Column: Kamala Harris’ politics of joy give way to a closing pitch focused on fear

PHOENIX —  In the days following her sudden ascension to the Democratic presidential nomination, Vice President Kamala Harris energized supporters by what her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, called “bringing back the joy.”

But as the race against former President Trump screeches into its final week, joy has taken the back seat. As Democrats try to consolidate their vote and win over the last few undecided Americans, they’ve increasingly pitched their appeals to a more primal emotion — fear.

The election is “critical,” Harris’ brother-in-law and advisor, Tony West, told a crowd of Black elected officials and community leaders in Arizona’s capital on Wednesday.

“Some folks are saying it’s the most important election since 1860,” he said, adding, in case anyone missed his reference, “since the Civil War.”

A few minutes later, former President Clinton followed suit.

“I’m out here not because I’m running for anything, but because I want to protect my grandchildren’s future,” he said.

“I’m really worried about our democracy, but right now, people are so preoccupied with their own difficulties, and they think, ‘Oh, I saw Trump before. He was trying to do all these bad things, but he didn’t do it. So he couldn’t do it next time,’” Clinton continued, adding: “This crowd ought to know that he’s dead serious.”

Can Jan. 6 and abortion bans mobilize voters?

The threat they see in Trump has always formed a big part of the Democrats’ message. But the party has constantly debated over where to strike the balance between that theme and promoting Harris’ plans for the future.

One side argues that voters consistently put the economy at the top of their list of priorities, and calls for more specifics about what Harris would do to improve it.

This camp warns that President Biden repeatedly talked about Trump as a threat to democracy, and a lot of voters tuned him out. The share of voters with a favorable impression of Trump rose throughout the spring and early summer despite Biden’s attacks, they note.

The other camp counters that persuadable voters didn’t heed Biden’s warnings due to the messenger, not the message. This group says concern about the president’s age and apparent decline caused many voters to set aside fears about Trump.

Some argue that Harris has gained about as much ground as possible toward evening the race with Trump on economic issues. An intensified focus on Trump in these final days of the campaign can remind voters why they disliked him, they say.

In the closing phase of the race, Harris has clearly placed a heavy bet on that side. It’s a fateful choice which will, no doubt, be lauded if she wins and endlessly second-guessed if she fails.

Over the last week, she has campaigned through Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, three of the seven crucial battleground states, with Liz Cheney, the Republican former congresswoman consumed with Trump over the threat he poses to democracy.

Harris said Wednesday during a CNN town hall in Pennsylvania that Trump would be “a president who admires dictators and is a fascist.”

On Friday, she held a campaign rally in Houston, featuring Beyoncé. Why? Texas has little likelihood of voting for Harris, but the venue focused attention on the state’s abortion ban, among the most restrictive in the nation.

Harris has repeatedly warned that if he is elected, Trump will seek similar bans nationwide. Some of her recent campaign ads have featured women who suffered under the Texas law.

The former president has denied he would approve a nationwide abortion ban, but has avoided answering specific questions about what restrictions he might support.

On Tuesday, Harris is scheduled to speak at the Ellipse in Washington, the site where Trump exhorted a crowd of supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, to march on the Capitol in an effort to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory. If the venue alone didn’t make the theme clear, her aides have told reporters that the speech will lean heavily on Trump’s threat to democracy.

The targeted voters — soft Republicans …

Harris’ closing argument targets two significant groups of voters — so-called soft Republicans and those Democrats, including many young voters, who haven’t yet committed themselves to turn out.

The vast majority of Republicans will vote on party lines, as partisans almost always do. But Trump lost a slice of GOP voters to Biden in 2020, and Harris’ campaign has made a huge effort to expand that slice enough to get them over the top in key swing states.

That’s the point of the events with Cheney, who joined Harris in referring to the former president as cruel, unstable and “unhinged.”

Their effort got a recent boost from onetime Trump aides, including former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. In interviews with the New York Times and the Atlantic, Harris referred to his former boss as a “fascist” who had talked about wanting military subordinates like “Hitler’s generals.”

On Thursday, Harris launched two new ads featuring Kelly’s words.

Harris and Cheney held their events in precisely the suburban areas where Republican fortunes have tanked during the Trump era: Chester County, outside Philadelphia; Oakland County, near Detroit; and Waukesha, outside Milwaukee.

Those mostly white suburbs, heavy with college-educated voters, were key to Biden’s victory in 2020.

Harris aides have wagered their campaign can squeeze even more juice from these areas this time, especially with women voters. Suburban women accelerated their turn against Republicans after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe vs. Wade’s longtime right to abortion nationwide. Their shift powered Democratic wins in that year’s midterm elections in those three northern swing states.

Cheney, who had a strongly antiabortion voting record in Congress, was even willing to help Harris on that issue, telling voters in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that voters who consider themselves “pro-life” could justify voting for Harris due to the draconian nature of abortion bans like Texas’.

“I think there are many of us around the country who have been pro-life, but who have watched what’s going on in our states since the Dobbs decision, and have watched state legislatures put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need,” Cheney said in Pennsylvania. “That’s not sustainable for us as a country, and it has to change.”

… as well as wavering Democrats

Harris needs to run up the score with suburban, largely white college-educated women as polls indicate she’s lagging behind in securing support from voters of color, especially men.

That was the backdrop for Clinton’s event with Black leaders in Phoenix, where he, West and former national security advisor Susan Rice exhorted the crowd to redouble theirefforts to mobilize supporters and win over the undecided.

“More than 50% of the people know that President Trump shouldn’t go back to the White House, and about 45% of the people think he can do no wrong,” Clinton said. “There’s a sliver out there that have to make up their minds.”

That sliver includes a disproportionate number of young voters. Among registered voters under 30, 9% said they didn’t know how they would vote, according to a poll released Friday by the Harvard Institute of Politics.

Overall, Harris leads Trump 53% to 33% among registered voters younger than 30 and 60% to 32% among young likely voters, the poll found.

Compared with where Biden stood in the spring, Harris has made strong improvements among young white men and women and a dramatic gain among young women of color, the poll found. Among young men of color, however, her margin has slightly eroded.

Black community leaders at the event here offered differing theories about why some young Black men remain distant from Harris.

“It’s a matter of our doing more outreach to these younger Black men” to explain Harris’ economic plans, said Corey D. Woods, mayor of Tempe. “It’s just a matter of their hearing more.”

Cloves Campbell Jr., a former Arizona legislator and the publisher of the Arizona Informant, a Phoenix-based newspaper, offered a somewhat less rosy view.

“We still have some men who don’t want to vote for a woman. And we’ve got others who are undecided. Mix them together, and you get a close race,” he said.

Jevin D. Hodge, who at 30 would just miss the age cutoff for the Harvard poll, recounted what he heard at a closed-door event he recently participated in with other young Black men:

“My vote doesn’t matter,” some participants said.

“The Democrats have never done anything for me,” said others.

“He’s a businessman; he’ll do things differently,” still others said, referring to Trump.

“A lot of Black men feel forgotten,” said Hodge, who narrowly lost a congressional race here in 2022. “But as someone who lost by one-half a percent, I tell them, your vote does matter.”

The outcome of this exceptionally tight presidential race may turn on whether Harris, in these final days of the campaign, can convince enough fence-sitting voters to embrace that message.

What else to read

Poll of the week: Harris, Trump Voters Differ Over Election Security, Vote Counts and Hacking Concerns.

The Saturday read: Americans are divided on whether American culture and way of life since the 1950s has changed for the better, with Republicans and Democrats holding opposite views.

The L.A. Times special: Inside a flawed immigration system: Millions of undocumented workers and a verification program that few use

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