Vice President Kamala Harris dumped her so-called “campaign of joy” messaging for a more angry, bitter, and nasty tone with less than three weeks until Election Day.
Politico Playbook reported the shift on Friday:
You can see the change on the campaign trail, where Harris’ early emphasis on joy has given way to more direct verbal attacks on Trump, including playing video of him, AP’s Zeke Miller and Steve Karnowski report from La Crosse. You can see it on the airwaves, where a new Harris ad calls Trump “unhinged,” “unstable” and “unchecked” in a second term, NBC’s Monica Alba scooped. (Interestingly, this is all a bit of a return to Biden’s old anti-Trump messaging.) Reuters’ Jeff Mason and Nandita Bose report that the broader Harris strategy shift is an effort to play up her prosecutorial image and project strength to gain support from men and Republicans.
“Unhinged is the way to describe Kamala Harris throwing open our borders to unvetted criminals putting the safety of Americans at risk,” Brian Hughes, a senior adviser to Trump, told NBC News. “Unhinged is her support for economic policy that has made life for Americans unaffordable and trade policy that favors foreign workers over America’s working men and women”:
INCITEMENT: If you were told Donald Trump would put you and your family in concentration camps what lengths would you go to keep him out of the White House? pic.twitter.com/eAbulSBOFd
— @amuse (@amuse) October 15, 2024
The reused attacks on Trump, however, do not present voters with a unifying message that candidates often transition to in the final weeks of presidential campaigns, underscoring the Harris campaign’s desperation.
Mark Halperin, a political analyst, told Tucker Carlson on Tuesday that Harris’s adoption of Biden’s rhetoric is intended to appeal to independent voters, but it might not last long:
There’s a lot of Democrats who are not satisfied with Biden, but a lot of Democrats, and certainly a lot of independents and centrists and moderates, they don’t like either of these choices, and that — that’s part of what Democrats are looking at.
Because I think in the end, as much as she’s not satisfied people’s desire for knowledge about her, they won’t vote for Trump. They just simply don’t want four more years of Trump, and she’s turned to that and turned to that message in the last 24 hours the way Biden did. Now I don’t know if she’ll stick with it, but she’s now emphasizing this notion of “We can’t go back to somebody this unstable and this, and this unattractive in terms of personality.”
