VP Harris Must Seize Control of Her Own Narrative
Harris is off to an excellent start but she needs to define her identity before the right wing manages to find a narrative that sticks.
By Ryan McGreal
Posted July 28, 2024 in Blog (Last Updated July 28, 2024)
As Louis Pasteur famously said, chance favours the prepared mind. And the free world is most fortunate that Vice President Kamala Harris, suddenly the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, was prepared to seize the historic opportunity presented a week ago today when President Joe Biden yielded to mounting pressure from his party and announced that he would no longer seek re-election.
Harris has her work cut out for her, not only because she is not well-defined in the minds of many voters but also because she is about to face an extremely well-funded partisan media assault.
The right-wing rage machine is unburdened by the need for logical consistency, so it embraces a kind of natural selection process in which an army of trolls generates an array of different attacks on their enemy and then they check to see which attack resounds with voters.
They don’t need a theory of the case against Harris; they just need to keep generating more and more BS until they find something that sticks. Right-wing narratives resonate because they shamelessly adopt whichever narratives happen to resonate.
They haven’t found an effective narrative against Harris yet. And the quicker and more clearly Harris defines herself, the less attack surface the right will have to impose some other definition onto her. So far she is off to an excellent start, defining her temperament and her vision not only in relation to core American values but also in razor-sharp contrast to her opponent’s biggest weaknesses.
She wants to expand your freedom. He wants to control your life.
She wants to move the country forward. He wants to drag it backward.
She stands for the rule of law. He makes a mockery of the rule of law.
She’s upbeat and hopeful. He’s grim and apocalyptic.
She’s a bit goofy. He’s deeply weird and creepy.
She laughs. He sneers.
She likes Venn diagrams, he likes violent 4chan memes.
She fights for women’s rights. He abuses and demeans women.
Harris also has another advantage: the modern right is so terminally online and so up its own ass that it can’t help reaching to an ugly combination of lazy sexism/racism and obscure references from the right-wing rabbit hole that swing voters find super-weird and off-putting.
But they’re also ruthless and relentless, and they will keep grinding and grinding until they find an attack that works, no matter how ugly or absurd. So Harris and her campaign team need to move fast to build on their early and really extraordinary success striking a new and energizing tone.
In 2020, Harris struggled to find her voice. After a couple of early comms missteps in her Vice Presidency, the Biden administration seems to have withdrawn her from a lot of high profile media appearances. It’s possible that fear of letting her upstage Biden may have also played a role.
What her incredible launch into the position of presumptive Democratic nominee tells us is that she spent that time out of the harsh media glare wisely.
She has been doing the hard work to build relationships throughout the party, mostly through the kind of smaller personal interactions at which she has always excelled. So when President Biden made his history-making announcement and then endorsed her to replace him, she was able to leverage her party relationships to line up enough delegates and party leaders to lock up the nomination.
Additionally , and just as importantly, Harris presents as refreshingly authentic and comfortable and clear in her persona and power and conviction, and that resonates better than any crass political hit job ever could.