One way that Kamala Harris needs to be more like Joe Biden

President Joe Biden bet his reelection bid on the idea that American voters in November would care about the fate of American democracy. The conventional wisdom now is that Biden was wrong and that Vice President Kamala Harris is not only stepping away from his strategy but doing so for good reasons.

Many Democratic political types today believe that “democracy” is a message that’s both tired and abstract, something that preoccupies elites but not the key voting demographics. They cite data showing ”democracy” at the bottom of the list of voter concerns in the 2024 election, with issues like inflation, immigration, and abortion placing well ahead of what Joe Biden treated as issue number one.

It appears Harris has taken the conventional wisdom to heart. Reporting in Axios and the Washington Post shows that Harris uses the word “democracy” far less than Biden did in both advertising and stump speeches — mentioning it only 12 times in her first nine campaign rallies.

Rather than casting the Trump-Vance ticket as a threat to democracy, the Harris-Walz campaign prefers to describe them as “weird” men aiming to curtail Americans’ freedom. The language of freedom has suffused the Democratic National Convention so far, and will almost certainly be a centerpiece of Harris’s address on Thursday night.

Yet I think the conventional wisdom is wrong in nearly every respect. Harris should not abandon democracy as a campaign issue, but rather double down on it. 

Democracy is a more powerful issue than polling might suggest: It likely swung the 2022 midterms Democrats’ way, and some research suggests it remains potent in 2024. Democracy messaging is especially persuasive with moderate Trump-skeptical Republicans, an important voting bloc in swing states around the country. Given its proven track record of success with a critical demographic, democracy ought to be a significant part of Harris’s message.

Integrating democracy doesn’t require ditching the clearly effective freedom messaging: Harris can quite easily spend more time highlighting attacks on democratic freedoms, talking about “the freedom to vote” as one of several essential liberties Trump and Project 2025 plan to attack. That’s what some of the Democratic pollsters who helped develop the party’s “freedom” message back in 2022 currently urge her to do.

“Saying ‘we’re trying to protect your freedom to vote’ and ‘we’re trying to protect your freedom to have a family when you want to’… those two things together frame that story in a way that makes people care about democracy,” Jen Fernandez Ancona, vice president of the progressive strategy group Way To Win, told Vox.

If Harris listens to the conventional wisdom instead, she’ll be leaving a powerful campaign issue — and potentially some crucial votes — on the table.

The case that democracy matters in American politics

Sarah Longwell is a longtime Republican strategist who, since 2016, has made it her life’s work to figure out how to get her fellow conservatives to ditch the Republican Party. As the head of a group called Republican Voters Against Trump, she has conducted “hundreds and hundreds” of focus groups with persuadable Republican moderates — a systematic attempt to figure out how they might be convinced to ditch the Trumpified GOP.

When she talks to former Trump voters, they say the same thing over and over again: that his assault on democracy pushed them out of the party.

“I listen to why voters who voted for Trump now refuse to do so, and the No. 1 reason is that January 6 was a red line for them. They were out after that,” Longwell says.

The 2022 midterms showed that these voters mattered — that these voters aren’t just important, but potentially decisive in critical states.

We remember 2022 as a Democratic victory because the party managed to make gains in the Senate while suffering minimal losses in the House — defying the historical rule that the party in charge of the White House loses in the midterms. But this wasn’t the result of a blue wave: Republicans got several million more votes in House races nationally than Democrats. What happened instead is that Democrats excelled in a handful of key races, making history as a result.

So what happened in those key races? The Dobbs ruling was a major part of the story. But so too was democracy.

Multiple separate data analyses, conducted by sources ranging from Stanford political scientists to the Democratic data firm Catalist, attempted to estimate a “MAGA penalty”: how much Republicans who parroted Trump’s “big lie” about 2020 suffered at the ballot box relative to other Republicans. On the whole, these estimates converge somewhere in the neighborhood of a two- to three-point penalty for MAGA candidates, with some estimates going as high as five or six. 

Without this effect, Democrats likely wouldn’t control the Senate: Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock beat his opponent, Trump darling Herschel Walker, by 2.8 percentage points. Moreover, extremists would almost certainly hold key statewide positions: Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona who made the big lie central to her message, lost by less than a percentage point.

After the election, I interviewed several Democratic candidates and strategists who fought and won races against election deniers. They told me that putting democracy first was a major component of their victory.

“Voters are just tired of the bullshit. They know it’s nonsense, that there’s no evidence behind the big lie or any of that stuff, and they rejected it,” Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s secretary of state who was first elected in 2022, told me at the time.

Democratic strategists are fully aware of what happened last election, but not all of them are convinced that it’ll work the same way in 2024.

“[Democracy messaging] worked extremely well with the folks we needed in the midterms, which was those suburban college-educated folks who voted every time and do not like the current direction of the Republican Party. [But] those folks are already with us,” says Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at the center-left Third Way think tank. 

That might not be true. Anat Shenker-Osorio, the head of the progressive messaging outfit ASO Communications, recently conducted a randomized experiment testing the effect of ads featuring January 6. She found that the ads “did a decent job” swinging voters away from Trump and toward Harris, specifically by making voters in the study connect Trump to political violence.

This tactic is especially likely to work with moderate Republicans. Key races in 2022 were determined, in large part, by a small group of registered Republicans who crossed the aisle to vote against extremists. But these same voters were often perfectly happy to vote for a more normal Republican: In Georgia, for example, incumbent Republican Gov. Brian Kemp handily defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams with support from anti-Herschel Walker Republicans. 

It’s far from obvious that these voters are stable Democrats, and Harris will need them if she wants to rebuild the coalition that powered Joe Biden to victory in 2020. As such, it would be unwise to abandon the most proven line of argument for reaching them: that democracy is at stake and therefore partisan grievances need to take a back seat to saving the republic.

