris campaign has looked less like a bid for control of the most important country on a dangerous planet and more a kind of vast sleepover party for excitable followers fluent in the argot of modern teenage fandom. Her crew of supporters call themselves the “K Hive”, host mass Zoom calls of “White Dudes for Harris” and spread the joy to each other using coconut emojis (Harris likes to tell the story of how her mother used to reprimand her as a child by saying: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you” — a tale that sounds about as tall as a tropical tree) .
She is described by supposedly serious organs as the avatar of a “brat summer” — look it up, if you must. Her rallies consciously evoke Taylor Swift concerts, complete with friendship bracelets and conspicuous headgear. Though since Taylor is still on her Eras Tour, Harris has been assisted instead by pop phenomena down with the kids such as Megan Thee Stallion and Charli XCX.
The reason for this vast hole of ephemera where a political campaign should be, why devoted journalists write about the “vibe shift” in the presidential race since she became the nominee, is that this long Ode to Joy is the essential component of a transformation of Harris; the most ambitious reinvention of a political persona ever attempted. In the time it takes to watch an Olympic Games from start to finish Harris has been remade from a losing, unpopular, conventional political hack into an icon of statesmanship. And yet it seems to be working.
Harris has jumped into a small lead over Trump in the opinion polls and public perceptions of her seem to have shifted markedly. “Harris has done little and said little and yet her numbers since she has been the nominee have improved sharply,” Mark Penn, who was Hillary Clinton’s pollster and now runs Stagwell, a media group, told me. “How can someone go from 38 per cent to 47 per cent on the basis of doing nothing in particular?”
A little more than a month ago, when we were still being told by the Democratic Party and the press that Joe Biden was as sharp as a tack and mentally fit for another four years, the vice-president was the failing understudy no one wanted to see take the stage. Her public approval was even lower than that of a historically unpopular president. Her occasional forays into the spotlight had almost all been cringe-inducing — verbal efflorescences of meaninglessness of the sort you might hear from a 1970s California hipster several draws into a long night at the bong. No one was much surprised.
Harris ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019 and dropped out before a single primary vote after a couple of disastrous debate performances. When Biden got the nomination, having promised to pick a woman as his vice-president — and under strong pressure to pick from an ethnic minority — Harris, as a senator, was in a field of only slightly more than one for that job.
Once in office, her grasp of the great affairs of state seemed best summarised in an exhortation she made about dealing with Covid in 2021. “It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day.” Her performance as vice-president so validated the reputation she had gained that it was often cited by Democrats as a reason they felt they would have to stick with Biden in 2024, despite his evident frailties — a Harris candidacy would be even worse. But that was then, a few weeks ago. Today, Americans are being invited to forget all that and simply relish the joy.
This invitation by the Democrats to collective amnesia applies even more forcefully to the political ideology Harris has embraced in her 20-year career in California and national politics. When she was a member of the US Senate representing the Golden State between 2017 and 2021, Harris was the most left-wing member of the upper house, according to congressional rankings by GovTrack, which measures voting behaviour (since, curiously deleted). According to the Lugar Center for Bipartisanship, she was the sixth least likely senator of 100 members in all to vote with members of the other party.
In her ill-fated run for president in 2019, Harris embraced the full slate of progressive positions, putting her well beyond the centre of the country but also beyond the centre of her own increasingly left-leaning party. A selection of the policies she espoused gives the flavour: abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency responsible for protecting the border against illegal immigrants; providing full government benefits to undocumented migrants; defunding the police; eliminating private health insurance; banning fracking; requiring mandatory government buybacks of certain firearms; and guaranteeing federal jobs for all workers. In case some readers may think this sounds like a kind of nirvana, remember this is still America — an I&I /TIPP poll recently found almost all these positions to be hugely unpopular.
If symbolism matters more than policies, she has supported fundraising drives for rioters arrested during protests after the killing of George Floyd, and in 2017 she memorably railed against Americans wishing each other “Merry Christmas” while there were migrant children held in detention facilities. “How dare we speak Merry Christmas!” she told a press conference. “How dare we! They will not have a Merry Christmas.” So much for joy.
