It’s official.
The conventional wisdom says Presidential campaigns don’t really start until after Labor Day. Apparently, the American people are champing at the bit right this very minute, fully poised to pore over policy positions, compare party platforms and analyze ad strategies. They just need the gate to open and … they’re off!
Of course, horseracing isn’t just a cute metaphor. Horserace-style news coverage is the cable news media’s best hook. Endless hours spent handicapping a neck-and-neck race translates into ratings, and ratings translate into revenue. That’s why the cable news networks populate one panel after another with surrogates and strategists. It’s cheap, it’s easy and it happens to work.
And if you’ve watched (endured?) even just one political panel since Harris replaced Biden, you’ve probably heard a Republican “strategist” (paid contributor) repeat another tenet of conventional wisdom like it’s a self-evident truth.:
Donald Trump will win if he’s “disciplined” enough to avoid “personal attacks” and instead “stay on message” until Election Day.
For them, it’s simple … Americans are unhappy about the economy, about immigration and about crime. Those are all “policy” issues. Kamala Harris is the current Veep and, as the incumbent, is therefore highly susceptible to voters’ top policy concerns. Just hammer her on policy and voila! Victory is yours.
On paper, they are not wrong. Polling has consistently put the economy and/or inflation atop the list of voters’ concerns. Immigration, too, regularly polls in the top two or three issues. And Trump leads on these issues. An ABC News/Ipsos poll that dropped over weekend found:
Trump continues to lead on the top concerns in the race, trust to handle the economy in general and inflation in particular, both by 8 points, and by 9 points on the immigration situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, albeit a lower-rated issue in importance in previous data.
And earlier in the week, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found:
Republican former President Trump's approach to the economy and employment was preferred by 43% of registered voters compared to 40% who preferred Harris's approach. The 3 percentage point difference was too small to be significant given the poll's 4 percentage point margin of error. A prior Reuters/Ipsos poll in late July showed Trump with an 11-point advantage on the economy.
One obvious takeaway from these two polls is that Ipsos is a tramp … they’ll poll with anybody. The other takeaway is that despite some erosion in Trump’s double-digit issue advantages over then-candidate Biden, he still maintains an edge on policy.
Okay, chalk one up for the conventional wisdom.
Now add the vague answers Harris gave during her overly-hyped CNN interview and you’ve got Republican strategists champing at their own bit as they imagine a disciplined, message-obsessed Trump running the race as a referendum on the Harris-Biden Administration’s “failed” economic policy.
There is just one problem.
The American people are just not that into you … if you are running on policy. Sure, a specific policy may attract some single-issue voters, but on balance its pretty clear that we don’t elect presidents based on policy. Voters vote on image and on personality. And nobody knows it better than their own candidate.
Trump is this nation’s leading practitioner of personality-driven politics. It’s his stock and trade, for crying out loud. Message discipline? Only if the message you want him to hammer is “my opponent is weak” and “I am strong.”
But “inflation,” you say? C’mon.
He knows voters better than that. They’re voting in a personality contest and they prefer a binary choice between strength vs. weakness. That’s why he’s so angered by Biden dropping out. It was the easiest sales pitch of his life. Even easier than the personality contest with Hillary Clinton, whose significant likeability deficit Trump exploited to great effect. Unlike 2020’s Biden, he had it made with 2024’s Biden, who unintentional wrote the Trump campaign’s ad copy every time he spoke to a rally or to reporters. Trump the blood-stained survivor of assassination thought he had it in the bag.
And for good reason.
Over the last fifty years, the now-legendary “It’s the economy, stupid” election of 1992 may be the one contest decided on policy. Americans were hurting. But Eastern Establishment poster-boy G.H.W. Bush looked more closely at his watch than he did the economic “pain” Bill Clinton both felt and embraced. Bill’s lip-biting empathy won the day. It also didn’t hurt that the Clinton campaign’s mantra was continually reinforced by the wonky wisecracking of H. Ross Perot, who actually got Americans to watch him explain the national debt with charts and graphs. Now that was some harsh reality TV. But millions of Americans willingly watched a televised seminar on macroeconomics … in primetime. Now that’s what I call “weird.”
So weird, that I would also call it an outlier.
The norm in presidential contests dating back at least to Carter vs. Reagan (and we could certainly add Kennedy vs. Nixon to the list of notable personality contests) is that voters reward strength and confidence and they punish the perception of weakness. They’ll also reject boring attributes like competence and they’re definitely turned-off by “smug” wonkiness. They respond to passion and muscularity.
Just ask Michael Dukakis.