It’s perhaps understandable why Harris and her campaign seemingly chose to step away from the message, given Biden’s campaign struggles even before the disastrous June debate, but that skepticism would be wrong. While democracy was indeed at the center of his doomed campaign, it’s hard to blame the message for its failure. Everything we’ve seen since June suggests that concerns about Biden’s age made it impossible for any message, no matter how good, to break through with persuadable voters.

Recent evidence suggests that Harris can effectively make a democracy argument in a way Biden could not. A just-released academic study — the first to examine the effect of democracy rhetoric on support for Harris specifically — suggests that she could make inroads among persuadable Republicans by focusing on democracy.

The study’s authors showed Republican voters “democracy is on the ballot”-type messaging and asked them how it affected their political views. On the whole, the authors found, the effects were minimal and at times even counterproductive — causing Republicans to dig in harder on their partisan identity. This kind of rhetoric, they conclude, “does not change the attitudes that allowed Trump to challenge the legitimacy of the 2020 election.”

But there was a notable exception to these dour findings: vote choice in the 2024 election. 

After a Republican audience heard “democracy is on the ballot”-type rhetoric, Harris’s support in the group more than tripled — going from 2.3 percent to 7.3 percent. “The treatment induces a negative emotional response in Republicans and effectively shames them to report support for Harris,” the study’s authors write.

Unsurprisingly, the effect faded as time passed; it’s hard to change someone’s mind permanently after a single experiment. But perhaps repeating anti-authoritarian messaging through an entire campaign might have more durable effects.

For all their concerns about the limits of this approach, the authors concede that democracy messaging “has desirable effects in the short-term (a single election).”

How Harris can campaign on democracy — and win

Registered Republicans aren’t the only kind of persuadable voters who matter. There’s a much larger group of independents who don’t normally pay very much attention to politics or especially like either major party. These voters are much more likely to turn out in presidential elections than in midterms, and, per polling, are mostly unmoved by pro-democracy rhetoric.

“Our mantra has become ‘you defend democracy by practicing it.’ And you practice it by focusing on voters in the middle,” says Liam Kerr, co-founder of the Democratic WelcomePAC. “A lot of gettable voters — especially at this point, after eight years — don’t believe that stormtroopers are going to come into the streets the day after the election.”

But whatever message you think this group wants — be it tough-on-the-border centrism, a liberal focus on abortion bans, or middle-class economic populism — it’s not obvious that it trades off with pro-democracy messaging. 

Any good campaign develops different messages for different groups: There’s little opportunity cost in focusing more on democracy when reaching out to moderate suburban Republicans than disaffected downscale Democrats. Even a high-profile address like her DNC speech can include a reasonably sized section on such a critical issue without dragging.

Moreover, it’s possible to tie multiple messages together, especially through overarching themes like “freedom.”

In my new book The Reactionary Spirit, I study how pro-democracy candidates — in the United States and around the world — beat authoritarian rivals in elections. One of the most consistent findings is that it’s possible, and quite effective, to campaign on democracy in conjunction with other issues: showing how anti-democratic politics affects voters’ lives in concrete ways.

In Brazil’s 2022 presidential election, the left-wing candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva connected democracy to his core message of advancing economic equality, describing it as a vehicle to build shared prosperity. In Budapest’s 2019 mayoral election, the opposition candidate Gergely Karácsony tied democracy to housing, arguing that the concentration of power in the hands of the ruling Fidesz party was responsible for the government’s failure to address high costs of living.

In the book, I call this strategy “linkage” and argue that Democrats used a version of it effectively in the midterms. In linking abortion restrictions and January 6 as shared assaults on American freedoms, they made a strong case that Republicans were an extremist party attacking cherished American values.

Harris’ “freedom” campaign makes a linkage strategy exceptionally easy to execute. She doesn’t need to radically change her campaign rhetoric or strategy, but rather spend more time and effort explaining why the right to choose your own leaders is one of several important freedoms imperiled by the Trump-Vance ticket.

Another effective avenue for making democracy feel real is by attacking Trump’s ideas, especially those contained in the Project 2025 planning document.

Just over a week before Joe Biden dropped out, I attended a strategy meeting at the Center for American Progress (CAP) — the Democratic establishment’s leading DC think tank — about the party’s Project 2025 messaging.  The data showed that Democrats had done a remarkable job at both raising awareness of Project 2025 and convincing Americans that it was a bad thing.

CAP’s researchers wanted to understand why, and how Democrats could take advantage in November. So they conducted extensive interviews with voters, with a special focus on Black and Latino voters who some polls showed moving into the Trump column. As part of this research, they presented voters with a series of attack lines on Project 2025 and asked them to rate which were most and least concerning.

All four of the top-performing messages — the ones voters consistently ranked as most concerning — focused on the threat its proposals posed to democracy. The best was a so-called “strong man” message, arguing that “the restructuring of government that Project 2025 lays out is similar to the playbook dictators and authoritarian governments have used repeatedly over the last century.”

When I spoke with the researchers again after Biden dropped out, they argued that Harris needed to keep up this theme. It worked, they said, because it picked up on something important to many voters — their freedom to choose who governs them — and connected it to something new.

“There’s 800 pages of the same old conservative nonsense in here. But what’s so different is the method, the means to complete it — it’s the takeover. And people freak out about that,” says Joe Radosevich, CAP’s vice president for campaigns and outreach.

Campaigning on democracy, in other words, isn’t just about repeating the word “democracy” like a mantra. It’s about figuring out creative ways to make the defense of democracy feel vital and relevant. And there are plenty of ways for Harris to do just that.