In normal times this record, through votes, speeches and off-the-cuff expostulations, of some of the most far-left positions ever held by an American presidential candidate from a major party, would doom a campaign. Walter Mondale lost by a landslide in 1984 for wanting to raise taxes. Michael Dukakis was crushed in 1988 for having been seen as a Massachusetts progressive and too soft on criminals.
So the Harris campaign’s way of dealing with this albatross of a widely disliked politics is simply to say she no longer believes in any of it. Though we should note there is one policy position on which she has remained steadfast: abortion. (The supreme court decision in 2022 remains widely unpopular.) But on everything else, from fracking, to defunding the police to mandatory firearms buybacks, with the device of a simple campaign statement, she has recanted on all fronts.
In a normal political environment, reversals like this would be subjected to intense press scrutiny and create a hard-to-shake reputation for being inconsistent, cynical or just plain untrustworthy. In 2004, John Kerry was ridiculed by much of the media for being a “flip flopper” over one key policy reversal. Harris has made more than half a dozen in a couple of weeks and the media simply move on.
In place of these highly unpopular political stances, Harris and Walz are simply trying to steal more saleable ones. In a video commercial this week, Harris insisted she was a hardliner on illegal migration and promised to start getting tough at the border. After Trump unveiled a popular proposal this year to abolish taxes on tips for service workers, Democrats slammed it as irresponsible fiscal policy. Now Harris says she would do it too.
Can this strategy possibly work? Is it conceivable that Democrats and an allied media crowd can completely recast the Democratic candidate, distract enough voters with fluff and nonsense so they forget or ignore what she has been, and imagine her instead as the national saviour?
Conventional political analysis would say no. That even in the 12 weeks before election day, voters would be given plenty of opportunity to see through the deception. But if you didn’t know that these are not conventional times, you haven’t been following American politics for the past decade.
The scene, the election, even the culture remain dominated by one man, who has single-handedly rewritten all the conventions of behaviour and rhetoric. And while a new Kamala Harris is being born, Trump is very much the figure he has been for the past ten years — a demagogue uniquely capable of inspiring followers but also with an unrivalled capacity to alienate others.
For now he is compounding Harris’s small advantage by seeming to be incapable of prosecuting the case against her. In the month since Harris seized the nomination, Trump has flailed, from obsessing over whether she is black or Asian, to claiming she is using artificial intelligence to inflate the apparent size of crowds at her rallies, to dredging up his complaints against fellow Republicans who didn’t back his “stolen election” claim of 2020.
While it’s easy to mock the “joy” Democrats are displaying, it is also true that there is something genuine to the party’s excitement. A month ago they were stuck with a historically unpopular president evidently incapable of doing the job for another four years . But with one fateful debate performance and a little palace coup they have been liberated from the Biden Death March to electoral oblivion.
And it’s not just Democrats. A critical number of swing voters who regarded another Trump v Biden contest as the worst sequel anyone has ever written are now suddenly presented with a plausible escape route. While Harris hopes to make the election a contest between her brand (joy) and Trump’s (mean), Trump needs it to be about the substance — his record in office against the Biden-Harris administration’s, and Harris’s personal political history.
As Nicolas Checa, a pollster who advises political campaigns and businesses, says: “On the current trajectory, the 2024 election is framed as a contest between the rejuvenated Harris brand and the damaged Trump brand. If this strategic framing persists, Harris and Walz are likely to win. If the election is reframed as an issues contest (inflation, affordability, immigration, crime and foreign policy), Trump and Vance are likely to win.”
In any case, perhaps the phoniness and emptiness of the Harris campaign might just fit the state of modern America. In US politics there has always been a premium on style over substance. Few figures in public life have been as effective at exploiting that reality as Donald Trump. There is a certain irony in watching as Trump, who has made several careers out of successfully deceiving people, now finds himself the victim of what may be the biggest con of all.