Eight years earlier, a rosy-cheeked Ronald Reagan mastered the personality contest and what we now call vibe-driven politics. He argued that America desperately needed a “vibe shift” away from the infectious flaccidity of Jimmy Carter. That’s not to say Reagan didn’t benefit from deep dissatisfaction with a stagflation-addled economy. He did. He also benefited from the Iran Hostage Crisis. But I’d contend that the economy and the hostage crisis reflected the image of a weak, ineffectual Carter.
Yes, Reagan attracted a segment of single-issue, tax revolt-obsessed voters, but he was locked into a referendum on a personality … including his own personality. He had to convince voters to abandon their nuclear button-based trepidations about voting for a B-Movie actor who had some strange, radical ideas. He did that by selling himself as a sunny, optimistic alternative to Jimmy the Malaise-monger’s professorial dreariness. There was no “crisis of confidence” in Reagan’s America, just temporarily slumbering greatness. He even promised to “Make America Great Again.”
Can you hear the echoing vibes?
Reagan the Brylcreemed throwback to the 1950s was perfectly-timed for a generation of Boomers coming home from the disco only to find they pined for the white picket fences of their youth. It’s no coincidence that they’d probably seen Reagan work as a pitchman on TV when they were kids. And Reagan the horse-riding rancher was a living cliché of masculine strength that harkened back to the TV westerns Boomers grew up on. He evoked “a simpler time” and promised the prosperity and the Cold War vibes of Eisenhower’s America.
He was selling a muscular 50s persona and Boomers bought it.
It worked because American voters not only reward strength, they also love optimism (see Harris). And, ever the dutiful consumers, they love buying something new (see Harris). They also want to buy a big personality, not a wonky woman (Hillary), a “wooden” stentorian (Al Gore), a diminutive technocrat (Dukakis), or a cardigan-wearing therapist (Carter).
They all had policy chops. But personality?
I'd even argue that, the economy notwithstanding, Bill ”the Ray-Ban-Wearing Sax Player” Clinton won that personality contest in no small part because he didn’t stop thinking about tomorrow. Obama’s win in 2008 was clinched by his charisma and his “Yes We Can” optimism. His confidence stood out in the chaos swirling around the homes and 401ks of retirement-adjacent Boomers.
It’s the confidence, man.
So, enter the confidence man who re-launched himself as a celebrity arbiter in an actual personality contest. He basically re-made his name by firing failures as a reality TV game-show host. And then he exported that shtick to social media, where he weaponized his judgment of other people. That, in turn, became the basis of his political success. He is a perpetual personality contest personified, as his growing roster of vanquished enemies and banished former allies demonstrates.
That’s why he can’t quit the “personal attacks” on Harris.
Honestly, he may be almost physically incapable of '“pivoting to the economy.” He even brought back Corey Lewandowski, whose 2016’s campaign strategy was simply “Let Trump Be Trump.” It shows he knows this election is still a personality contest. He thinks he just hasn’t figured out how to attack Harris’s personality … yet. But his real problem is that a lot of voters now think his personality sucks.
Take a look at a Yahoo News/YouGov poll released last Tuesday. .
When Harris entered the race, more Americans saw her unfavorably (51%) than favorably (40%). Now those numbers are level at 47% — a net positive shift of 11 points for the vice president. In contrast, 55% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Trump; just 42% view him favorably. Biden’s numbers are similar.
And Harris’s gains are not limited to Democrats. Since July, her favorability rating has risen 9 points among members of her own party (from 83% to 92%), 10 points among independents (from 30% to 40%) and 4 points among Republicans (from 5% to 9%).
Approval of Harris’s performance as vice president, meanwhile, has shot up 7 points overall, from 35% to 42%.
When respondents were asked to describe Harris and Trump by choosing from a list of 16 different adjectives — and selecting all that apply — a clear pattern emerged. For Harris, the most frequently chosen words were "focused" (38%), "optimistic" (38%), "honest" (32%) and "normal" (31%). For Trump, they were "dishonest" (43%), "chaotic" (43%), "extreme" (43%), "tough" (40%), "racist" (40%), “weird" (36%) and "divisive" (35%).
Even more problematic for Trump is his standing with women. The aforementioned ABC News/Ipsos poll looked at the voters expected to play a decisive role in November:
Harris leads by 13 points among women, 54%-41%, while it's Trump +5 points among men, 51%-46%, for an 18-point gap. (The Trump-Harris difference among men is not statistically significant.) Pre-convention, Harris had been a slight +6 points among women and a non-significant +3 among men, a 3-point gap. The gender gap now is more in line with recent elections -- an average of 19 points in exit polls since 1996.
Like crowd size, Trump openly obsesses on polling numbers … and, it stands to reason, numbers like those above forced him into making a key mistake on the one issue that will motive single-issue voters on both sides—abortion.
