“Trump is weird” will only get Kamala Harris so far

In recent weeks, national Democrats and surrogates for Vice President Kamala Harris have settled on a pretty simple strategy: calling former President Donald Trump, his running mate Sen. J.D. Vance, and MAGA-aligned Republicans “weird.” One of its original purveyors, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, used it again Tuesday evening, during his first appearance with Harris as her running mate.

“You know it. You feel it. These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell!” Walz said, after telling a joke that played into a meme about Vance and couches.

Democrats have found plenty of fodder for the tactic, which they’ve used to describe Republican positions on abortion rights and IVF, on the role of parents and biological children, and on an array of other right-wing beliefs.

The attacks may be sticking — hardening the preexisting views many Americans have toward Trump, Vance, and the national Republican brand.

But they’re no substitute for a forward-looking, positive case in favor of Harris and Walz, according to new polling conducted by the Democratic firm Blueprint and shared with Vox. What must come next is an effort to define Harris by reintroducing the electorate to her track record before becoming vice president and leaving behind the politics and acrimony of the Trump-Biden era.

The new report reveals an interesting and slightly counterintuitive sentiment among American voters at this point in the race. Voters are relieved that there is a new option available for them to pick and feel a “breath of fresh air” — but they don’t really know Harris.

Specifically, beyond hearing attacks on Trump and Vance, they want to hear a positive, uplifting platform from Harris. They are ready for optimism, to hear why she wants to be president, and — even more fundamentally — just learn who she is. Plenty of voters have heard of the vice president, but many don’t know much about her past, her accomplishments, and her life experience, Blueprint’s chief pollster Evan Roth Smith told me.

“People really want to know who Kamala Harris is, and people are interested in finding out more about her. That is part of the atmospheric shift that’s taken place in this race,” Smith said. “There’s a lot more interest in hearing Kamala Harris and her campaign talk about Kamala Harris — more so than there is in hearing her talk about Donald Trump, or even Joe Biden.”

Blueprint, a center-left firm, has been conducting these kinds of polling experiments for the last year, questioning conventional wisdom and digging deeper on the subgroups of voters and kinds of questions that other big national polls don’t frequently ask. They’ve zeroed in on young voters, on what Americans know about Cabinet members, and how voters view specific policies. 

Smith and his team have some messaging recommendations for the Harris campaign, and a handful of specific life facts and career highlights from her biography that they found resonate particularly well with voters, but they all underscore one central theme: voter perceptions of Harris are a lot more fluid and changeable than they are of Trump, suggesting there’s not that much of an upside to dedicating time, energy, and messaging to attacking Trump, and especially not when compared to spending those resources talking herself up.

That dynamic suggests that there are limits to criticizing Trump and making fun of Vance. Most voters, including persuadable swing voters and independents, want to know about Harris’s background and are interested in a substantive, forward-looking pitch. And specifically when talking about immigration, independents are curious about how Harris would address their joint desires for border security and immigration reform.

As Harris and Walz begin to barnstorm battleground states ahead of the Democratic National Convention later this month, she has a limited window to define herself and make a positive case to voters. And while her campaign has been riding high since its late-July launch, the Harris honeymoon likely won’t last forever.

Harris has the advantage of being unburdened by what has been

There are two sets of numbers in Blueprint’s poll that explain the opportunity Harris has right now: the share of voters who say that their minds are absolutely made up on the candidates, and the share who say they could be persuaded to change their opinions.

For Trump, 71 percent of registered voters say “there is absolutely nothing” that could change their opinions of him. Just 57 percent say the same about Harris. And when asked if they would be open to changing their mind or would want to learn more about a candidate, just 12 percent of respondents felt that way about Trump, compared to the 20 percent who said that about Harris.

Though neither is particularly popular, Harris is still viewed more favorably than Trump: 46 percent have a favorable view of her compared to 43 percent for Trump. A larger share of respondents say they have an “extremely” favorable or unfavorable view of the former president (64 percent) than the share who have “extreme” opinions about Harris (53 percent).

For Smith, that suggests there is more room for voters to change or form an opinion about Harris than Trump.

This difference in strong opinions about Harris may help explain another of the poll’s counterintuitive results: Many voters don’t blame Harris for the unpopular parts of the Biden presidency and trust her more than President Joe Biden on specific issues, like protecting abortion and reproductive rights.

“Don’t tell people about the last four years. People have complicated, often unfavorable, views of Democratic governance over the last four years, and they do not yet tie her to some of the perceived failures of the Biden administration,” Smith said. There’s also a downside to talking about Trump and defending Biden: Doing so could remind people Harris was around during that time as well.

To investigate where Harris should be talking about the last four years, Smith and his team asked voters to identify whether Biden, Harris, or both of them were responsible for an array of specific policy issues. Those include increasing access to abortion, reducing crime, addressing past surges on the southern border, and providing aid to Israel and Ukraine. Biden, specifically, is seen as more responsible for politically damaging issues like the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and inflation, though he also receives credit for attempts at widespread student loan cancellation. Harris, meanwhile, was most credited for her work on abortion access, reducing border crossings, and helping to pass the codification of marriage equality.

