As she sits in the homestretch of her presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris has followed in the footsteps of many of her political predecessors by labeling her opponent as a “fascist.”
From former President Donald Trump labeling Harris as “Lyin’ Kamala” to President Joe Biden responding to Trump’s campaign rally in Madison Square Garden by denigrating the former president’s supporters as “garbage,” slurs from both sides of the aisle have echoed during the 2024 election cycle. But in the waning days leading up to the election, one of the loudest insults has been Harris’s move to repeat words comparing Trump to Hitler and repeatedly brand him as a fascist.
During an election year where voters’ top concerns are the economy and immigration, why do candidates seem often to be more focused on slurs than solutions? Is there a strategy behind negative campaigning?
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For candidates who feel as if they’re not strong on an issue or lack a strong policy blueprint, negative attacks can be a tactic to fill the void, suggested Carol Swain, a former political science and law professor at Vanderbilt University.
“Negative advertising has proven to be effective in the past, so that’s one reason why, if you don’t have something strong to tout, strategically candidates may choose to go negative, rather than focus on issues where they’re not strong,” she said.
Data from AdImpact shows both Republicans and Democrats have taken full advantage of negative campaigning this election cycle. Of all the TV ads run across seven battleground states by the Trump and Harris campaigns in October, 38% were negative.
Swain pointed to a 1971 book written by Saul Alinsky, a Vietnam-era radical activist with Marxist tendencies, to further explain why campaigns roll out “fascist” labels and other inflammatory rhetoric.
Rules for Radicals contains directives such as “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it”; “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive”; and “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”
The book outlines a strategy for gaining political advantage through deception and manipulation, in what amounts to “fear tactics,” though it might not always be effective in the long run, Swain said.
“People tune in because they care about themselves and they want to hear something that will help them or give them hope. And if all they hear is attacks on their opponent, I don’t see how that would motivate people to be involved very strongly. I think fear has its limits,” she commented.
Costas Panagopoulos, who teaches political science at Northeastern University, told the Washington Examiner that tactics such as Harris’s “fascist” claims are also geared toward turning out her base.
“It does more to energize supporters than to appeal to undecided voters at this point,” he said.
Donald Trump is out for unchecked power. He wants a military like Adolf Hitler had, who will be loyal to him, not our Constitution.
He is unhinged, unstable, and given a second term, there would be no one to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses. https://t.co/v4f8HbhmGU
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) October 23, 2024
As Harris battles to gain an edge over Trump ahead of Election Day, the Democratic Party has seen some warning signs. Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), an avid surrogate for Harris on the campaign trail, has repeatedly warned that enthusiasm for Trump is at an all-time high in the state, and the vice president grapples with lackluster support from Democratic strongholds.
Political Science professor Jeff Brauer, who teaches at Pennsylvania’s Keystone College, said that “Democrats have to often be convinced to turn out, and you know they have to be pushed and prod and given incentives, and you know sometimes they’re going to be dragged to the polls.”
But it’s hard to get voters to support a candidate they don’t know. Though Pennsylvania will play an oversized role in determining the next president because of its 19 electoral votes, Brauer noted that in his experience, Harris faces a startling lack of name recognition in areas such as Scranton, the area where the professor teaches.
“You know, Tim Walz was just in Scranton among everybody last Friday. And I can’t tell you how many people asked me who Tim Walz was, and this is, you know, just a week and a half before the election,” he said.
But it’s tactics such as “fascist” callouts that could help Harris build momentum in the final days of her abbreviated campaign after her swift ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket in late July.
“With the election going short, you want to try to define your opponent, you know, as quickly and as efficiently as possible,” Brauer said as he argued that “name calling and nicknames” could help candidates brand their opposition.
Voters may not remember “long, complicated explanations of differences in policy proposals, but they may remember a label,” Panagopoulos, the Northeastern professor, added.
The negative campaigning strategy is also a simple way to circumvent declining attention spans, which has been fueled by the rise of the 24-hour media cycle and the advent of the smartphone.
The “wealth of information has created a poverty of attention,” Nobel laureate Herbert Simon said. Over the past two decades, attention spans have dropped from around 2½ minutes to roughly 47 seconds, according to Gloria Mark, author of the book Attention Span.
“People don’t have the attention span for it, and it’s all about instant gratification,” Keystone College’s Brauer said as he explained why candidates might not frequently delve into policy explanations about issues such as the economy. “And you know, it’s a matter of time and money – you’re doing 32-second, 15-second commercials. You cannot explain a lot in those commercials except simply saying that inflation is bad and this other person caused it.”
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While negative campaigning has certainly been amplified with 21st-century technology, campaigns have been dialing the rhetoric up for as long as politicians have run for office. Barry Goldwater denounced former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Democratic Party as fascist back in the 1960s. Former President Richard Nixon was accused of being one following the infamous Watergate scandal. Even former President Ronald Reagan was known to say that members of former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration admired Italian fascist Benito Mussolini.
“If you keep saying that, repeating it enough times, people believe it’s true,” Swain said.