Policy Isn’t Going to Win This Election

One of the great myths of American politics is that detailed policy positions are crucial to winning elections. Yes, policy matters in broad strokes: Candidates take general positions on issues such as taxes, abortion, and foreign policy. Rather than study white papers or ponder reports from think tanks, however, most voters count on parties and candidates to signal broad directions and then work out the details later.

In the 2024 election, policy details matter even less than they usually do. Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, seem to have figured this out. Harris has been blasted by Republicans for avoiding the press, and some journalists have griped that she hasn’t sat down for a long interview and didn’t make a major policy speech before this past Friday. But Harris and Walz seem to be making a strategic choice—and for now, a good one.

Policy proposals are supposed to differentiate the candidates, but drawing policy distinctions with Trump is hard when he presents almost nothing beyond “I will fix it.” (What’s the counterargument to that? “No, you won’t”?) Trump knows that his base has never really cared that much about policy; he sees such details as bumf that only gets in the way of his supercharged appeals to the limbic system. (Remember, the GOP didn’t even bother writing a new platform in 2020.) He does not present policies so much as make wild promises in the middle of tirades about sharks and gangs and Hannibal Lecter.

Trump is so allergic to policy details and so unwilling to be pinned down about them that when the Heritage Foundation organized Project 2025 and produced a 900-page cinder block of proposals for Trump’s first days in office, Trump—who once seemed to praise Heritage’s initial work on the project—disavowed the whole thing as soon as Democrats highlighted some of the disturbing and creepy stuff in it.

Back in 2016, Trump’s ignorance about policy wasn’t much of an issue for the GOP. Republican elites knew they would send him to Washington—with adult supervision, of course—as a populist figurehead who would sign off on tax policies and judicial appointments that he neither cared about nor understood. But they also hoped Trump could control his bizarre and dangerous behavior, and when that proved impossible for him, Joe Biden chose a simple message in the 2020 campaign: Donald Trump is too awful to remain in office. Biden and Trump traded standard charges about abortion and judges and taxes and foreign policy, but in the end, what Biden promised above all was a return to a normal life after COVID.

The Biden campaign in 2024 tried to make that same case, but this time, Biden seemed flummoxed by voters who decided that he was no better than Trump because food was too expensive and gas prices were too high. At their only debate, Trump—for once—managed to keep relatively quiet, while Biden stumbled through a bunch of wonky talking points. Instead of challenging Trump as a convicted felon leading a movement rife with kooks and violent insurrectionists, Biden talked about climate goals and college aid.

Celsius targets? Pell Grants?

Perhaps the focus on policy was Biden’s idea, but someone should have talked him out of it: Letting the candidate go out there and drown in his own factoids was basic staff malpractice.

Harris has taken a different approach. I have said many times that I am comfortable voting for almost anyone who could stop Trump, but most people, understandably, want someone to vote for rather than against: Harris and Walz seem to believe that Americans are tired of gloom and drama, so they are presenting themselves as normal, cheerful people, politicians who everyone might not agree with but who won’t make America dread turning on the television.

Harris’s people also seem to grasp that when Trump is repeatedly melting down in public, Democrats should not interrupt him. And they’re right: Allowing anyone to drag Harris into the thickets of policy just to satisfy the demands of some journalists—and a lot of angry Republicans who will never vote for her—while Trump is hurting himself would, like Biden’s debate, constitute political malpractice.

In the past few weeks, Trump has attacked Harris’s race, her intelligence, and her looks. His unhinged rants are worse than ever. Last week, he managed to remind Americans yet again how much he hates military people by claiming that the presidential medals he gave out are “much better” than the Congressional Medal of Honor because people get them while they’re healthy and happy instead of all shot up, lame, or even dead. (He has a deep aversion to wounded warriors.)

Meanwhile, his running mate, J. D. Vance, continues to earn the label of “weird” that Harris and Walz have plastered on him. This weekend, for example, during an interview on Fox News, he said that “giving Kamala Harris control over inflation policy” is like “giving Jeffrey Epstein control over human-trafficking policy.” Now, I didn’t work in politics that long, but I’m pretty sure that making an analogy using a dead sex offender—who was once a well-known friend of your running mate—is not the most adept move. It’s the sort of thing that might have them rolling in the aisles over at Trump’s Truth Social site, but even the Fox anchor Shannon Bream just stared into the camera after that one.

In the middle of all this, Harris and Walz are supposed to sit for an interview and explain their plans for … what, exactly? Federal burden-sharing with the states for highway repair? Any adviser worth their salt would block the gates of the Naval Observatory rather than let Harris and Walz distract the public from the Trump and Vance tire fires by wonking out about school lunches or Ukrainian aid.

I wish that Americans cared more about policy, but they don’t. (Voters in other democracies are not much better. When I visited Switzerland while I was researching a book on democratic decline, some political analysts there told me they worry that voters are no longer equipped to participate in the referenda that run much of the country.) They care about a handful of large issues where the differences between Harris and Trump are stark, such as abortion, and that’s about it. Republicans might not like it, but Harris is wisely refusing, at least for now, to do anything that would take the spotlight off the awkward soap opera that is the Trump-and-Vance campaign.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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