Knowing Enough
When does "Harris is unknown" turn into "Harris is unknowable"
Last night VP Kamala Harris did a live-streamed event with Oprah for hundreds of thousands of viewers. In my opinion, it was good, but it wasn’t great.
One complaint I have is so very nitpicky, and I apologize in advance. But when you’re sitting down to be interviewed by Oprah, talk to Oprah. She struggled to figure out whether she was addressing the entire audience or her interviewer. Watching Oprah interview someone is almost entirely about watching Oprah vibe with that person. A good interview is one Oprah enjoys. We know what that looks like, and I didn’t really see that last night. That’s just my opinion.
The other speaks to the question of getting to “know” Harris. I can say that she was extremely disciplined last night. She came back to her talking points and her stump speech applause lines. And people in the room did applaud. But if you saw the DNC speech, or the CNN interview, or the debate, or have seen clips of her other campaign stops — you’ve heard those lines before. She delivers them well, and if you hadn’t heard them, then they’re new to you. But there was an opportunity there to really connect with Oprah, connect with the audience there, connect with the special guests, and to say something new, or say old stuff in a new way. There was an opportunity for an unscripted moment — a moment like this one:
I walked away from the event impressed by its attendance, its production values, and the stories of the people in the audience. But I didn’t learn anything new. And I began to wonder when she might start to fold new stories, talking points, asides, or jokes into her appearances. When would I get to see more of her - not just more airtime with her in it?
So. I don’t do a lot of rank punditry here. It’s usually about polls. So today I want to talk about the way polls and political coverage feed each other.
There is a question in recent polls that nags at me far more than any other, and it’s, “Do you know what Kamala Harris stands for?” Here’s it is two weeks ago in a CBS News/YouGov poll:
Or this version: “Do you feel like you still need to learn more about Kamala Harris, or do you pretty much already know what you need to know?” from a New York Times/Siena College poll:
Before the past few weeks, questions of this type were not being asked about Harris or Trump. But the questions didn’t come out of nowhere.
There were questions about her favorability, where some people said they didn’t know enough about her to respond. If you combined that number with those who said they had no opinion, you could get to about the same number as the New York Times did this week. In an SSRS poll done just after The Debate, you can see those answers, and an interesting trendline:
The percentage of people who said they’d never heard of Harris was at its lowest point in a late October 2023 poll; the percentage of people who said they had no opinion of her was at its lowest right around the time she and Biden were sworn in. Somehow, the number of people saying they never heard of Vice President Kamala Harris doubled between October 2023 and late June 2024 in a poll taken right after The Debate. The number of people who said they had no opinion of her tripled between when she took office and late June 2024.
People didn’t suddenly forget her. I think the closer voters got to realizing the candidate would not, could not be Biden, the more people had to really think about what they knew about the alternatives. I believe that some number of those who suddenly said they didn’t know her meant they hadn’t heard much about her. Some people with unfavorable opinions switched to this more neutral “I don’t know her” position.
But now it’s a dominant talking point in coverage and polling. How did we get here?
Step One: “Never heard of her.”
As with the concerns about Biden’s age, it seems like the problem was first identified in focus groups.
People told pollsters in focus groups they didn’t know much about Harris, hadn’t seen that much of her, and assumed she was either a do-nothing or basically the same as Biden. Sarah Longwell of
The Bulwark talks about this frequently, as she did here:
You should read the post and listen to the clips because they are extremely illuminatingbut my favorites are these:
“I feel like I just don’t know enough about her, like, as a candidate. Yes, she’s our VP, but just like, kind of been on the side in my mind, right?” —Jessica, GA flipper
“Four years later, now I think about it, like, apart from her, like, laugh, I can’t say I even know her.“ —Sumanth, GA flipper
“I cannot tell you one thing that I can be like, ‘Oh yeah, she was a really good vice president.’ [...] “Not to even put any apples in Trump’s cart, but I can at least say that he did something. I mean, it wasn’t the best thing, but he did something.” [...] “If you think about Obama’s wife, I mean, at least she did some things. I mean, this is his wife. At least she was visible.” [...] “It’s scary to put your hope and faith in somebody who hasn't done anything.” —Michele, GA flipper
This reminds me of something former Pennsylvania Governor and chair of the Democratic Party Ed Rendell once said: “You know rule one for the vice president is make sure you never upstage the president, right? It's rule one.”
Well, Harris never upstaged Biden, and what she got for her troubles was the sense that she was never on stage either.
Step 2: “Harris must define herself before Trump does.”
