The week of the second presidential debate, Deborah Mattinson and Claire Ainsley, respectively the former heads of strategy and policy for now-British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, were in Washington, D.C. to brief leading Democrats on the Labour Party’s “success” in winning back working-class voters. While this exchange began with a series of trips by Labour strategists in the spring to assist the Biden campaign, it was only after Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee that their influence became apparent.
There is an irony in Ms. Ainsley’s title of “head of policy,” because at the heart of Starmerism lay a rejection of policy altogether. Instead, Starmerism relies on two core premises.
The first is that, since 2021, if not before, the right has won the battle of ideas while the left has won the battle of norms. When it comes to issues such as immigration, nationalism, identity politics, guns, crime, and even gender, not only has the right won, but the liberal elite believes the right has won. If elections are fought on issues, it follows that the right will win.
However, Starmerism believes in a second premise: that when it comes to personality, the over-the-top behavior and drama they see as typical of right-wing politics is a liability, not an asset. When right-wing men face left-wing policies, the former win. When right-wing men face right-wing policies promoted by left-wing men or women, then the voters will choose left-wing leaders implementing right-wing ideas.
Harris’s approach to politics, one that involves conceding any issue on which her opponent has the advantage to make an election solely about the personality of the other candidate, is vintage Starmer.
It is not that the Harris campaign has no policies. In fact, it has two. When Donald Trump’s position on a given issue is popular, say the border, taxes on tips, crime, or the economy in general, then Harris will insist she agrees with it entirely. When it is unpopular, such as on abortion, the Harris campaign will lie about it.
In both cases, the goal is to move the campaign narrative away from policy and toward personality. By arguing that they will pursue the same policies in office, Harris focuses on whose team is better equipped to implement them. That explains the focus on attacking Donald Trump for failing to complete his wall (ignoring Democratic obstruction), to pass a border bill, or to eliminate the deficit, combined with a focus on a purported lack of self-control.
Harris wants to argue that Trump will be unable to implement his policies and conjure narratives of a frustrated opponent leading a campaign wracked by infighting in order to then present that infighting as proof that Trump would be unable to implement Trumpism. It is not a coincidence that the Harris campaign’s entire message from the second presidential debate was how easily distracted Donald Trump was from questions. The implication was that he would be easily distracted from policy.
This approach is fundamentally defensive. In the short span of a debate or even a news cycle, it makes it almost impossible to lose. The practitioner, whether it was Starmer in the UK or Harris and Walz now, cannot be attacked on policy except where and when they choose to disagree, such as on abortion for Harris. They thus force any policy discussion into a narrow lane. In turn, they do not even need to win on character and competence. A tie forces discussion back to the carefully chosen issue on which they disagree.
With the help of a complicit media, Harris practiced this approach with skill for several weeks. She launched a relentless series of attacks on Donald Trump’s character and the lives of those around him. When these attacks landed, her campaign cited them as reasons why he was unfit for the presidency. When Trump counterattacked, this too was painted as a character flaw as Harris complained of racism or sexism. Any effort to move off character was shifted to a discussion about either abortion or the nebulous concept of “democracy”, the phrase Democrats use for their obsession with reliving the winter of 2020 in perpetuity.
This strategy, while tactically savvy in the short run, comes into conflict with the need to maintain voter engagement in the long run. Any product, whether a television series, a long-running movie-franchise, or a political campaign, needs new content if it is going to keep an audience engaged. New issues, new developments, even new characters.
The flaw of the Harris-Starmer approach is not merely that it is boring, but that it is deliberately so. It is designed to limit the number of issues discussed during a campaign and reduce every ad, every speech, and every news cycle to the exact same lines voters have heard a thousand times before.
Other than his dishonesty regarding his time in China, there was nothing in Walz’s debate performance on Tuesday that voters had not heard before. His answers on immigration regarding the so-called “bipartisan border bill” were ineffective not merely because they were bad, but because they were the exact same answer Harris had given, more eloquently if that can be believed, three weeks before, and which every Democratic surrogate has repeated for weeks.
Even the most effective attack lines lose resonance by the thousandth time they are delivered. Even if Harris’s campaign benefits in general from the issue of abortion, or from attacks on Donald Trump, repeating them further begins to bore and demoralize her own supporters.
This has had to Harris resorting to gimmicky expedients like running ads during last weekend’s Alabama-Georgia game begging Donald Trump to “debate her.” Debate her about what? It’s unclear. Harris is now hoisted upon the petard of her meta-messaging. If the campaign is genuinely about nothing, she has nothing to say, except things everyone has heard a thousand times before.
Suddenly it is the “change” candidate echoing the same attack lines about Donald Trump’s character made by Hillary Clinton in 2016. The problem is not merely that the electorate is rejecting them. Worse, her base, so energized in August, is becoming bored and restless.
Agreeing with Donald Trump on everything controversial was designed to give voters who liked Trump’s policies but were uncertain about his ability to implement them no reason to vote against Harris. It also, however, gives voters who disagree with those policies no reason to vote for Harris.
August’s stories of “unprecedented enthusiasm” for Harris have been replaced with late September worries from Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Elissa Slotkin that Harris is underwater in her state, and early voting figures indicating many Democrats thought the election was won the Tuesday after the first debate. With Israel’s successes against Hezbollah and the lack of a Ukraine strategy, voters are beginning to remember that Harris represents the incumbent administration at the same time she has given leftwingers and groups like Muslim Americans no policy reasons to vote against Donald Trump.
Harris cannot rally her base against Trump without arguing he will be worse on policy, which means implying her “agreement” with him on certain issues is feigned and disguises a secret far-left platform. That message, however, directly undermines her support among the centrist voters upon whom she based her campaign.
For the better part of two months, Harris got away with leading both groups on, but there is a reason this strategy was honed in systems where governments can call six-week election “campaigns” at will. That is just about how long a newly-installed leader can tell centrist and opposing voters what they want to hear while their supporters remain in a state of delirious relief over rising poll numbers. Longer, and as a litany of leaders from Canada’s Kim Campbell and Britain’s Theresa May learned, both groups start to catch on. Centrists begin demanding specifics as reassurance, while the base begins worrying that the candidate is either telling the truth about abandoning the policies they hold dear, or is a liar, a conclusion bringing with it problems of its own.
At that point, the candidate must choose one constituency or the other, lest they lose both. The temptation, however, is to run out the clock – a temptation Harris appears to be falling victim to, adopting a holding pattern as both groups grow increasingly distrustful and demoralized. 13 weeks is an eternity in politics, as Joe Biden’s vice president should know all too well.
Having followed the path of Kier Starmer, who is now fading in the polls in Britain, Harris now finds herself in the same trap. Having sacrificed the ability to rally her base through policy, she is left desperately begging Donald Trump to debate her to retain the centrist voters who are rapidly losing interest.
Starmer, however, had the good sense to win his election before his policy collapsed. Harris still has a month to go. If Starmer’s example is anything to go by, the only direction Harris will be headed is down.
Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.
