‘Joy’ Is Working for Harris, but Can It Close the Deal?

“If Donald Trump were just to shut up for a few days, he would be elected president,” but he just doesn’t understand that, pollster Frank Luntz said last week. And he said if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz “would just get real with the American people, that would ensure their election, but they’re too afraid.” But what does “get real” mean? For Harris, it means putting herself in position to make more meaningful connections with voters who are still on the bubble, what I call the “final 5%,” give or take, that I believe she’ll need to win over to ensure a victory.

For many of us, that connection has already been forged, or was an unnecessary condition of our support. For us, not only is Harris the best choice; she’s also the only choice — a must-win candidate as a guard against a rising authoritarianism.

But in mid-September, a quarter of voters said they still needed to learn more about her, compared with just 1 in 10 who said the same about Trump. There was at least one other modern, major-party nominee whom people similarly said they didn’t know well enough: Mitt Romney in the summer of 2012. And of course, Romney lost that election even though he was basically tied with Barack Obama nationally in the second week of October.

I had hoped that Harris’ campaign of joy would continue to fill her sails and that her rise in the polls would be inexorable. But according to FiveThirtyEight, Harris and Trump have close-to-even chances of winning.

One way to read this is that voters still need to know more about Harris’ positions, particularly on the issues for which her positions have changed over time. Another way to read them is as an expression of a lack of connection with her as a candidate.

I don’t think the latter is a fatal flaw of her campaign, but I do believe that it’s an area of opportunity. It’s not that Harris needs to pull back from conveying joy, because, as pollster Cornell Belcher said, “It’s what got her there.” He said that she should hold to that component of her message in the same way that Obama held to “hope” in 2008 even as Gulf Coast states were ravaged by Hurricane Gustav and a financial crisis unfolded.

But what the Harris campaign must do — and is doing — Belcher said, is layer specific issues like housing affordability and health care “under the overarch of joy.” The campaign doesn’t need a post-joy strategy, but it definitely needs an in-addition-to-joy strategy.

For me, that also extends into press strategy. The campaign, which has leaned heavily on influencers and entertainers — many of them providing friendly media venues in which Harris isn’t pressed or challenged — is slowly and cautiously including more challenging settings, like her recent appearance on “60 Minutes.”

But her campaign must do more. Harris has to come down from behind the rally podiums for more personal interactions with individual voters. I sat down and watched or rewatched a dozen Harris events and appearances that have taken place since the Democratic National Convention. Her rallies, exercises in remarkable message discipline, are built around a fairly standard stump speech: a recitation of plans and policies with vignettes from her biography and condemnations of Trump.

But the rallies often don’t seem to provide enough space for the organic moment, for the one-on-one human interaction, for a skeptical voter to really see who she is as a person. What’s desperately missing are more town hall-style events or more unmanaged, unscripted interactions with everyday Americans.

Some of the most memorable and most humanizing moments for presidential candidates happen in these smaller settings, as in 2008 when John McCain corrected a supporter who said she didn’t trust Obama because “he’s an Arab” and when Hillary Clinton teared up talking to a small group of voters about how hard it was being on the campaign trail.

While that year’s Republican National Convention was going on, Obama made stops at more intimate settings to get up close and personal with voters in battleground states. At a farm in Ohio, he said, “They’re going to try to make you scared of me,” but, “You spread the word out there, don’t let them fool you.” His strategy was to not only counterprogram the RNC but also to countervail the skepticism about him that Republicans were stoking. His direct engagement with voters helped to humanize and demystify him. That’s what Harris needs in the homestretch of this campaign.

There is risk in this, I realize, that the campaign seems reluctant to take. But in its efforts, it seems, to shield Harris from “gotcha” moments, it’s also robbing her of chances to have transcendent moments in which her appeal crosses over from those who strongly support her to those who remain wary.

As Democratic strategist Donna Brazile said, “You cannot reach people from a platform or a stage,” rather, “You got to actually be in the neighborhoods and go and tell the folks that you need help and you want their vote, and listen.”

Harris has run a remarkable race, one truncated by the historic route by which she became her party’s nominee. But now she must finish it in the way many longer campaigns begin: by prioritizing retail politics that win over the reluctant.