A few days after The Debate, Longwell put down the marker in a piece in The Atlantic (emphasis mine):
I hold focus groups with voters every week, and their impressions of the vice president have been remarkably consistent over the past three years: They don’t see her. They don’t feel like they know her. They don’t have a clear impression of who she is or what she stands for.
The fact that people feel like they don’t know Harris yet is obviously a challenge, but it could become her greatest asset. She has an opportunity to reintroduce herself to millions of voters. This is crucial, because public opinion is like concrete: It’s malleable at first, and then it hardens. If Harris wants to win over persuadable voters, she needs to define herself before Trump does.
Straight away we have an epistemological challenge:
what does it mean to define yourself?
Ironically, Harris often talks about this very topic:
In fairness, I think that’s what she does when she grounds her answers to questions in her own biography: the child of advocates for social justice, immigrants, the middle class. Whose parents divorced, whose mother couldn’t afford a mortgage until Harris was a teenager. Who grew up mixed race, who went to Howard, who joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, Inc. Who went to law school, became a line prosecutor, served two terms as Attorney General of the State of California, ran for Senate from that state and won, ran for President and was selected to be Vice President four years ago. We know about her childhood friend’s experience with sexual violence as the origin story of her desire to become a prosecutor; we know that she prosecuted drug cartels and gangs; we know that she fought the banks after the financial crisis. We know her husband, Doug; we know that she is a stepmom. We know she is a gun owner, and that she loves to cook.
We also know some of the gossip. And we know that she struggled with her 2020 presidential bid, and changed some of her positions (as all presidents do). But when you’re running for president, position changes are cast as “flip-flopping” (or “evolving”). So we know she’s done that, too. And perhaps, those changes over the past four years are why we began this journey in the way we did, not wondering “How did she come to this new position?” but “Who is she, really?”
To place this in the timeline, Biden dropped out on July 21. And then the definition drumbeat began:
- The New York Times was among the first out of the gate, with this headline: Harris Steps Into the Spotlight, Reintroducing Herself on Her Own Terms” (July 22, 2024).
- NPR: “Kamala Harris aims to define herself by campaigning across the country” (July 24, 2024).
- Chuck Todd: “How Harris can use her VP search to define herself” (July 24, 2024).
- Time: “The Scramble to Define Kamala Harris Before Republicans Do It For Her” (July 24, 2024).
You get the gist.
Step 3: When “unknown” becomes “unknowable”
By the end of August, after the DNC, the notion of “unknown” or “lacking definition” had started to curdle into something worse: a sense that a lack of familiarity with the candidate was synonymous with a lack of trust in her.
- NBC News reported on focus groups they conducted with Syracuse University, Engagious, and Sago: “Skeptical voters wrestle with what they know about Harris versus what they've seen from Trump” (August 29, 2024). In that coverage, they wrote (emphasis mine), “Conversations with nine voters — who are primarily from presidential battleground states and say they’re unsatisfied with both major-party candidates — show a near-unanimous lack of familiarity with Harris. That’s bred a real skepticism about whether Harris means what she says in the campaign or whether the November election is a choice, as one voter put it, between the “devil we know” in former President Donald Trump and the “devil we don’t know” in Harris.”
- Jay Caspian Kang, writing in the New Yorker noted, “An unexamined candidate can become anything, and can work under the influence of anyone when they assume power.” The larger thrust of his piece seemed to be a low-grade frustration with a campaign in which both candidates are running on brands, rather than substance, and a press reluctant to curry disfavor among the extremely online. But he played the sinister note anyway.
- The Economist, on their podcast on August 23, went right for it, titling the episode, “KamaChameleon: What does Harris stand for?”
Step 4: Now we panic
We have passed four critical milestones:
- Harris’ entrance into the campaign
- Her selection of a running mate, Governor Tim Walz
- Her official coming out at the DNC
- Her first debate against former President Trump
And yet. The line that Harris wasn’t doing enough media hits — derided by many as petulant whining from a press corps who couldn’t accept their own irrelevance and the realities of a truncated campaign — had started to take new form. Writing in The Bulwark, columnist A.B. Stoddard wrote,
It’s high time for her to stop by local television morning shows, call into radio programs, chat with reporters in the back of the plane, and appear on podcasts of all kinds. Harris needs to start having conversations with the press. Loads of them.
…
Opportunities—to amplify her ideas, show empathy to voters, and endear herself to them—are everywhere. Find some streaming show that reaches young women who may not be registered to vote. Go back to The View and The Drew Barrymore Show. Sit down again with Charlamagne tha God. In every setting Harris can speak to voters’ worries and articulate her solutions. But it won’t hurt to talk about her favorite musicians, the Golden State Warriors, or her passion for cooking, either.