In a sign of weakness, Trump flipped and flopped on a forthcoming referendum on Florida’s 6-week ban. In a bid to soften his tone, Trump came out against the 6-week limit, and then, due to the ensuing backlash, came out for it. His team was also forced to explain away his promise, transmitted via JD Vance, to veto a national abortion ban. He further signaled his desperation by floating government-funded IVF treatments and, in an deep affront to his Evangelical base, he Tweeted a promise to be “great for women and their reproductive rights.” That brought a series of rebukes from Evangelical leaders whose loyalty is rooted in his promise of an abortion-free America.
Many of them are single-issue voters. And he needs them to show up, in no small part because he needs to counter the single-issue voters on the other side. Now he’s alienated both … demoralizing some the voters he needs and further motivating the voters he doesn’t. It has put his campaign in the unenviable position of trying to shame Pro-Life Evangelicals into voting for him in spite of his betrayal. Even worse, Trump’s shown weakness by bending on the one issue that, because he did what countless other Republicans only promised to do, established his image as a paragon of strength.
So, yes … issues can and do matter. And there will be voters voting only on abortion, particularly in the ten states with ballot measures. But how many voters will pull the lever based on a specific economic proposal? Will “no tax on tips” tip the balance? Do unlikely to be filled promises like $25k for first-time homebuyers actually convince voters to pull the lever in spite of how they “feel” about a candidate?
No, Trump is right. It’s still going to be decided on personality. Only now, the script has been flipped. He looks weak and old. His shifting stances signal a loss of confidence. He sounds bitter, not optimistic. He isn’t offering anything new. And although the race is basically a dead heat, particularly in the swing states, he’s losing ground in the personality contest. Voters, particularly independents, are not just turned off by him, but also how he campaigns. Again, per ABC and Ipsos:
Notably, 93% of Democrats and 56% of independents rate Harris' campaign positively, as do 24% of Republicans. Fewer across groups see Trump's campaign positively -- 79% of Republicans, 38% of independents and 13% of Democrats.
Admittedly, poll numbers like this are “vibe barometers.” The value of polling is in revealing trends … looking for surges or shifts in direction. That’s why I prefer tracking polls that ask the same questions to similar samples over the course of months or even years. Those numbers inspire confidence.
Among the slew of polls out last week, one such number stood out. It’s 47%.
According to a solid round-up of the week’s polling by NBC News, they noted a pattern:
He’s at 47% nationally in the Wall Street Journal poll; 47% in that EPIC-MRA Michigan poll; and 47% in Georgia and Michigan, per the Bloomberg/Morning Consult surveys.
As it turns out, 47% was Trump’s popular-vote share in the 2020 election (which he lost), and it was 46% in 2016 (which he won).
The takeaway from a consistent 47% ceiling is that, in the final analysis, he’s limited by the paradigm he’s exploited. It’s a problem his campaign believes it can only solve by driving Harris’s negatives to toxic levels. And it isn’t a surprise tactic. Character assassination has been part of many GOP campaigns over the years … because going negative can work if the target lacks a compelling personality (see Dukakis). As The Washington Post reported today, Trump’s campaign sees it’s path to victory increasing paved with negative attacks.
Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told the Daily Beast, “Our focus every day is on ensuring the American people know Kamala’s dangerously liberal record and see her for who she is … a phony, radical, San Francisco liberal who would further spiral our once great nation into a sanctuary for illegal immigrants and a nightmare for law-abiding Americans.” Republican strategist Jeff Roe told Puck that the backup plan is to simply “define her as a liar who you can’t trust,”
There’s the final takeaway … Trump’s path to victory depends upon the weakness of his opponent, perhaps more so than any president of the modern era. He cannot attract new voters beyond his ceiling. It’s a problem his team is attempting to mitigate by targeting LPVs—so-called “low propensity voters”—in the hopes they’ll take a time-out from gaming to vote, perhaps for the first time.
The rub is that LPVs are young men who traditionally don’t vote. They do love Joe Rogan and Dana White and UFC. They at least flirt with online conspiracy culture. And they’re unlikely to be college educated, although they may have some college under their belt. They also don’t show up in polling. But if they show up in in November, perhaps motivated by RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard (lets face it, LPVs are a key part of their demo), they could be the cherry on top of Trump’s “coalition” of White men, Evangelicals, culture war moms and disaffected Black and Latino men. It could work if they all show up in peak numbers. But it definitely won’t work if a slice of his Evangelical base is demoralized and decides to withhold their votes.
And it certainly won’t work if suburban women and independents in swing states decide this election on the one thing he cannot change—his personality.