Photo: Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty
Arguably the whole ball game in the 2024 presidential election revolves around which candidate can best appear to represent safe “change” at a time when voters are deeply unhappy with the status quo and fearful of the future. This was always going to be a tough task for incumbent Joe Biden, and when he made his own fitness to serve another four years the overriding question after his fateful debate with Donald Trump on June 27, he forfeited his chance to make the election a choice between himself and Trump. Democrats and Biden himself took a long look at the rest of a campaign in which the incumbent’s weaknesses would never leave the minds of voters and made the move to Kamala Harris.
The strategic imperative for Democrats to shake identification with an unpopular status quo did not change. But could Harris credibly appear as a “change candidate” herself, despite being the sitting vice-president in an administration whose policies and performance were decidedly unpopular? That has been the big question from the moment she became the Democratic nominee. All the talk of “vibes” and “joy” surrounding her candidacy early on were really the happy noises of Democrats and other anti-Trump voters thankful for a potential escape from the trap that Biden had stumbled into so deeply.
By proclaiming a “new way forward” at the convention that formalized her candidacy, while succinctly blasting Trump’s extremism and bad character, Harris made her bid to be a “safe change” option for a restless but wary electorate. Aside from Harris earning herself a second look from persuadable voters unfamiliar with her, this gambit also forced Republicans to choose between treating her as Biden 2.0 or as a dangerously different kind of “radical left” Democrat. Typically enough, Trump continues to make both mutually exclusive arguments.
So how is this coming through to voters? We have some fascinating new evidence from the gold-standard New York Times/Siena College polls. In September, Times/Siena found that Trump represented “major change” to 49 percent of respondents while only 25 percent said that of Harris. Meanwhile 52 percent of respondents said Harris was “more of the same,” while only 38 percent thought of Trump that way. So as recently as a few weeks ago, Trump was clearly winning the battle for the mantle of “change.”
The latest just-released Times/Siena survey, however, shows a significant shift. Asking more simply which candidate “represents change,” 46 percent of likely voters say it’s Harris, and 44 percent say Trump. Unsurprisingly, Harris leads Trump overall in this poll by 46 to 43 percent; the two candidates were tied in the mid-September edition.
What could account for this shift in perceptions? Two possibilities stand out. Harris’s slow-but-steady release of policy proposals may be reinforcing the impression she’s got more in mind than simply continuing the work of the Biden-Harris administration. And Trump’s recent bout of destructive remarks about disaster relief and his continuing election-conspiracy theorizing may be reminders of how old his act is becoming.
But this will remain a contested issue. Just now on The View, Harris declined an opportunity to identify decisions she would have made differently than Biden during their time in office, and Team Trump pounced:
Does this mean Trump’s handlers have finally decided it’s more urgent to label Harris as another Biden than to smear her as a “Marxist” or as someone eager to fill white neighborhoods with violent non-white migrants? It’s hard to attribute any fixed message to a campaign so wild in its base-tending attacks on those who stand in the way of a Trump restoration. This very close contest could yet turn on whether persuadable voters are so determined to avoid the chance of four more years of the Democratic status quo that they will embrace the certainty of four more years of Trump’s narcissistic hatefulness.