Read the whole piece here to get the whole, reasoned argument — it’s not wrong.
However, I think this line of argument has fallen for an easy trap the pollsters are propping up.
Commentators assume that the question of “knowing enough about” Harris or “knowing what she stands for” is connected to lacking policy detail about what she would do as President.
But I’m skeptical that’s what voters mean. First of all, that’s not the question they were asked. And there’s reason to believe that voters don’t pick candidates based (solely) on a slate of policy preferences. So I think there are two other ways of saying this — and while one is benign, one is not.
The benign way: “I haven’t gotten used to her yet.”
The solution to this problem is to do precisely as Stoddard and others suggest: be everywhere. After appearing on Black and Latina podcasts/radio shows, she made a widely covered appearance at an NABJ event in Philadelphia this week.
And then last night she participated in a live-streamed event with Oprah.
Today, she appeared on the WIRED Autocomplete Interview.
I expect with about 45 days to go in the campaign we will see even more of these kinds of appearances, to say nothing of what Walz will do with local appearances, influencers and his own upcoming debate against JD Vance:
So perhaps she is taking the advice from pundits to address the benign version of “not knowing enough”. But what about the less benign version?
The malign version: “You can’t trust people like her.”
At the risk of Friedmanizing, here’s a conversation I had with someone I know who is not at all politically engaged. She told me she had not watched the debate because, “I will never get those hours back.” She told me she knew what they’d say, “The guy’s going to be all ‘blah blah blah’ and the lady’s going to pat us on the head and tell us whatever she thinks we want to hear.”
Layered into that comment you’ll find two ideas: Trump is boring, and Harris is insincere.
Trump could, in theory, do something novel to make him seem exciting or fun.
But once the narrative takes hold that you are insincere, or inauthentic, or secretive, it’s very hard to convince people otherwise.
This is the way I think this works: a handful of people say something in a focus group. Journalists quote them in a piece. It fits with an expectations-setting frame they’d already used for horse-race reporting. It gains traction. Then we poll on it. And out of a NYT/Siena Poll comes a thousand think-pieces (including, I suppose, this one). It goes mainstream, becomes a source of concern for the base and sympathetic columnists; it becomes a talking point for the opposition, a wedge they can use to drive bigger accusations and, frankly, lies.
The idea that Harris is “the devil you don’t know” is already in the discourse. NBC News wrote (emphasis mine),
Her campaign’s media strategy has largely been a continuation of Biden’s, which is to minimize interactions with the media. It’s a risk-averse approach that maximizes control but limits public access and opens her to criticism that she has something to hide or can’t handle unscripted questions.
The mainstream or left-leaning press is pleased to be able to blame voters. CNN recently published an article with this headline: “Harris isn’t giving the specifics some undecided voters say they want”. In it, the author writes in the second paragraph, “[S]he is either unwilling or unable to spell out a comprehensive blueprint for exactly what she would do as the 47th president.”
But conservative commentators and right-wing outlets are not being so gentle. Comparatively respectable columnist George Will wrote in his endorsement of Harris (emphasis mine):
This election pits someone whose current persona is obviously synthetic against someone whose dishonesty in the service of his egotism is scarily authentic…[]
Disbelieve almost everything she has said for weeks in disavowing almost everything she said for years while reciting progressivism’s catechism. She seems to have no more agency than does an iron filing drawn to a magnet.
Other commentators are being far more direct in their accusastion — saying she uses fake accents, has “many, nasty faces”, and that her whole campaign is a “psyop”.
Now, you may think to yourself that the right-wing fever swamps of conspiracy have nothing to do with “normal” Democrats. But remember Hillary Clinton. Conspiracy theories don’t stay contained; they didn’t in the days of newsletters in the mail, and they definitely don’t in the days of X and TikTok and Reddit.
This quote haunts me, from a 2015 piece in the New York Times by Brendan Nyhan:
The refrain that Mrs. Clinton is calculating and inauthentic has recurred throughout her political career. During this campaign cycle, reporters and columnists have already questioned who the “Real Hillary” is, said that she “wrestles with the authenticity issue,” and described just being herself on the campaign trail as “a tricky proposition.” The Daily Beast’s Mike Barnicle reflected the conventional wisdom in writing that the “nagging question” that “won’t go away” is “Who is she? Really, who is she?”
Expect to see this question in the polls through Election Day. Expect it to show up in the post-election analysis. Expect it to be the reason for whatever result we ultimately get.