Kamala is running as a ‘no-brainer’. What if voters object to the idea they have no brain?

Three weeks out from the US election, Joe Biden replacement and current vice president Kamala Harris is running out of joy. When she first took over from Biden, it seemed that joy was all she’d need. The American public and many who follow US politics closely from afar were giddy with relief that the elderly president had agreed to go gently into that good night.

Since then, though, her campaign trajectory has stalled. The polls are close, some showing Trump a whisker ahead, some Harris. Over the past month, the platform I consult had the two candidates flipping the odds between them. But over the past week, as the election nears, Trump is steadily, if only very incrementally, nudging the odds in his favour. If the bookies are right, then Trump will become president again.

When she first took over from Biden, it seemed that joy was all Kamala Harris would need.Credit: AP

On the anniversary of Australia’s failed Indigenous Voice to parliament referendum, this should create an awkward echo for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Yes campaign strategists. Something which seemed so natural and obvious a choice to them that they chose to run a campaign on vibes turned out not to be so obvious to others.

These misjudgments of the national mood seem, at least in part, to be a consequence of the hype around social media. Every successful campaign these days celebrates a win built in large part online. That’s because most of us are online a good part of the time at least.

And so there are a lot of misleading articles which analyse campaign tactics at the expense of strategic substance. For instance, The New York Times has discovered that Kamala Harris’ campaign is running ads on Snapchat, while Donald Trump’s is not. According to its breathless report, former president Trump is “conspicuously absent” from a platform on which “young men gather in large numbers”, which means he is “effectively ceding the popular digital messaging platform to Vice President Kamala Harris”.

It is always difficult to make a pronunciation of what might happen if things were otherwise; but if Team Trump’s absence from Snapchat is significantly affecting his male vote, it isn’t showing up in the polls. There’s something else going on.

Harris’ campaign team appears to have finally realised this. Their response, however, shows they’ve fixated on the medium rather than the message. After an earlier strategy of avoiding the mainstream media and only doing interviews with sympathetic social media influencers, Harris is now appearing on the major news networks, including CNN and Fox News.

But switching up the media won’t help. The problem is the message. Reduced to their essence, the Voice campaign had and the Harris campaign has essentially the same message: voting for them is the right thing to do because the alternative is unthinkable.

The alternative wasn’t unthinkable for the Australian public and Harris has to assume that it won’t be unthinkable for the US public either. Voters need at least a sense of what they might be voting for.

There are only a few groups for whom Harris herself is the message: young women and black women are enthusiastic about the idea of seeing a black woman in the White House. For everyone else, laughing, dancing and being “brat” isn’t enough. An effective campaign has to deliver a substantial pitch in a small package.

The side that did this best in the Voice referendum was the No campaign. For all the claims of misinformation, the line that cut through, especially on social media, was the concern that the Voice would divide Australia by race. Not a lie, but a vision of unity. The sentiment distilled discomfort with a major constitutional amendment into a simple yet meaningful statement.

This week, when it was announced that Harris had agreed to be interviewed on Fox, it seemed conceivable that the Democrat campaign had realised that coconuts and lampooning Trump on TikTok did not communicate vision. Perhaps it was preparing a high-profile appearance to launch some new lines. Surely no-one agrees to be interviewed by Fox’s Bret Baier under the misapprehension that “I’m not Trump” is a good enough argument to sway viewers to elect her?

It seems Kamala Harris does. This was not Harris’ first strangely empty interview; we now know two things about her (other than that she had a middle-class upbringing and is definitely not Trump): her “values haven’t shifted” and she “will follow the law”.

The polls are so tight in the US that three weeks might be enough for Harris to work out what she stands for and deliver a Democrat victory. The TikTok turnout machine could still work in her favour, if only?? she can tell TikTokers what they’d be turning out for.

But for the moment, like the Yes campaign, Kamala Harris is being run as a no-brainer. Perhaps US voters, like Australians, object to being treated as though they have no brain.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.