Next, to borrow the words of former Office of Management and Budget Director Bert Lance, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The Harris team is currently ascendent. In just over a month she’s raised a whopping $540 million. The vice president is currently up by nearly two points nationally in the RCP average. Fox News swing-state polling from last week shows Harris up by one point in Arizona and two points in both Nevada and Georgia. What’s more, Republican efforts to tar and feather Tim Walz have utterly flopped. In a recent ABC News survey, 39 percent of those polled have a favorable impression of the Minnesota governor, while only 30 percent see him unfavorably. Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, meanwhile, is underwater at 32 percent–42 percent.
Harris’s vibes-based, personality-based approach to the first six weeks of this mad dash of a campaign is clearly working. And it’s working in part because of her reliance on broad, simple messages like “Protect a woman’s right to choose,” “Lower the cost of health care,” “Secure the border,” and “We’re not going back,” all of which seem to be enough for the American people. The campaign should take yes for an answer. There’s no indication that Harris needs to offer specific, potentially divisive policies on any issue—and all of the early signs suggest that doing so would be a mistake. Harris herself is not a wonk—she flopped in 2020 in part because she struggled to compete in a wonky, policy-heavy primary. And yet, even if she were a policy dork, there’s little reason to believe that it would necessarily boost her chances: In 2016, Hillary Clinton offered more than 200 distinct policy proposals and lost.
Additionally, Harris is unlikely to enjoy a Democratic trifecta, so major policy has less of a chance of being enacted than Bob Menendez has of being appointed the next ambassador to Egypt. The rising tide of Kamalamania has clearly lifted Democrats nationwide, but the prospect of holding onto the Senate and securing the House is still not strong. The Democrats’ best shot of holding onto power in either chamber isn’t by releasing a slew of domestic and foreign policy proposals—these will, moreover, most likely hurt them, particularly in competitive Senate races in states like Montana and Ohio. Instead, Harris can continue to push the argument that she is, unlike Donald Trump, someone who cares about ordinary people—and that her party is committed to “fairness” in its economic policy.
