Harris and Clinton, two strategies against the same Trump

Photo: Rebecca Noble AFP/Kevin Dietsch Getty Images via AFP. Photomontage: Le Devoir. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris will have used very different strategies to try to access the presidency.

Fabien Deglise

Published at 12:20 p.m. Updated at 12:35 p.m. Analysis

• United States

In his latest book, entitled Howard Stern Comes Again, the famous American radio host recounts having tried several times to interview Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election campaign. In vain.

“Why didn't she do it? I'll tell you why: she was afraid. She thought that the deal was in the bag [for her election] and she said to herself that by coming to talk to Howard, she would ruin everything,” he writes.

And yet… it is the risk of grabbing her microphone that the Democrat should have taken, rather than avoiding it. This would have allowed her to reach part of the electorate she needed to become the first female president of the United States, the strong figure in the American media landscape believes in retrospect.

Eight years later, the analysis seems to have been embraced by Kamala Harris' campaign team, which this week decided to have the Democratic candidate sit in the guest chair on the Howard Stern Show. It happened last Tuesday on Sirius XM.

In an hour-long interview, on friendly ground, the vice president was able to introduce herself to a clientele less won over to her cause and more undecided, fire several arrows in the direction of her Republican opponent, talk as much about foreign policy, the defense of democracy, as about her passion for the group U2 and Formula 1…

But above all, she also confirmed one thing: if she is currently walking the same path as Hillary Clinton towards the White House, facing the same opponent, Kamala Harris seems to have learned from her predecessor's mistakes. And she has sought since her arrival on the scene last July to avoid following in the same footsteps.

Calculated audacity

“The vice president has shown that she can take risks,” something Hillary Clinton had more difficulty doing, summarizes in an interview Shawn J. Parry-Giles, director of the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland and an expert on political discourse in the United States. “She took these risks by debating Donald Trump and by offering to debate him again.” On Wednesday, the Republican definitively rejected the possibility of a second televised duel with Kamala Harris. “She is also doing it with a voter targeting strategy that no longer only involves the major traditional networks, but also social media and local media. »

It has been happening all week, with the Democratic candidate making several media appearances in predictable spaces, such as CBS's 60 Minutes or The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on the same network, and others that are a little less so, such as Howard Stern's media mass or the feminist podcast Call Her Daddy, hosted by the young Alexandra Cooper.

200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000

Last week, Kamala Harris went to support the decriminalization of cannabis in front of two former NBA players, Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, who host the podcast called All the Smoke. A remark and a presence noted in a less formal setting.

On the ground, the Democratic candidate is also daring. At the end of September, she went to southern Arizona, on the border with Mexico, to announce her intentions to tighten the legal framework around asylum seekers. She also promised to fight against fentanyl entering the United States illegally, her “top priority” once elected.

It was the first time since the start of her campaign that the vice president had approached the border. The ground is slippery for Democrats, because it has become, in the Republican camp, an inexhaustible source for feeding the anger, indignation and ordinary racism, often through exaggeration and disinformation, of its electoral base.

A controlled narrative

“Kamala Harris has a different way of controlling her narrative than Hillary Clinton,” summarizes Kristina Horn Sheeler, a political communications specialist, contacted by Le Devoir at Indiana University. Her late arrival in the race [thanks to Joe Biden’s sudden withdrawal at the end of July] has left her with less time to make herself known between now and Election Day, but, consequently, the possibility, in the emergency, of taking the lead in defining the terms of her campaign herself, before the Republicans do it for her.”

Having been in the public eye for less time than Hillary Clinton, and with a “less burdensome” history than the former Secretary of State, Kamala Harris therefore quickly took action, easily thwarting the suspicious comments that accompanied her predecessor's candidacy. And she did so, too, without neglecting her presence in the key states, areas to which Mrs. Clinton had, in 2016, given a little too much confidence and granted a little less political rallies, which was fatal for her on election day.

On Thursday evening, former President Barack Obama supported the approach by calling on the male electorate — mostly more inclined towards Trump — to vote for Kamala Harris, during a political rally in Pennsylvania, one of those pivotal states necessary to obtain the keys to the White House.

Since July, she, her running mate, Tim Walz, and her allies have been making numerous stops there to mobilize the troops in this state won by Joe Biden in 2020 with a majority of 80,000 votes.

Last week, the Democrat also returned to Wisconsin, a state she must win in November to ensure victory. She boldly ran in a Republican-friendly area, the town of Ripon in Fond du Lac County, alongside Republican Liz Cheney, who is supporting her candidacy. The event was held just a few miles from the Little White Schoolhouse, a public school that in 1854 hosted the meeting of American elected officials who laid the foundations of the Republican Party.

Symbolically, it was in Wisconsin that she launched her election campaign as the Democratic presidential candidate, at a political rally in Milwaukee.

“Doing risky things can sometimes be seen as irresponsible for women,” Horn Wheeler notes. “And for African-American women, there’s the added threat that it’s seen as aggressive recklessness. But her team is well aware of those stereotypes and is making strategic choices that successfully subvert them.”

With just over three weeks to go before the election, the strategy is giving Democrats hope. The latest Siena College poll on behalf of the New York Times confirmed on Tuesday that Harris has a three-point lead over Donald Trump in national support. On Thursday, Ipsos reported that the Democrat led by six points among suburban voters, a constituency whose influence can be crucial to making or breaking a candidacy, particularly in close races.

And this race is tight: the two candidates are still neck and neck in several key states, such as Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia, which, next November, will be able to tell whether Ms. Harris's risk-taking has worked. Or not.