Media and Republicans Join in Pretending They Care About “Policy”

Kamala Harris isn't falling for it. Good.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

Kamala Harris has turned around her party’s polling deficit and moved into the lead against Donald Trump, while Trump is flailing dramatically as he searches for the right nickname to pin on Harris. Yet both of them are being told, for different reasons, that they need to put more emphasis on “policy.” And yes, the quotation marks are ironic, because neither the media scolding both candidates nor the Republicans scolding Trump are concerned with actual policy, but with a public performance meant to evoke it. 

To be clear, I’m a big fan of policy. Whether an administration is skilled at designing and implementing policy has a huge effect on people’s lives. I write about policy with regularity, but when I do so it’s with the understanding that it’s not usually what most people want to read about (at least not in too much detail), nor is it what determines most election outcomes. 

For much of my adult life, Democrats nominated presidential candidates about whom they would say, “Sure, they’re a little lacking in the charisma department, but they really understand policy!” Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, just one admirable public servant after another who would have been excellent presidents but didn’t have what it took to become president.  

The Democrats who did succeed knew a lot about policy, but more important, they were very good at politics. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama could talk Medicaid reimbursement rates and agricultural commodity price supports deep into the night if you wanted them to, but they also knew how to win elections. And while Harris is not the equal of Clinton or Obama in raw political talent, she might have figured out not just that policy isn’t what wins but that the particular kind of policy presentation reporters are demanding is all but irrelevant. 

Policy means different things

Republicans watching Trump fall behind and say idiotic things about Harris’ race and gender have the answer: He needs to focus on policy. “If you have a policy debate, he wins,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham on Meet the Press. “Donald Trump the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election.” “The winning formula for President Trump is very plain to see," said Kellyanne Conway. "It's fewer insults, more insights, and that policy contrast.” Others like Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy have offered the same advice. 

Rest assured, if all Trump’s vile personal attacks were having more of an impact, those same people would be talking about what a brilliant campaigner he is. The party that was obsessed with Hillary Clinton’s emails and Barack Obama’s birthplace and Hunter Biden’s dick pics is suddenly all about the substance, eager to dig into the meat of governing? Right.

But what do they mean when they say “policy”? When it’s Donald Trump, what they mean is anything that isn’t a personal insult with no plausible relationship to anything substantive. “Policy” in this formulation can be full of lies, race-baiting, or insane fantasies, so long as there’s some connection to an issue the government might do something about. So when Trump says Kamala Harris “turned black,” that’s not policy, but when he says Harris is a communist who is importing cannibal serial killers from foreign insane asylums to come murder your family, that is policy, and therefore all good.

Republicans just want Trump to do a better job at the kind of demagoguery they’ve engaged in with such skill in the past. If his brand of personal racism and misogyny isn’t working, he should concentrate on the more issues-based fear- and hate-mongering. They don’t want him to dive deep into his tax proposals, or talk more about his plans to limit people’s access to health care, or make sure everyone knows their party wants to outlaw abortion. But “Kamala Harris wants to force your 8-year-old to gay marry a transgender MS-13 member so you won’t notice that she made milk cost $75 a gallon”? That’s good policy talk. 

To a great extent, the news media accept that. They consider Trump’s Hannibal Lecter rants a bit silly, but still give him credit for supposedly addressing the issues. But they have very different rules for Harris. 

Because she is a Democrat, reporters expect that her campaign will produce an endless stream of white papers and ten-point-plans, to which she will devote a great deal of her time on the stump. Furthermore, these plans must be new; if she intends to simply continue what the Biden administration has done with some minor modifications here and there, that will not qualify as “policy” campaigning. 

For instance, if Harris gives a speech in which she promises to protect abortion rights, she won’t be lauded for talking about “policy,” because it’s simple, straightforward, and doesn’t represent any kind of change from what she and other Democrats have said before. Even though of course it absolutely is policy, and policy of particular importance to tens of millions of people. And when she does talk about things reporters judge to be about policy, if what she produces isn’t dense and boring enough, they’re likely to scold her for being “light on specifics” as CNN did, or say as The Washington Post did that her case to the public “remains somewhat murky, at least in terms of policy — and that has become the chief knock on the Harris campaign.” And then you get headlines like this:

In their eyes she’s damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t: Either she’s being too light on policy, or she’s boring people with all that dull policy talk and failing to “connect.” But she may have realized that those judgments don’t make much of a difference to her success or failure.

All this isn’t to say that there aren’t extraordinarily important policy contrasts that Democrats should be talking about, because there are. On the vast majority of issues, the Democratic position is far more popular than the Republican one. And you know what’s 900 pages of policy? Project 2025, which Republicans now want to pretend doesn’t exist even though it forms the policy blueprint of their next administration. 

But Harris has clearly decided to set aside the white papers and 10-point plans in favor of a style of campaigning that focuses on fundamental substantive differences without getting too deep in the weeds. If you go to her website, there isn’t even that traditional “issues” section where all the policies are laid out. That doesn’t mean there’s widespread confusion about what agenda she’ll have as president, or that she herself doesn’t understand complex policy challenges. It just means she has a clear sense of what’s important in a campaign that has less than three months remaining. And it seems to be working.