Three weeks out from the US election, Joe Biden replacement and current vice president Kamala Harris is running out of joy. When she first took over from Biden, it seemed that joy was all she’d need. The American public and many who follow US politics closely from afar were giddy with relief that the elderly president had agreed to go gently into that good night.
Since then, though, her campaign trajectory has stalled. The polls are close, some showing Trump a whisker ahead, some Harris. Over the past month, the platform I consult had the two candidates flipping the odds between them. But over the past week, as the election nears, Trump is steadily, if only very incrementally, nudging the odds in his favour. If the bookies are right, then Trump will become president again.
When she first took over from Biden, it seemed that joy was all Kamala Harris would need.Credit: AP
On the anniversary of Australia’s failed Indigenous Voice to parliament referendum, this should create an awkward echo for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Yes campaign strategists. Something which seemed so natural and obvious a choice to them that they chose to run a campaign on vibes turned out not to be so obvious to others.
These misjudgments of the national mood seem, at least in part, to be a consequence of the hype around social media. Every successful campaign these days celebrates a win built in large part online. That’s because most of us are online a good part of the time at least.
And so there are a lot of misleading articles which analyse campaign tactics at the expense of strategic substance. For instance, The New York Times has discovered that Kamala Harris’ campaign is running ads on Snapchat, while Donald Trump’s is not. According to its breathless report, former president Trump is “conspicuously absent” from a platform on which “young men gather in large numbers”, which means he is “effectively ceding the popular digital messaging platform to Vice President Kamala Harris”.
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It is always difficult to make a pronunciation of what might happen if things were otherwise; but if Team Trump’s absence from Snapchat is significantly affecting his male vote, it isn’t showing up in the polls. There’s something else going on.
Harris’ campaign team appears to have finally realised this. Their response, however, shows they’ve fixated on the medium rather than the message. After an earlier strategy of avoiding the mainstream media and only doing interviews with sympathetic social media influencers, Harris is now appearing on the major news networks, including CNN and Fox News.
But switching up the media won’t help. The problem is the message. Reduced to their essence, the Voice campaign had and the Harris campaign has essentially the same message: voting for them is the right thing to do because the alternative is unthinkable.