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There’s a polling question the New York Times–Siena folks asked in their latest survey that illustrates the perception problem Kamala Harris faces going into her debate with Donald Trump, and the brief but intense campaign that remains before November:
Do you think Kamala Harris is too liberal or progressive, not liberal or progressive enough, or not too far either way?
Among likely voters in this large-sample, gold-standard national poll, 47 percent said “too liberal or progressive,” 9 percent said “not liberal or progressive enough,” and 41 percent said “not too far either way.” The “too liberal or progressive” characterization is shared by 56 percent of men, 52 percent of seniors, 59 percent of non-college-educated white voters, and perhaps most significantly, 47 percent of self-identified independents.
Why is the “too liberal” reading so high? It’s probably a combination of (a) perceptions that were developed and reflected in media coverage of Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign, (b) four years of conservative treatment of the entire Biden administration as “too liberal,” (c) the manifest joy of progressive activists and their social-media amplifiers over Harris’s elevation to the Democratic presidential nomination, and (d) stereotypes about Harris as a Black woman from California. Since the Trump campaign is deploying massive resources on convincing voters that she is a “radical leftist” or even a “Marxist” or a “communist,” the Harris campaign is working overtime (as most strikingly reflected in her relentlessly centrist DNC acceptance speech) to develop crowd-pleasing and swing-voter-reassuring messages and policy priorities.
But they have another problem that will complicate their task, as reflected in another Times-Siena question:
Do you think Donald Trump is too conservative, not conservative enough, or not too far either way?
Only 32 percent of likely voters say Trump is “too conservative,” while 49 percent say he is “not too far either way.” 48 percent of self-identified independents are in that “not too far either way” category, as are 25 percent of Democrats. So believe it or not, at this moment, and even before Team Trump spends a half-billion dollars or so smearing Harris as dangerously leftist, it’s the 45th president who is the perceived centrist in the race. That’s exactly what public-opinion researchers discerned in 2016, mostly because Trump jettisoned unpopular conservative positions favoring Social Security and Medicare privatization, free trade, and “forever wars” while Hillary Clinton suffered from decades of conservative attacks on her. Trump is in a position to replay that comparison if Harris lets him get away with it.
To anyone paying attention to the issues, the idea that there is anything “centrist” about Donald Trump is beyond preposterous. Even his “popular” positions on issues like trade and national security are throwbacks to paleoconservative nationalists like the pre–World War II isolationists and later imitators like Pat Buchanan.
Beyond that, as president he empowered old-school knuckle-draggers eager to destroy the New Deal–Great Society heritage and willing to go along with Trump’s insistence that they leave Social Security and Medicare alone. They didn’t just go after Obamacare; the failed TrumpCare legislation would have also gutted Medicaid, and Trump’s budget mavens and regulators were endlessly undermining ancient bipartisan policies in virtually every area of domestic governance, from education and the environment to food stamps and public health — even before you get to the public-health disaster of his administration’s response to COVID-19. And Trump 2.0 could well be far worse, particularly if Republicans win a trifecta by gaining control of Congress. For all the attention appropriately paid to Project 2025’s Christian-nationalist rhetoric and its plans for finishing off reproductive rights, it’s more than anything else a blueprint for disabling the federal government almost entirely as a vehicle for egalitarian social and economic policy, up to and including the first attack on civil-service protections in a century and a half.
Add in Trump’s patently insincere professions of moderation on abortion policy and his reckless talk of sending U.S. troops to shoot protesters in U.S. cities, and you have a target-rich environment for Harris to exploit in exposing her opponent’s extremism. But that can be a problem, too, as Nate Silver observed in assessing Trump’s bizarre reputation for moderation:
Democratic messaging often suffers from the sheer abundance of potential attack lines on Trump, causing voters to tune out … If I were the Harris campaign, I’d mention: January 6, Roe, Obamacare, Project 2025, JD Vance and the words “convicted felon” — and not much else. That’s a lot to work with, and it’s a reasonably coherent cluster of topics that bolsters perceptions of Trump being too conservative.
I don’t know if this is the right mix, but it dramatizes the complexity of Harris’s task in the debate and beyond: She must buttress her own record for pragmatic problem-solving and freedom from ideological shackles while demolishing Trump’s effort to depict himself as this decent if irascible old man who just wants to bring back the peace and prosperity Americans allegedly enjoyed just four years ago. From 40,000 feet, it’s the same struggle that has characterized most of the national elections in this polarized century: Who can seize “the center” and push the other candidate into the wilderness where fanatics and losers live? So very much rides on the answer to this question.
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