Attendees listen as democratic presidential nominee U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally at the Bojangles Arena on Sept. 12, in Charlotte, N.C..Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
At their best, and sometimes at their worst, American presidential elections are like children’s hour at the local library. They are about telling a story.
Franklin Roosevelt told a story in 1932 about offering a new deal – later transformed, with upper-case letters, into the New Deal program – for an American people beleaguered by relentless economic distress. John F. Kennedy told a story in 1960 about a new generation of leadership to a country whose horizons he would expand to outer space. Ronald Reagan told a story in 1980 about national renewal to a country weary of negativism and limits.
Kamala Harris is telling a story about the future and moving on from a period of contention and conflict. Donald Trump is telling a story about taking the United States back to a time of greatness.
More than ever, this week’s debate was a clash of stories. More than ever, the coming weeks will be a collision over whether the Trump past seems sunnier than the Harris future, or vice versa. One of them uses the word “again,” a clear nod to the past. The other uses the phrase “go back” as a warning, not as an invitation.
The U.S. presidential debate was a gabfest that disintegrated into a gong show
Many commentators – and the Harris camp as well – insist that elections are about the future. That’s an appealing notion for a country whose founding document, which spoke of creating a “more perfect union,” was a promissory note for the coming decades and centuries.
That is the case for the Vice-President’s campaign – an effort that, unconsciously, riffs off the Kennedy campaign that called for a “new generation of leadership.” Listen to a Harris speech and you will hear variations on that phrase, minted almost exactly four years before she was born.
But the look-forward theme is not always the narrative that wins. After the disillusion of the First World War, Warren G. Harding won the 1920 election by promising a return to “normalcy,” a mathematical term he popularized for politics and a clear invitation to go back. Donald Trump won the 2016 election with his Make America Great Again slogan, which was a dagger at the heart of Barack Obama’s vision of America.
The two syllables of the word “again” can have surprising power. Mr. Reagan rode them to re-election to the White House in 1984 in part because of an evocative television advertisement in which the narrator said, “It’s morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”
The Trump campaign for another term is based on that assessment – ”prouder, stronger, and better” – and that yearning.
“If people like the idea of the Trump presidential record, then he has the pathway forward,” said Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha, a political scientist at the University of North Texas. “Harris needs to convince people it’s more important to look forward than look back, and if she does, that’s her path forward. That conflict is the election.”
But it is clear that Ms. Harris did accomplish one substantial achievement in the debate. She made it safe for Americans to consider her as presidential, and to consider voting for her.
The reaction of Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, who said her debate performance showed her as an “intelligent, capable person,” was indicative. That doesn’t mean that Mr. Romney, or other Republicans, will join those in the “Haley Voters for Harris” group – some of the onetime supporters of former Governor Nikki Haley, the last primary challenger to Mr. Trump – and vote for the Vice-President. But doing so now is a more plausible possibility than it was at the beginning of the week.
“On the dimensions of competence, and on the question of whether she will work hard, she performed above the bar,” said Lynn Vavreck, a professor of American politics at UCLA. “But whether that is enough to make an undecided voter go for her is impossible to know. We are talking about so few people who haven’t decamped to one side or another.
“But she didn’t hurt her case – and not hurting herself in this context actually helped her.”
However, Ms. Harris’s task isn’t finished. She has said she’s not a political clone of Joe Biden but has yet to explain how she differs, or why she doesn’t differ in cases where their views are similar. If there is another debate, Mr. Trump will surely press her on that. In the meantime, if she submits to press interviews, she will not be able to avoid the question.
Mr. Trump faces no such challenge. If this week proved anything, it is that he is the same man who won the 2016 and 2020 Republican nominations: blustery, iconoclastic, passionate, above all defiant of precedent, of conventional notions of comportment, and of readily checked truths.
Even if his views have shifted, he’s still Donald Trump being Donald Trump. And his running mate, who shows no inclination to separate himself from the Republican standard bearer, likely will continue his loyal adherence to the Trump viewpoint and ethos – which is why, minutes after the debate, he rushed to support Mr. Trump’s assertion that Haitian migrants were eating Americans’ pets. Senator J.D. Vance is no Sarah Palin, who as the 2008 GOP vice-presidential nominee wandered from the viewpoints and, ultimately, the values of then-senator John McCain.
When future historians evaluate the 2024 election, they will ascertain which of the candidates’ stories prevailed. But one thing is sure: They will not conclude that this was a storybook campaign – and, if the contest isn’t clearly resolved by Election Day, not one with a storybook ending.