“On these big, salient issues — the economy, inflation, and immigration — she should define herself outside of the last four years and very, very, very carefully cherry-pick items from the Biden years to be associated with,” Smith told me. 

Instead, Harris and her campaign would be smart to “lead with her personal background, who she is, where she’s from, and her role as prosecutor, as California’s attorney general, as someone who enforced the law, and put criminals, particularly criminals related to transnational crime, behind bars.”

Harris has some weak spots on immigration and the economy

The Blueprint survey also tested a variety of Republican attacks on Harris and hypothetical Democratic defenses. It found that a combination of facts about Harris’s background and work on the issues were more convincing to voters than the default Democratic response of calling something a “Republican lie” or attacking Trump as an existential threat.

This dynamic was particularly notable when looking at how to respond to the Republican attacks that resonate the most with voters, including Harris’s role in addressing immigration (think of the attacks calling her a failed “border czar”) and the rise in inflation during the first few years of the Biden presidency. As tested in the poll, both GOP arguments were compelling to voters. More than half of voters said they found the “border czar” argument very or somewhat convincing.

But the best Democratic rebuttal Blueprint tested turned out to not be based on debunking the false claims, such as by pointing out that Harris was not a border czar or responsible for the border. Instead, saying that she could be both tough on the border — because of her background prosecuting transnational gangs and drug smugglers — and compassionate to migrants — because her parents’ immigration stories gave her hope for humane and sensible reforms to the immigration system — proved the most effective. 

Similarly, criticisms about inflation, the price of goods, and the economy in general — that Biden and Harris “let government spending get out of control and let companies rip us off on everything from gas to groceries,” as the poll puts it —  were convincing to half of respondents, with 33 percent finding that “very convincing” and 17 percent finding it “somewhat” convincing.

Those attacks were best rebutted not by pointing out facts about the growing GDP, the laws passed in the last few years, or the low rate of unemployment, as had been Biden’s approach. Instead, talking up a populist economic message, of going after price gouging, capping drug prices, cutting junk fees, and taxing the rich was more convincing.

Those two lines of attack are significantly more effective than the path that Trump, Vance, and other Republicans seem to have taken in the last few weeks: calling Harris a DEI hire, criticizing her lack of biological children, or attacking her racial identity.

“Those test way at the bottom for Republicans. They are barking up the wrong tree,” Smith said. But the responses that work best to those attacks are the more traditional anti-Trump response: getting a bit personal, comparing Trump’s past affairs and divorces against Harris’s family, and calling Trump and Vance “weird” for caring so much about how she runs her family. 

Similarly, responding to the DEI and identity politics attacks with lines about how “Trump and the Republicans are desperate to distract voters from their extreme Project 2025 agenda” does better, but not that much better than essentially just calling Trump and Republicans racists.

What the voters want to hear instead

Candidates only get so much time to get their message across in an election. That’s particularly true for the Harris campaign, with the vice president getting a historically late start to a presidential bid. And as the summer passes by, the fall stretch of the election will be especially valuable, as that’s when a lot of casual voters tune in for the first time.

Because of that time constraint, there’s an opportunity cost to any line of messaging: The investments Harris makes in promoting her own record come at the expense of making the case that Trump is unfit for office.

Still, the polling suggests that the trade-off is worth it.

Beyond talking about Trump and Biden, registered voters seem to want to hear most about Harris’s career in California. In some experiments Blueprint ran, biographical facts about her time as a prosecutor, as attorney general of California, and as a US senator resonated with voters, as well as her experience growing up in a middle-class neighborhood.

So did telling voters about her work prosecuting sex traffickers and jailing abusers, securing a billion-dollar settlement for people scammed by for-profit colleges, and suing BP for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. And they liked hearing a tangible platform: protecting Social Security and Medicare, lowering costs, protecting those with preexisting health conditions, and protecting abortion rights. 

That tangible platform has yet to be fully articulated. Harris is just two weeks into a campaign that she had to assemble from the wreckage of Biden’s own reelection effort. And she has hinted at some priorities during her stump speeches, including protecting entitlement programs and reproductive rights, investing in the care economy, and fighting inflation. She still has time to define a more unified governing agenda — but her newest rallying cry is a good start: “We’re not going back.”

“This is what people are the most excited about when they hear about [her]: a mix of ‘I was attorney general, and that allowed me to a) go after bad guys and b) go after bad guys who are coming over the border, and c) go after the big companies who are ripping you off’,” Smith said. “It avoids reminding people too much about the past four years, it avoids having to say the name Joe Biden too much, and now she can introduce herself to voters without strengthening that association.”All together, Blueprint’s findings offer a logical next step for the campaign as the thrill of the honeymoon period ends and as disengaged voters begin to tune into the election. Up until now, the 2024 election has seemed to be mostly about the vibes. But the vibes won’t stay positive forever. It might be smart to make the most of them now.