Former President Donald Trump‘s attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris have been falling flat, as Harris continues to rise in the polls despite an onslaught from the former president. Political experts weigh in on alternative tacks that could help Trump halt the momentum of Harris.
Trump has recently resorted to suggesting that the vice president, who rose to the top of the Democratic ticket after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed her last month, “happened to turn Black,” while insulting her intelligence and claiming that the size of her rally crowds pale in comparison to his.
Dan Lamb, senior lecturer at Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University, told Newsweek that “Trump’s latest attempts to normalize racism aren’t playing well to an increasingly diverse electorate,” saying that “the country hears his divisive language and either rejects it or yawns,” while “Harris smartly dismisses his attacks and doesn’t take the bait.”
“For Trump to stop falling in the polls, he should recognize the country is in a very different place than it was when he came of age,” Lamb said. “He’ll need to find a 2024 version of ‘build the wall’ or ‘Hillary’s emails.'”
It is clear that Trump’s recent tactics have not been working. The Democratic ticket has gone from what was once a clear losing polling position with Biden at the top of the ticket to a small advantage over Trump with Harris. An average of national polls taken after Harris entered the race now shows her leading by 2.1 percentage points as of Friday, according to polling website FiveThirtyEight.
Recent polling averages from the pollster also now show Harris leading by small margins in the crucial “Rust Belt” swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, while pulling to within 1 point of Trump in “Sun Belt” swing states like Arizona and Georgia.
Additionally, approval ratings for the vice president have substantially improved since she became a presidential candidate, having been boosted by more than 10 points since Biden dropped out, a feat that pollster Adam Carlson called “nothing short of incredible.”
Trump’s chances of shifting the momentum back in his favor might improve if he refrains from “personally” attacking Harris and instead focuses “on policies of the left wing of the Democratic Party” and concerns about “how far to the left she is,” according to Syracuse University political science professor Grant Davis Reeher.
“[Trump should] remind voters that she criticized Biden heavily in 2020 for being too conservative,” Reeher told Newsweek. “His current attacks will only further stoke her base, so it hurts him in terms of turnout, and they don’t do anything to persuade the small sliver of voters in the battleground states who could decide the election.”
“Those voters would be much more open to messages about taxes, foreign policy, immigration, the economy, and some of the left’s less popular social issues,” he added.
William Reno, professor and chair of the political science department at Northwestern University, told Newsweek that “a disciplined Trump campaign vs. Harris would do well to associate her as closely to the Biden administration policies” as possible and focus on “developments during Biden’s term that agitate people the most.”
“The inflation message is the easiest,” Reno said. “Putting this criticism in people’s minds as they go about their everyday lives encourages them to think of Harris in negative terms. The affordability of housing, a complicated issue, agitates a lot of younger voters. The adage that inflation is a tax on workers makes it a basis for an effective campaign.”
Reno went on to say that Democrats were right to back Harris as their choice to replace Biden, calling the vice president “an ideal pick to exploit Trump’s personal weaknesses” by causing him to make “unforced errors” that could dissuade voters.
“An old white guy with too much makeup accusing people of not being Black enough strikes many as comic or pathetic,” he said. “Trump had an earlier line of argument that as a convicted felon he was the Gansta Candidate and Black men should like that and vote for him. Shows more what he thinks about Black people than anything resembling a disciplined campaign.”
David Axelrod, who served as chief strategist for former President Barack Obama‘s two successful presidential campaigns, said during a CNN appearance on Tuesday that the Trump campaign should attempt to block Harris campaign messaging that presents the Democratic ticket as “the future” and the Republican ticket as “the past.”
“If I were the strategist for the other side, I would not want this to be a future/past debate,” Axelrod said. “I would want to make Kamala Harris the incumbent, and I would assign to her Joe Biden’s record, and I would run that way.”
During a long news conference on Thursday, Trump repeated more than one line of attack against Harris that he used in previous campaigns against Biden in 2020 and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016, including claims that further Democratic control of the White House would spark “World War III” and trigger the U.S. economy to go into a depression.
Former federal prosecutor and elected state attorney Michael McAuliffe suggested in previous comments to Newsweek that Trump may be unable to effectively change his tactics due to his decision-making process being compromised by a variety of issues including legal troubles, causing him to resort to “inexplicable” attacks on Harris.
“His history of counter-attack when he is being pushed back is predictable,” McAuliffe said. “What’s changed is that his aggressiveness is starting to be viewed as weakness, not strength. That creates a perverse incentive for Trump to engage in even more extreme conduct to keep the public’s attention.”
“Trump’s almost inexplicable attack about Harris’s multiracial background is an example of an all words, no thought move,” he added. “And the country should worry about not just more vitriolic actions by Trump, but similar extremist conduct by his most committed loyalists.”
Update 08/09/24, 6:03 p.m. ET: This article has been updated to include additional context and expert comment.
