Last week was the U.S. presidential election’s first debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. It was a critical debate as it allowed Harris redemption for President Joe Biden’s embarrassing performance in June. It is also likely to be the only debate between Harris and Trump because this time, it was Trump’s turn for an embarrassing performance. He has said many deeply stupid things before, but his claim from the night of the debate that Haitian immigrants are “eating dogs” wasn’t just deeply stupid, it was also incredibly weird.
On a more serious note, when the debate was discussed in one of my classes, several classmates said they were dismayed that so much of the debate was devoted to personal attacks as opposed to policy. They also pointed out that both Trump and Harris rarely engaged in nuanced arguments against their opponent’s beliefs, opting instead for quips and one-liners. And on the surface, I agree with them. It’s a shame that over the past few years debates have focused increasingly on interruptions and personal attacks—more specifically, the past eight years.
But for a while now I’ve been skeptical about claims that progressives should focus on the outcomes of their political agenda and the concrete steps we need to get there. The problem is that Trump doesn’t derive his power from people who approve of his specific policies—why do you think that every time he’s directly asked for specifics, he dodges the question? Just look at his infamous, two-minute, rambling monologue that went viral two weeks ago—a response to a request that he be more specific about what kind of childcare policy he would pass. Trump gets his power by appealing to emotion, especially emotions like fear, anger and nostalgia. His supporters don’t follow him because of anything he actually does, they follow him because of the story he tells.
Trump tells a story of weakness and strength, embarrassment and pride, invaders and protectors. Is it any surprise that calmly explaining to a Trump voter that his tax policy actually harms middle-class Americans would be ineffective then? What the Harris-Walz campaign needs is a better story to tell to people who otherwise wouldn’t vote. The number of people who are policy wonks but could still be convinced to vote for Harris over Trump is astonishingly few.
But those who want to get rid of Trump so politics can finally get back to normal are in for a nasty surprise because this won’t go away when he does. Trump’s rise has coincided with the rise of the internet as a political platform. As more and more people get their news from social media, presidential debates are increasingly being consumed by the general public in the form of 30-second video clips, as opposed to the full debate. So the emphasis on one-liners and personal attacks makes complete sense. Attack ads made from short clips are almost as old as television itself, but now a new front is opening on the political battlefield as campaign teams have modernized.
The internet has changed how we perceive the world. Many people have lamented over our shortening attention spans and how we can bring people back to reading long books or attentively watching presidential debates. But for now, the problem isn’t going away, and strategy must change. We have to remember that not every voter is a college student who wants to engage critically with laws and their effects. There have always been uninformed voters, but now those uninformed voters are online, and their power cannot be underestimated or we’ll have learned nothing from the 2016 presidential election.
That being said, I’m not disappointed that Harris’s campaign has published press releases that read like tweets. Nor am I dismayed that she repeatedly denounced Trump during the debate, even at the expense of laying out her own policy vision for America. Decorum and respectability are nice, but if they hurt the chances of controlling the most powerful country in the world, they have to be dropped as the superficial deadweights they are. Some people may be upset to see the campaign trail shift from a series of polite, official rallies and debates into an online boxing match. And perhaps we’ll find a way to channel the internet’s obsession with short-form content into a positive or even develop a new way of distributing politics to the masses. But for now, to quote a popular political slogan, “we’re not going back.”