What’s better than calling Trump weird?

Convincing voters that Harris is normal.

Today’s guest post is from David Broockman and Josh Kalla. David and Josh are associate professors of political science at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale University, respectively, where they study political persuasion.

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The entire internet seems to be buzzing about Tim Walz’s new line of attack on Donald Trump and JD Vance: they’re “weird.”

But social science research (including some of our own) suggests that Democrats should not be focused on attacking Trump. A huge new survey we fielded — testing dozens of messages among over 100,000 people — finds the same. Voters have been hearing about Donald Trump for almost ten years now. If they’re willing to vote for him based on that near-decade of experience, a few ads or a new quip are unlikely to change their minds about him. In our survey, we found that every attempt at attacking Trump — from overturning Roe to his threat to democracy and calling him “weird” — didn’t persuade voters to support Harris.

Instead of attacking Trump, Democrats should talk about Harris. The bad news for Democrats is that, to the extent voters do know Harris, they think she is very liberal and that her policies would not make them better off financially. The good news is that voters have heard much less about Harris than Trump: in fact, many don’t know basic facts about whether she supports protecting Social Security or taxing the rich. That means there should be much more room to change voters’ views about her. Our survey finds exactly this: Only messages praising Harris’s achievements and describing her vision for America win her votes. Messages attacking Trump don’t.

How should Democrats be defining Harris?

Some commentators treat this question as a proxy for the battle between the Democrats’ progressive and moderate factions, hoping Harris will voice support for their faction’s signature policies. But our mega-survey finds neither side of this debate is right. Rather than tacking to the left or to the center, it’s messages that present Harris like a normal Democrat that most persuade voters. That means running on mainstream “kitchen table” Democratic ideas to reduce the cost of living, protect Medicare and Social Security by taxing the rich, keep abortion legal, and raise the minimum wage. Other messages that don’t map onto ideological divides in the Democratic party, such as touting her achievements as a prosecutor and casting the tie-breaking vote for the American Rescue Plan, also perform well.

In other words, a good rule of thumb for Harris is that if both AOC and Joe Manchin would say they’re for something, she should probably be saying that, too.

To persuade people, tell them something they don’t know

We’ve dedicated our academic careers to studying political persuasion. One of the most consistent lessons we’ve learned is that telling voters something they don’t know is often the best route to changing their minds. That might sound obvious, but it’s exactly the opposite of many political consultants’ instinct, which is to “stay on message” and repeat what voters have heard already.

A great example of this lesson in action occurred four years ago. The situation was eerily similar to today. In 2020, then-Former Vice President Joe Biden clinched the Democratic nomination, having not been in the news regularly for years. Donald Trump, meanwhile, had been dominating headlines for years. But instead of trying to praise Biden, Democrats focused on attacking Trump, even though voters knew much more about Trump than Biden. Perhaps Democratic operatives just weren’t that enthusiastic about Biden, or perhaps they just couldn’t believe voters would stick with Trump if they heard their attacks.

Either way, attacking Trump instead of praising Biden in 2020 was a mistake. As detailed in a piece Matt wrote at the time, we found that attacks on Trump didn’t do much (and we tested hundreds!), but that messages both for and against Biden were much more persuasive. We also found that the more specific — in other words, informative — the Biden messages were, the more persuasive they were. This is because voters already knew a lot about Trump, including that he made a lot of mistakes as President and had questionable moral character. Even the specific bad things about Trump people didn’t know yet still weren’t surprising to them based on what they already knew, and so didn’t move votes. Democrats’ anti-Trump ads in 2020 were likely a huge waste.

Democrats should not make the same mistake this time. Instead of repeating a single negative adjective about Trump over and over, Democrats should be informing voters about what Harris would do.

People who read political Substacks might take it for granted that all Democratic candidates will support taxing the rich to protect Social Security and Medicare. But voters (especially persuadable voters) actually don’t. In another recent survey of swing state voters, we found that half don’t know that Harris opposes cutting Social Security benefits, and a third don’t know that she wants to raise taxes on the rich and corporations. In other words, that Harris is a normal Democrat actually is new information to many voters. And it’s likely a mistake to focus on new pejorative adjectives for Trump rather than on letting voters know where Harris stands on these bread-and-butter Democratic issues.

The data agrees

To test whether our argument that campaigns should focus on the less-known candidate held up in the 2024 race, we examine data from a survey conducted in early August of over 100,000 Americans recruited on the platform Lucid. In the survey, which we collected as advisers to Democratic consultants, we randomized voters to see one of 76 video ads created by our friends at Tavern Research or a “control” ad that didn’t talk about either candidate. Tavern’s ads either attacked Trump or praised Harris, and did so from different angles — e.g., some focused on issues of democracy, others about who was most “weird,” and others on core issues like Social Security. After survey respondents saw one of the ads, we asked them how they planned to vote this November. Comparing people’s responses based on which ad they saw offers insight into which messages are most persuasive.

