The Harris messaging challenge

Democrats open source messaging data, the Biden drop-out market, using data to uncover a rigged election, one professor's ChatGPT trick

Aug 09, 2024

No. 325 | August 9, 2024

🇺🇲 2024

Democratic-aligned groups have released a treasure trove of internal Harris messaging data. First up is Blueprint, the Reid Hoffman-backed polling effort, which gives us the best and worst-testing anti-Harris attacks and their suggested responses:

Setting aside that the messages are too long and would never fit in a :30, none of these results are surprising. The border and inflation remain Harris’s main challenges just as they did with Joe Biden. Beyond the ones listed here, I would also say that there is good reason why the Trump campaign and SuperPAC were out with ads on bailing out the Minneapolis protesters and letting gang members go free in San Francisco. And above, the broader “San Francisco liberal” sticks more than the Extremely Online attacks on legitimacy and DEI, but not as much as the straightforward criticism of the Biden-Harris record on the economy and the border.

Blueprint’s best-testing responses to these attacks are all pure positives on Harris (too long to post here, but on immigration, it’s something like Harris as the children of immigrants is fighting for an immigration system that works). That’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s a constant property of polling that positive messages test better than negatives, and this is a bit of a non-sequitur to what’s going on at the southern border. The direct response to the border attack does not test nearly as well as the original attack.

Still, for a relatively less candidate like Harris, there are good reasons to focus on defining yourself before your opponent can, and that’s what they seem to be doing.

Josh Kalla and David Broockman, two well-regarded professors now donning D jerseys, have a piece up at Slow Boring underscoring the point. They helped a Democratic consulting firm conduct an experiment using 100,000 responses (!) testing lots of different pro-Harris or anti-Trump ads. Echoing their previous findings that only new information tends to move ballot numbers, they find that the pro-Harris ads do more than the anti-Trump ads to move the needle on the ballot, because voters are saturated with knowledge about Trump but not as much about Harris. And kitchen-table issues like Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage, and the cost of living top the list in effectiveness, more so than abortion (though slightly).

This highlights the challenge for the Trump campaign: with a candidate who will tend to say whatever comes into his mind, it’s harder to message against an initially undefined candidate because of the paramount importance of quickly branding them with concise and easily understood lines of attack. This is something of a pattern with Trump, and sometimes it works out for him, as it did when he attacked Ron DeSantis from every which direction early in the primary season. But to do this, you need an opponent who will wilt under media scrutiny when questioned on any of these lines of attack. Harris’ controlled media campaign is heading this off at the moment, but so is not concentrating attacks on the top 2 or 3 vulnerabilities, which gives the media less to go off of when they do start questioning her, which will happen eventually. Trump’s freewheeling communications approach has been easier to pursue against well-defined opponents, like the 2016 Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden deep into his term.

For right now, we are seeing something pretty unexpected: a Trump campaign in second gear. And this may be a deliberate strategic choice. Trump’s schedule has been light and an expectations-setting memo by Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio right after Biden’s withdrawal foreshadowed that they likely thought Harris would have a moment. Just as Democrats twisted in the wind from the debate through the Republican convention, Biden’s exit on the heels of the GOP convention has let Democrats effectively own the entire inter-convention period. The logic here might be that there might be little point to punching back at maximum intensity now when the Democratic convention is in a week. A Harris come-down in September might be harder to recover from than one in August. After all, on Labor Day, it was good to be Al Gore in 2000 and John McCain in 2008, but not so much a few weeks later.

But this is riskier with a new candidate like Harris, who is getting her announcement bump during the general election when voter interest is high. As a result, she has an unusual amount of freedom to define herself, both because the media isn’t challenging her but because attacks have been scattershot. And troubling for Republicans, she is using this time to try and detoxify the Democratic brand on inflation and costs—an issue that’s been the entire ballgame for the election so far and which Trump cannot afford to lose ground on.

On a related subject, Dan Pfeiffer has a good piece up on how you differentiate a viral message, like “Republicans are weird,” from one that actually moves votes. The Walz-pilling of the Democratic Internet with the “weird” message might be the second coming of the Lincoln Project ads in 2020 that got the very online to salivate but were ineffective when tested with actual voters.

As of today, the two-way polling averages stand as follows (with week-to-week change in parentheses):