How Harris is reversing Biden’s biggest weakness in the campaign

Analysis by Ronald Brownstein, CNN

(CNN) — Kamala Harris has quickly erased several of the advantages Donald Trump enjoyed over Joe Biden when it comes to the key personal attributes voters prize in a president. But the most formidable personal quality voters see in the former president – his perceived strength – still looms as a critical obstacle Harris must overcome to win the White House.

Voters have long viewed Trump as a strong leader, capable of keeping them safe, and as they grew more skeptical about Biden’s physical and mental capacity, Trump’s advantage grew to towering proportions this year.

But Harris’ energy and strong, confident speaking style at her boisterous rallies over just the past three weeks ago have stirred optimism among Democrats that she can reset the debate over strength and neutralize, or at least reduce, Trump’s traditional edge on that measure.

“American politics over the last decade has been defined by a frame that Donald Trump has imposed on it and has worked to his benefit, which is this strength frame,” said Democratic pollster Evan Roth Smith, who is leading the ongoing “Blueprint” project to measure voter attitudes about key themes in the 2024 presidential race. “Kamala Harris entering the picture and the sea change that has occurred in this race … has [produced] this sigh of deep relief among voters that maybe we can close this chapter in American history. And that includes discarding the political frame around strength that Donald Trump imposed on our politics. Not just the man himself, but the frame.”

But to do that, it’s likely Harris will need to rebut an intensifying Republican effort to portray her as weak. That offensive is likely to center on issues relating to Americans’ physical security, including crime, immigration and national defense. Trump’s plan for blunting Harris’ momentum, some Democrats believe, could reprise elements of the 1988 presidential campaign that George H.W. Bush, and his fearsome campaign manager Lee Atwater, ran to devastatingly portray his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, as a weak, soft-on crime liberal.

“If they decide to go in that direction and they use all the tools at their disposal, and they lie as much as Trump does every day, then it could be a very powerful attack,” said long-time Democratic consultant Tad Devine, who served as a senior strategist in the Dukakis campaign. “I think the Harris campaign has to be prepared for it.”

The two sides are already hotly contesting the terrain of strength. Spokespeople for the Trump campaign routinely describe Harris as weak; the principal super PAC backing Trump recently released an ad describing her positions on criminal justice issues as “dangerously liberal.” In an interview on Fox News, Trump implied that Harris’ gender made her too soft to stand up to other world leaders. “She’ll be so easy for them. She’ll be like a play toy,” Trump insisted. “They’re gonna walk all over her.”

Harris, in turn, is airing an ad in swing states that touts her credentials on the two issues Republicans are most determined to use against her. “Kamala Harris has spent decades fighting violent crime,” the ad begins, before concluding: “Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris.”

Convincing Americans that the vice president is weak is so important for Republicans partly because, on a variety of important personal attributes, multiple polls show that voters are judging Harris more favorably than they did Biden — and, in many instances, more favorably than they do Trump.

In a national Marquette Law School poll released last week, for instance, nearly 3-in-5 voters said they believed Harris has the right temperament to succeed as president. That was more than the just over one-half who had said the same about Biden in a Marquette poll this spring, and well above the roughly two-fifths in the new survey who said Trump had the right temperament to succeed.

Similarly in that Marquette survey, only 35% of voters said Harris has “behaved corruptly.” That was well below not only the 61% who said the same of Trump but also the 44% who applied that description to Biden.

Most dramatically, Harris’ entry into the race and Biden’s departure have largely flipped the debate about age. Polls all year have shown that a significant share of voters were dubious that Trump was still up to the job — a perception perhaps fueled by his frequent verbal flubs on the campaign trail, such as confusing Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley when talking about the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol. But those doubts about the former president’s capacity were almost completely overshadowed by the much broader concerns about Biden’s.

With Harris in the race, however, suddenly it’s Trump’s age that stands out. In the Marquette Poll, nearly 3-in-5 of those surveyed agreed that Trump is too old to be president. That wasn’t nearly as many as the 4-in-5 who said that about Biden the last time Marquette asked the question in May, but it dwarfed the roughly 1-in-8 who expressed those concerns about Harris now.

Other personal comparisons with Trump are also benefiting Harris. In a CBS News survey earlier this month, nearly 7-in-10 voters described her as energetic, well above the roughly 6-in-10 who applied that label to Trump. In the New York Times/Siena College polls of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin released over the weekend, significantly more voters in each of those critical swing states described Harris than Trump as intelligent and honest; more voters in each state said Trump had a clear vision for the country’s future, but in all three more than half said Harris did as well.

But amid the long-standing questions about his temperament, honesty and ethics, and the more recent doubts about his age and mental capacity, the trump card for Trump has always been the perception that he’s a strong leader. Even before Biden’s disastrous performance in the June debate – where he struggled to finish sentences and sometimes appeared disoriented – far more voters described Trump than Biden as strong. Trump led Biden by nearly 20 percentage points on that measure in a Gallup Poll this spring.

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who conducted surveys for Biden’s 2020 campaign, said his strength deficit to Trump had become a nearly insurmountable obstacle for his 2024 campaign. “This was a toxic conversation about age, effectiveness and strength,” Lake said. “We desperately needed to pivot what was the character dimension of this race, which was age and weakness vs. strength.”

Biden’s campaign scheduled the unusual June debate in part to dispel those concerns. Instead, the debate catastrophically reinforced them, and Trump’s defiant response to the assassination attempt against him the next month only solidified the comparison. “Trump was the very picture of strength after his assassination attempt when he shook his fist, and Biden was the very picture of weakness after his blank stare during long stretches of the debate,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres. After the debate, Ayres told me he believed that to beat Biden, Trump would need to do little more than contrast those two images in television ads for the remainder of the campaign.

