Frustrated Republicans who see US Vice President Kamala Harris’ rise in the polls have a simple message for former US president Donald Trump — stick to policy and you can win. The problem is their candidate is Donald Trump, and Trump, who beat policy wonk Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign, knows that in a contest between white papers and vibes — which is really just cooler shorthand for emotion and feeling — vibes usually carry the day. (Clinton also famously lost to former US president Barack Obama in 2008 in a contest not over minuscule policy differences, but over vibes.)
A recent exchange between the former president and South Carolina Senator and Trump superfan Lindsey Graham was telling.
“President Trump can win this election. His policies are good for America, and if you have a policy debate for president, he wins,” Graham told Kristen Welker last month on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Donald Trump the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election.”
(Trump, in a policy debate, LOL).
“Look, I like Lindsey. I don’t care what he says, OK?” Trump said in response to Graham’s comments during an interview with CBS.
Trump does not care because he knows vibes, not policy, can get you big ratings for your party’s convention, US$540 million in campaign donations and tens of thousands of volunteers who would knock on doors or create posts on TikTok, just because they are feeling it.
Still, Trump has been trying to shift gears and highlight policy as Republicans have publicly fretted that this is his election to lose, and that he would lose by ignoring policy and focusing on trying to harsh Harris’ and running mate Minnesota Governor “Coach” Tim Walz’s vibes. After the successful Democratic National Convention (DNC), which was a whole love, joy and freedom vibe, Trump called into Newsmax and said that Harris was a “Marxist or beyond that.”
He has spent much of his time in his battle against Harris trying to portray her as unlikeable, incompetent and shifty, while the Democrats, also aware of the power of vibes, have smartly labeled Trump as weird.
(With vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and former US representative Tulsi Gabbard as some of Trump’s most visible backers, the weird argument becomes even easier to make.)
“Folks don’t vote for 10-point plans,” Patrick Gaspard, a policy guru and head of the Center for American Progress, said in an interview with Bloomberg News last month at the DNC. “Every election for the last 200 years has been a vibes election.”
This election, while it has been remarkably unpredictable, would likely stay true to form with vibes edging out policy. Successful campaigns are about poetry, to borrow from former New York governor Mario Cuomo, and the prose comes with governing. This is not to say that Harris should not have policy or should not talk policy — she has policies and would likely talk about them in more detail when she sits for an interview.
For example, her new ad called “Full House,” says that as president she would build 3 million new homes and rentals. These are the bread-and-butter — “kitchen table” — issues that centrist Democratic presidential nominees have campaigned on for years.
Now Harris’ critics are saying that she needs more detailed policy proposals, ignoring that Trump’s policy is that he alone can fix everything just by showing up.
Take Trump’s plan for inflation, a top issue for voters.
“On my first day back in the Oval Office, I will sign an executive order directing every cabinet secretary and agency head to use every tool and authority at their disposal to defeat inflation and to bring consumer prices rapidly down,” Trump said during what he billed as “an intellectual speech” in Asheville, North Carolina, earlier this month. “It will be a whole of government effort to raise the standard of living and make American lives affordable again.”
So Trump’s big idea to reduce the cost of living is to have everyone in his administration work on it — not exactly novel.
The emphasis on detailed policy ignores a reality: Most voters are juggling jobs and family, are just trying to get by and simply do not have time to focus much attention on specific plans. They do not sit around watching endless hours of cable news or searching for the policy section on candidates’ Web sites.
What they do focus on is how a candidate makes them feel and whether they vibe with a particular candidate. It is the classic beer test often mentioned in presidential politics.
There is a reason that Trump, ever mindful of the power of branding and vibes, apparently borrowed Clint Eastwood’s tough guy squint and is utterly obsessed with Harris’ appearance. Looking the part played a key role in how Trump picked his Cabinet.
Trump’s biggest asset against US President Joe Biden was Biden’s age. It was not that Trump was so strong on policy, it was that Biden was presentationally weak, which made his ideas, policies and presidency also seem weak. With Harris, Trump, an almost God-like figure to his followers, faces someone who has that “it factor” he had in 2016. It is a viral vibe that is hard for him to stop because he has never faced an opponent like this.
Nia-Malika Henderson is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former senior political reporter for CNN and the Washington Post, she has covered politics and campaigns for almost two decades. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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