To win, Harris should talk more about working-class needs and less about Trump | Dustin Guastella

4 weeks ago

The 2024 campaign has entered the final stretch and, as polls tighten, it seems Kamala Harris plans to lean into attacking Donald Trump as a threat to democracy.

Over the past week the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the New York Times and even the conservative National Review have all reported or commented on the messaging pivot. In a newly unveiled official campaign ad, a disembodied voice warns gravely that a second Trump term “would be worse. There would be no one to stop his worst instincts. No guard rails.” At a recent rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Harris reminded her supporters of Project 2025, the “detailed and dangerous plan” that she believes an “increasingly unstable and unhinged” Trump will follow to cement “unchecked power”. She sounded the alarm about the dire threat Trump poses to “your fundamental freedoms” and how in his second term he would be “essentially immune” from oversight.

This is hair-raising stuff. And the campaign thinks that menacing warnings like these will motivate some urgency to march to the polls for Harris. The only problem is that voters, especially working-class voters, seem uniquely uninspired by the appeal.

The Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) recently tested a variety of political messages on voters in Pennsylvania, a key battleground for both campaigns, to determine what kind of rhetoric is working to nudge blue-collar voters toward Harris. In collaboration with the polling firm YouGov, we polled a representative sample of 1,000 eligible voters in Pennsylvania between 24 September and 2 October 2024. We asked respondents to evaluate different political messages that they might hear from Harris and Trump, and to score them on a scale of favorability.

In line with our past research, we found that economically focused messages and messages that employed a populist narrative fared best relative to Trump-style messages about Biden’s competence, immigration, corrupt elites, critical race theory, inflation, election integrity and tariffs. No surprise there. Meanwhile, Harris’s messages on abortion and immigration fared worse than any of the economic or populist messages we tested.

Yet no message was as unpopular as the one we call the “democratic threat” message.

Much like Harris’s recent rhetoric, this message called on voters to “defend our freedom and our democracy” against a would-be dictator in the form of Trump. It named Trump as “a criminal” and “a convicted felon” and warned of his plans to punish his political enemies. Of the seven messages we tested, each relating to a major theme of the Harris campaign, the “democratic threat” message polled dead last.

It was the least popular message relative to the average support for Trump’s messages. And it was the least popular message among the working-class constituencies Harris and the Democrats need most.

Among blue-collar voters, a group that leans Republican, the democratic threat message was a whopping 14.4 points underwater relative to the average support for Trump’s messages. And among more liberal-leaning service and clerical workers, it was also the least popular message, finishing only 1.6 percentage points ahead of the Trump average. Even among professionals, the most liberal of the bunch and the group that liked the message the best, the message barely outperformed Trump’s messages.

The exact opposite is true for the “strong populist” message we tested. This message, which combined progressive economic policy suggestions with a strong condemnation of “billionaires”, “big corporations” and the “politicians in Washington who serve them”, tested best with blue-collar workers, service and clerical workers, and professionals.

If we break down the results by party we find much the same story. Republicans – who didn’t prefer any of Harris’s messages over Trump’s messages – preferred the strong populist message the most. And they overwhelmingly rejected the democratic threat message, on average preferring Trump’s messages over this by over 75 points. Among independents – an imperfect proxy for nonpartisan voters – the strong populist message was best received, while the democratic threat message was least favored. Only Democrats strongly preferred the democratic threat message, and even then it was among their least favorite.

All of this suggests that the messaging pivot is a big mistake.

Why voters aren’t responding to messages like these is anyone’s guess, though the fable of the boy who cried wolf comes to mind. Trump was already president. And while Democrats warned about the danger he posed to democracy, we did actually have an election to get rid of him. Remember, the moral of the fable isn’t that, in the end, there wasn’t a wolf. It’s that no one believed the boy.

Moreover, the distaste for the democratic threat message among working people, and the total obliviousness to that distaste among campaign officials, is evidence itself of the huge disconnect between Harris and the working-class voters she desperately needs to win. Worse, every ad or speech spent hectoring about the Trumpian threat is one less opportunity for Harris to focus on her popular economic policies; one less opportunity to lean into a populist “people v plutocrats” narrative that actually does resonate with the working class.

If Harris loses, it’ll be because the campaign and the candidate represent a party that is now fundamentally alien to many working people – a party that has given up on mobilizing working people around shared class frustrations and aspirations. A party incapable of communicating a simple, direct, progressive economic policy agenda. A party so beholden to a contradictory mix of interests that, in the effort to appease everyone and offend no one, top strategists have rolled out a vague, unpopular and uninspiring pitch seemingly designed to help them replay the results of the 2016 election.

Ironically, if Democrats are keen to defend democracy they would do well to stop talking about it. Instead, they should try to persuade voters on an economic vision that seeks to end offshoring and mass layoffs, revitalize manufacturing, cap prescription drug prices and put working families first.

In other words, they should sound less like Democrats and more like populists.