 Dustin Siggins |
If there’s one thing presidential campaign strategists know, it’s public relations. Every moment of every day is spent penetrating target audiences to secure the number of votes necessary to win the White House. Vice President Kamala Harris knows it too, and she’s spent the last three weeks turning herself from the most unpopular VP in history to presumptive Democratic nominee: raising money, tightening up what was becoming a runaway race for Trump and giving Democrats momentum for the first time all year.
But now comes the hard work of defining herself in the minds of voters less than 90 days before the November election. And her opponent is well-prepared with a PR machine that will try to frame her as a radically unacceptable choice for moderate voters.
As Harris prepares to officially lead the Democratic Party presidential ticket at the party convention later this month, here are the opportunities and challenges her still-fresh candidacy faces to have a winning brand with voters.
Helps
Democrats were coming apart as they fought over Biden’s future: Independents saw him as cognitively impaired and Trump was opening a solid lead over the incumbent. The contrast between a cognitively impaired and confused President Biden and former President Trump surviving an assassination attempt with a defiant fist in the air had come to define the race with just over 100 days to go.
On the other hand, Kamala Harris will be just 60 on Election Day. Simply by not being visibly frail, she automatically stanched much of the Democrats’ political bleeding. And that had a second advantage: Does anyone remember the weeks of bad Biden headlines? Pundits and influencers don’t seem to and neither do Democratic voters.
Harris’ ethnicity and race—she’s Asian and Black—also shores up two key Democratic constituencies. While she may not move many voters over to the Democratic camp that weren’t already there, she inspires people to vote who may have otherwise stayed home through more enthusiastic Get Out the Vote Efforts.
Lastly, her full-time campaigning means that Biden can spend more time governing and less time on the road. And the more positive work that he can achieve, the more she’ll be able to leverage successes into campaign talking points.
Hurts
But it’s not all good news for Harris. Her approval rating had been lower than Biden’s—the least-popular president in history—for years, which means she has an uphill battle with the critical margin of persuadable voters. Biden had 50 years of well-defined reputation behind him; meanwhile, she’s flip-flopped on issues ranging from Medicare for All to criminal justice to fracking. She was also ranked the most liberal U.S. Senator for a time, something that a Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania recently used at her expense in a recent viral ad.
Furthermore, she has a weak leadership record. Her 2019 presidential campaign crashed and burned due to rumors of staff troubles, her awkward communication style and poor retail politics. She’s also been the face of the Biden administration’s border policies, policies that resulted in immigration becoming one of voters’ most important issues and one on which Trump is winning.
Her nomination will also make it harder for Democrats to claim the “pro-democracy” mantle. As the Black Lives Matter organization noted on July 23, party leaders effectively crowned Biden by refusing to hold primary debates and changing state primary schedules in his favor. And when he became inconvenient after earning tens of millions of voters’ support as Democrats’ presumed nominee, party leaders pressured him to withdraw and coalesced around Harris, who participated in zero primaries and received no primary delegates.
This won’t stop Democrats from referencing January 6 to frame Trump as the world’s biggest threat to democracy. But it has given the GOP some ammunition that it’s already using to fight back—and, as noted above, even some liberals are upset at how the Harris coronation took place.
Mixed
Perhaps the most difficult part of Harris’ brand-building campaign will be getting ahead of several key campaign messages that could easily be turned back on her.
Speaking of crime, Harris spent much of her career—including as California’s Attorney General—framing herself as tough on lawbreakers. She did so in July, sharply contrasting her background to the “felon” Trump. But this is where her flip-flopping may catch up with her. She was tough on crime—including by throwing 1,500 people into jail on marijuana charges—right up until it was politically convenient to oppose mass incarceration. Republicans have already dug up her 2020 Tweet calling for violent rioters to be bailed out of jail, and her inconsistency has been a point of concern even among some of the liberal Left.
Harris also has a mixed record on the First Amendment. It’s popular for Democrats to attack Trump because of his “revenge” comments about how the media has treated him. But Harris targeted the press even more directly as Attorney General, when her office helped write a law banning certain types of undercover journalism.
And, of course, there’s her pick of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her presumptive running mate. Framing Walz will be almost as important as framing Harris herself. He’s a liberal Governor who served in the military and used to represent a less-liberal congressional district that Trump won and is clearly designed to win over centrist, rural white voters. Former Democratic operative and now PR pro Jeremy Tunis praised the pick, saying Walz has “plain-spoken Midwestern populism and an everyman football coach image. To put it candidly, he looks a lot like the guys that Donald Trump really needs in November.”
But former GOP operative and Touchdown Strategies Founder James Davis described Walz as “a risky pick” because “he hasn’t been vetted on the national stage.” He also said Walz “has the record of a California progressive.” Republicans are already framing Walz as the man who let Minneapolis burn during the riots after George Floyd’s murder, all the while locking up law-abiding citizens under draconian COVID restrictions. Rural voters in his home state also didn’t give much support in his re-election race.
Harris’ next major branding opportunity is the late-August Democratic National Convention, where she’ll be feted by the party and give an important brand-defining primetime speech. What she chooses to say may quickly be swallowed up by whatever happens the following week—this has been an absolutely crazy political year, after all—but will live on in campaign ads, interviews, articles and viral social media posts.
And it will continue to be part of the national brand she brings to the voters on Election Day.
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Dustin Siggins is Founder of Proven Media Solutions. A former journalist, his work has been published in USA TODAY, Business Insider and Forbes.
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