The results are essentially identical to what we found in 2020: Attacking Trump simply isn’t as effective for Democrats as praising Harris. Messages attacking Trump moved a small number of people from saying they’d support Trump to being indifferent but didn’t persuade people to vote for Harris. Only messages that praised Harris actually boosted support for her (and reduced support for Trump).

Just be normal

Encouraging Democrats to define Harris is easy enough. The tough question is how to do it.

Some Democrats seem to see messaging decisions as another front in the struggle between the party’s progressive and moderate wings, with each wing arguing that their signature policy proposals will most persuade voters. We tested this out in our survey, running ads that praised Harris in ways that either moderates (e.g., she supports drilling for oil), or progressives (e.g., her support for forgiving student debt) would like to see. We also included a third option: Harris could simply talk like a typical Democrat and focus on bread-and-butter Democratic issues broadly popular with most of the party and most voters (e.g., protecting Social Security). Standard Democratic talking points might be standard for a reason!

To help understand which approach was best, we pre-categorized the 65 pro-Harris messages we tested into one of three categories: messages which positioned Harris as a champion of a moderate, progressive, or simply normal Democratic cause. All three types of messages were more persuasive than anti-Trump messages, but the “typical Democrat” messages typically did best, including among non-Democrats.

As Matt recently wrote, “it would be better for Democrats to walk the walk on non-weirdness to an even greater extent than they do. …there is a time and a place for weirdness, but electoral politics is not it.” Our data agrees.

Diving into the weeds

What does it mean to talk like a “normal Democrat,” and what “normal Democrat” talking points work best?

We categorized the ads’ messages into one of 35 more specific topics, such as Medicare or Child Care and conducted the same analysis.

The topics at the top of the graph did best, and every single one is what a “typical Democrat” would talk about. For example, one of the top ads used this message, focusing on Democrats’ efforts to lower the cost of living:

Kamala Harris has worked hard to lower costs for middle-class families. Harris has helped to cap insulin at $35/month and reduced drug costs, helping many. She helped reduce the costs of prescription drugs, and even lowered mortgage insurance premiums by $800/year. She also helped to crack down on corporate price gouging and ban hidden junk fees. These actions help everyday Americans save money and improve their lives. By supporting Kamala Harris, you support policies that make life more affordable for everyone.

And the best performing individual message we tested discussed Harris’ tie-breaking vote for the American Rescue Plan:

Think about a time when your family needed help. Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus during the COVID-19 pandemic. This plan helped workers, students, and families by lowering the unemployment rate and supporting important programs like child care and schools. Harris's vote brought much-needed relief to many Americans. She ensures families get the help they need in tough times, showing she truly cares about making a difference.

There’s nothing revolutionary about these messages: They focus on Democrats’ achievements on “kitchen table” issues that are broadly supported by the party’s base and by both the progressive and moderate factions of the party. From the perspective of readers of this blog, they’re boring. And that’s exactly the point.

That’s not to say that progressives and moderates don’t have some messages that can persuade voters too. For example, a moderate “fiscal responsibility” message (about taxing the rich to both reduce the debt and protect Social Security and Medicare) performs well, as do progressive messages about abortion. But messages from both wings of the party generally perform worse than messages that span the ideological factions. For example, messages which paint Harris as moderate or as liberal on immigration do not appear to be as effective as simply talking about Social Security and Medicare.

(You can see all the individual messages and the raw results for each one here.)

Surveys aren’t everything

To state the obvious, surveys like ours which ask voters how they’d vote immediately after seeing an ad are not a be-all end-all. Campaigns also have to think about other considerations. For example, just because certain policy ideas tested well in this survey doesn’t mean Harris would gain votes from supporting them after the other side hits Harris for supporting them. Likewise, as Matt has written, videos of Harris taking unpopular positions during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary are likely to continue to haunt Harris, and Harris might be able to blunt the effectiveness of these attacks if she disavows some of those positions. The media might also be more interested in covering some messages than others. Our survey didn’t examine these dynamics. 

With that said, a common complaint about message testing — that it doesn’t measure what will excite voters — didn’t seem to hold much water. The messages that were persuasive were also the messages that excited the Democratic base to say they would turn out to vote this fall or share the messages on social media. We also see that pro-Harris messages both reduce support for Trump and increase support for Harris (our survey had third party and “won’t vote” options, which don’t drive the results).

When pundits argue about how Democrats should talk to voters, data like this rarely makes an appearance, but as we’ve written elsewhere, it’s a mainstay of how campaigns actually make decisions. In our view, the increasing role of data in guiding campaign messaging is a positive development; human beings are bad at predicting what will persuade others. Even if it needs to be taken with a grain of salt, data like this is almost certainly better than simply relying on gut instinct.

Right now, the data’s message for Democrats is clear: Just be normal.