In the six weeks since Kamala Harris succeeded President Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee, Donald Trump has repeatedly accused her of being a radical whose views are out of step with those of voters.
“He is a Marxist. He is a fascist,” the former president said last week, combining strange labels that are often at odds with each other.
Trump claimed without evidence that Vice President Harris, whom he called “Comrade Kamala,” “wants this country to go communist.”
Trump openly explained his strategy to reporters: “We just have to identify our opponent as a communist or a socialist.”
But his savage blows do not fall.
Several opinion polls show Harris is steadily rising in the eyes of voters and has a slight lead in the national popular vote. Wall Street Journal Poll Last week’s poll showed the vice president receiving a favorable rating from 49 percent of voters, up 14 percent from July.
The same poll found that 59% of voters think Trump is “too extreme” to be president, but only 46% think Harris is too extreme. (That number, 46%, roughly matches the share of Trump voters in the electorate.)
So why is Trump’s liberal rhetoric failing?
On the one hand, Harris is not and never has been a Marxist, and most voters recognize this.
In the 2019 presidential campaign, she positioned herself as a progressive, but was still closer to the center than candidates like Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, who (unlike Harris) describes herself as a democratic socialist.
For double assurance, I consulted the distinguished historian of American Marxism, Paul Buhl, a retired professor at Brown University. He said he reviewed Harris’s history and found no evidence of Marxist leanings. “This is an insult,” he said in an email.
On the other hand, Harris moved quickly and effectively to define her positions as a mainstream of current democratic thought: liberal, but far from anything amounting to Marxism, which calls for government ownership of key industries.
At the Democratic convention in Chicago and in an interview with CNN last week, Harris made clear that she is abandoning some of the progressive policies she briefly embraced in the heat of her 2019 campaign.
His promise in a convention speech that he would work with “small business owners and entrepreneurs and American companies to create jobs” was pro-capitalist enough to bring some progressive critics to tears.
He has made several controversial proposals during the election campaign, including a federal ban on “price gouging” by grocery stores; Trump denounced the idea as “Soviet price controls.” But it turned out to be common: a Economist-YouGov survey Last month, he found that 60% of voters like the idea, including nearly half of Republicans.
Campaign strategists from both parties say Trump’s attacks on Harris suffer from another flaw: They are fragmented and focused. In addition to calling him a communist and a fascist, Trump also claimed Harris was more liberal than Biden and would continue the president’s policies.
“It’s not going to be controversial,” said Doug Sosnick, a Democratic strategist who helped President Clinton win reelection in 1996. “I think he tried about eight different arguments.”
Several Republican strategists say they believe Trump is aiming at the wrong target: ignite enthusiasm among voters who already support him, but targeting undecided voters.
“Insults are great for converting your base, but they don’t work for middle voters,” said one GOP strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity while criticizing his party’s nominee. “People already know his record. They want to know how candidates will grow the economy. … Every time he brings it up, he doesn’t talk about the economy.”
“Harris succeeds in presenting himself as an agent of change,” said Alex Conant, a former adviser to Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio. “In 2016, one of the reasons Trump won was because he claimed the role of candidate of change. He said he would ‘drain the swamp,’ and that appealed to independent voters. But I can’t remember the last time I heard him use that phrase.”
Strategists say Harris still has a vulnerability that Trump can exploit more consistently than he can.
They said a more effective campaign would bring him even closer to Biden’s economic record, as many voters hold the president responsible for high prices and think Trump can do a better job.
“Trump should make the election a referendum on the Biden-Harris record,” Conant said.
And they said some voters doubted Harris’ ability to lead in a crisis, given that Trump is ahead of her in the polls.
Trump’s TV ads, produced by the professionals who run his campaign, already focus on these themes. Instead of whitewashing accusations like “Marxist,” they use a more traditional and accurate label: “San Francisco liberal.”
But in public appearances, Trump has failed to stick to this more disciplined message.
While Harris continues to build her image among unsuspecting voters who may choose the next president, Trump’s campaign speeches are exercises in moral superiority.
Wild phone calls and wild shots won’t help him win more votes. But Trump wants to be Trump, free from the discipline his advisers have tried in vain to impose. He just keeps moving.