With Harris replacing Biden, Ayres believes “the entire core comparisons” that had been boosting Trump “have been upended.” As a multiracial woman, Harris blunts Trump’s advantage against Biden in seeming to embody change, Ayres said. The strength argument has grown more complicated too, he believes: “Now it’s more of a male and female dynamic, but it doesn’t have the same sense of strength vs. weakness.”

Lake also believes Harris can scramble the contrast on strength that had been benefiting Trump so much against Biden. “Ironically,” Lake said, for many voters “Joe Biden was like the female candidate – empathetic but perhaps weaker. Donald Trump was the male candidate.” Lake said the contrast between the two men invoked the old idea of Democrats as “the mommy party” and Republicans as “the daddy party.”

“A bunch of blue-collar women felt safer with the daddy party than the mommy party,” Lake said. “The difference now is [Harris] is seen as tough as nails.”

In the first round of polls since Harris replaced Biden, voters have been much more likely to view her than him as strong. In a late July New York Times/Siena national poll, the early August CBS survey and last week’s national Marquette Poll, almost exactly half of voters in each case described her as a strong leader or tough. That’s slightly more than the share who described Biden as strong in Gallup polling just a few weeks before his victory in 2020.

But analysts in both parties say it’s premature for Democrats to assume from these initial polls that Harris has crossed the threshold of strength that voters expect in a president. For one thing, more voters in each survey described Trump as strong or tough (though the difference between them was smallest in the Marquette poll, the most recent).

The surveys have also found a huge gender gap in the assessments of whether Harris and Trump are strong. Detailed results provided by Marquette show that while White women were only slightly more likely to describe Trump than Harris as strong, Trump’s advantage over her on that measure exceeded 25 percentage points among White men. In the July New York Times/Siena poll, only about one-sixth of White men without a college degree said they would describe Harris as a strong leader, according to results provided by Siena. Likewise, in the CBS poll, while the share of women of all races who called Trump “tough” was just 10 percentage points greater than the share who saw Harris that way, Trump’s advantage among men reached nearly 30 points. These assessments could make it difficult for Harris to maintain the minimum level of support among men she’ll likely need to win.

Most important, voters have reached these initial assessments of Harris’ strength before Republicans have really begun their campaign to portray her as weak. On Monday, MAGA Inc, the principal super PAC backing Trump, released plans for a $100 million ad campaign over the next several weeks intended to persuade voters that Harris is a “soft-on-crime radical who is too dangerous for the White House,” according to a memo first reported in Politico.

Devine, the long-time Democratic consultant, knows how powerfully such Republican arguments can land. In the 1988 campaign, Republicans pilloried Dukakis as soft on crime by highlighting the case of Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who committed a rape and assault while temporarily freed from jail under a Massachusetts “furlough” program. The ads focused on Horton, a Black man, drew widespread criticism for evoking racial stereotypes, but they were critical in helping Bush erase the large lead the Massachusetts governor enjoyed early in the summer of 1988. “The attacks against Dukakis took hold and we didn’t respond to them in the way we should have, as quickly as possible,” Devine said.

Ayres, like many Republicans, believes Harris remains exposed to challenges over her record on crime as district attorney in San Francisco and attorney general in California, and her role on immigration policy in the Biden administration. “I think she’s incredibly vulnerable to far-left wing mindset that voters associate with ‘unsafe,’” Ayres said. “San Francisco is a mess. It’s an example of what liberal governance does — won’t get homeless off the street, crime running rampant, liberal prosecutors won’t go after criminals. That whole gestalt.”

But Devine, like other Democrats, is cautiously optimistic that Republican attempts to portray Harris as weak on crime (and immigration) won’t cut as sharply as their attacks against Dukakis a generation ago. For starters, Devine noted, the backdrop is different: while violent crime (especially the murder rate) was steadily rising through the late 1980s, it has more recently been receding from its pandemic highs, with the first months of 2024 showing especially steep declines. One law enforcement analyst recently told CNN that 2024 could see the largest ever one-year decline in murders.

Harris also has defenses unavailable to Dukakis: She can point to criminals or drug traffickers that she convicted (as she does in her new ad). In an analysis released earlier this month, the Blueprint project said that the biographical fact that most improved voters’ views of Harris was that “she prosecuted sex traffickers and other men who abused women, putting them behind bars.” (Harris highlights those experiences in her stump speech, too.) Roth Smith, the Blueprint project director, also argues that the vice president can demonstrate toughness not only through her record prosecuting violent criminals but also her lawsuits against powerful corporations.

“Kamala Harris’ ability to say – ‘I put these bastards in a court room before and I will do it again’ – I think that’s important,” he said. “The American people are not looking for an economic technician right now. They are looking for someone who can wield the battle ax of the federal government a little bit against these people who are seen as taking advantage of American consumers.”

At their convention last month, Republicans celebrated a very traditional definition of strength. They stressed Trump’s physical bravery and defiance after the assassination attempt and surrounded him with symbols of hyper-masculinity such as professional wrestler Hulk Hogan (who ripped off his shirt on stage), musician Kid Rock and Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White.

As the recent polls suggest, these conventionally masculine totems of strength still strike a chord with a large swathe of Americans, particularly men but also many working-class White women. But Lake, the Democratic pollster, pointed out that what Trump’s admirers see as strength, other voters, especially women, often see as “divisiveness, ego … even toxic masculinity.”

If voters don’t consider Harris strong enough to keep them safe, they are not likely to worry much about those downsides of Trump’s brand of strength. But if voters ultimately view Harris as someone qualified to protect them in a dangerous world, the more corrosive elements of Trump’s leadership style may loom larger and transform his bristling definition  of strength into an electoral weakness.

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