The 2024 presidential election is unlike any other. The issues favor one major candidate; the intangibles favor the other. On most of this cycle’s key policy areas, voters are more aligned with Donald Trump. Yet non-policy factors favor Kamala Harris; many voters, especially swing voters, have longed to move beyond the last two presidencies and choose another option. One decisive factor in this election, then, will be whether voters consider Harris as a stand-in for the Biden presidency or to represent new blood. For this reason, Harris may well benefit if voters believe that she has done little as vice president.
The election in recent memory most similar to this one is probably 2016, when the issues—immigration, trade, foreign interventionism, a desire to move on from the big-government years of Barack Obama—favored Trump. His positions ultimately won him a narrow victory, though many voters questioned whether he had the requisite character, demeanor, or résumé to be president. Those concerns were not decisive in part because few voters thought highly of Hillary Clinton’s character, either. This time, at least so far, voters don’t seem to think that Harris carries similar baggage.
Though she has been vice president for nearly four years, Harris remains largely an unknown, which is one reason why a genuine commitment to republicanism requires that she and Trump debate one another multiple times before the election. Neither Harris nor Trump participated in a single primary debate this year, the first time that neither party’s candidate has done so in the past half-century. Every presidential election in the last 40 years has featured at least two debates between the major-party candidates—most have featured three—and a vice presidential debate. The first presidential debate in each cycle across that span was in late September or after, meaning neither side in this year’s race can claim that there isn’t time for multiple debates. This year’s first debate, held on June 27, featured someone no longer in the race and doesn’t count toward the Trump-Harris total.
Debates between Trump and Harris would help flesh out the issues, particularly Harris’s beliefs and the extent of her connection to the Biden presidency. They would also help voters gauge important intangibles and evaluate them in something other than a vacuum. Given the advantage to Harris of running a short, blank-slate race, and given her reputation for struggling to express herself compellingly without a teleprompter, it would be political malpractice for Trump not to insist on debating Harris three times (as, after some hesitation, he now apparently has). And given Harris’s stated commitment to “democracy,” and the highly unusual means by which she has secured the nomination, the vice president couldn’t very well deny voters the opportunity to see her and Trump in this time-honored election forum. This is especially true given her failure thus far to sit down for a formal media interview, while Trump has held a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, chatted with Elon Musk on X, and appeared in a televised interview at a National Association of Black Journalists conference.
By the end of 2020, most independent voters were tired of the nonstop drama and conflict of the Trump years—not all of his making, of course—and certainly didn’t become more enamored of his presidency in its last three weeks. Many voters, especially women, have long found Trump boorish. Such intangibles work against the Republican nominee. On the other hand, Trump’s evident courage after having been shot by a would-be assassin is an intangible in his favor, and also highlights one of his broader virtues: his courage to take on the establishments of both parties, as well as the mainstream media.
Such willingness to buck establishment norms is part of what gives Trump the advantage on the issues. Of the five key issues in this election—inflation, immigration, crime, abortion, and foreign affairs—Trump has the advantage on all but abortion. Even there, his views are rather moderate and probably more in step with those of the average voter than Harris’s full-throated embrace of abortion access in seemingly all circumstances and at every stage of a pregnancy.
Exit polling has shown that a clear majority of American voters favor either banning or allowing abortion in “most”—rather than in “all”—cases. Among voters who hold “most”-of-the-time positions, exit polling demonstrates that they are more likely to back Republican than Democratic candidates. To the extent that Democrats have used abortion to their electoral advantage, they have done so because many more voters favor no limits on abortion than a complete ban on it—but Trump is far from calling for a complete ban. In all, it seems likely that abortion will do more to pad Harris’s margins in true-blue states than to sway swing voters in competitive states.
The other four issues more clearly favor Trump. Prices are up 20 percent from when Biden and Harris took office—and up 45 percent, per the federal government, for a “thrifty” food plan (from $675 a month for a family of four in January 2021 to $976 a month in June 2024). One can easily draw a straight line connecting Biden’s rampant deficit spending—even on top of the profligate deficit spending under Trump in 2020—to these inflationary prices.
Meantime, Biden’s insistence on advancing “equity” at the U.S. border in lieu of enforcing federal immigration law—specifically his refusal to detain asylum-seekers as the law requires—has resulted in an unprecedented influx of illegal aliens and enough of an increase in the foreign-born population over the age of 16 (even without counting the 2024 additions) to populate a new Los Angeles, Miami, and Washington, D.C. As the so-called border czar, Harris is particularly vulnerable here.
Violent crime rose a whopping 58 percent in urban areas from 2019—before radical leftist efforts to defund police and avoid prosecuting crimes became fashionable—to 2022, the most recent figures available. Selecting as her running mate progressive Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who presided over some of the worst criminal rioting in recent years, presumably won’t help Harris on this point.
Finally, few Americans likely feel better about the state of the world, or about our likelihood of avoiding a major war, than they did before the United States’s ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia’s subsequent invasion of Ukraine, and Hamas’s strike against Israel and Israel’s response.
Yet Trump is no longer running against Joe Biden. Whether voters will hold Harris responsible for the Biden-Harris record remains to be seen. At the least, she’ll have to answer for her fellow Democrat’s record in the way that any other possible Democratic nominee would.
This election started out as a choice between two candidates for whom independents really didn’t want to vote. It’s now a choice between one of those candidates and the vice president in an unpopular administration. It’s anybody’s guess how this issues-versus-intangibles election will play out, but much will likely depend on which half of that equation voters give more weight to.
Photos: Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images (left) / Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images (right)