Hope Is Making a Comeback
They say that the best political campaigns are those that appeal to change for the future. While people are generally fearful of change, they also want it because it gives them something to look forward to and few of us are ever totally content with the status quo. Normal modeling would suggest that there should be 20% of the population that likes what it has and is more worried about losing it than about getting it. That is what gives rise to wealth preservation strategies rather than accumulation strategies. That is at the heart of conservatism. Of course, for the last forty or so years we have seen a perversion of that mix and we are now faced with the infamous 99% to 1% split that makes the people that should advocate for the status quo considerably smaller but more powerful since they command so much of the nation’s wealth.
The current political divide is also mostly about change and we are hearing a lot of that language these days. Strangely enough, both Trump and Harris are running on a platform of change. Both sides are touting the need to get back to an America that we all can believe in. The normal configuration of such elections is about an incumbent that feels we are on the right track, even if there is more work yet to be done, and a contender who wants a clean slate and all the change that involves. The incumbent has to defend his or her current policies and direction and try to convince the electorate that what has been done is a good start. If we properly consider the economy to almost always occupy the foremost position in voters’ concern, we have plenty of good empirical and unassailable data on which to rest our evidence of success. The contender must describe all that is wrong or lacking and what he or she will do to repair the situation. Luckily, most economic situations leave some room for disagreement and even more luckily for the contender, plans are always easier to state than accomplish.
But both Trump and Harris have a challenge that a normal set of incumbent and contender don’t always have. Trump is in the unusual position of trying to regain a lost presidency (not unique entirely since Grover Cleveland, Ulysses Grant, Herbert Hoover, Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore and none other than Teddy Roosevelt all tried….only Cleveland succeeded). That means he is an advocate for change, but he is also vulnerable to commentary about what he did and didn’t do during his four years in office. That makes him less able to disdain all aspects of the status quo and makes him necessarily more specific about his plans for the future. Meanwhile, Harris is not the incumbent, but is directly tied to the incumbent and must assume ownership of a goodly part of the status quo. She can lean a bit on Congressional interference, but only so much since that is a sign of political ineffectiveness. Presidents are expected to navigate the waters of bi-partisanship as needed. But Harris is also adhering to a message of change on two levels, improvements to the existing Biden/Harris efforts (less due to eliminating the constraints of the prior leader and more due to the shifting environment), and a broader change from the era of Trump that has pervaded out economy and society for the last nine years.
A recent poll was conducted as to which candidate more represented change. It turns out that both are viewed as change agents with Trump getting a considerably larger measure of that characteristic. However, when you dig down to the next level as to how the electorate views that change, Trump gets far greater marks for negative change, meaning change that voters do not want. This contrasts with Harris, who gets marks for positive change that voters feel will accrue to their benefit. Therein lies the notion of hope. We fear negative change and hope for positive change. We all want life to get better for us or our children or our grandchildren, or better yet, all of us. I find it interesting that the message that is most associated with Donald Trump, and has been right from his start in 2015) is one of fear mongering and yet his own program of change is feared by a majority of voters. The message of Harris, which has very quickly been defined in the past few weeks is one of joy and hope and the change she has defined as her aspiration is considered to be very hopeful to most voters.
There is an added dimension that is snarling the atmosphere these days. That is the widespread use of disinformation at a tactical level. It is one thing to simply interpret things in an erroneous manner. That type of misinformation can be interpretational or it can be viewed as an honest mistake. That has always been with us in one way or another and we can generally accept it in stride. But strategic or tactic misinformation, intended to deceive and confuse the electorate has risen to become a systemic problem. It tends to hide behind a veil of freedom of speech, but it has become far less about freedom and far more about deception and obfuscation. We are living in the Biden/Harris economy so there is little Harris can do to avoid realistic consideration of its impact. The statistics are strong, but the feel has been bad as people suffer under the high price burdens of pandemic and war-related supply chain driven inflation of the past five years. Reducing the rate of inflation does not fully alter the pain of current prices. Harris can talk about what she hopes to achieve by stopping price gouging and provide people with ways to mitigate high prices (like granting them funding for new home buyers), but these are aspirations and not lies. They may be seen in the future as promises not kept, but those are decidedly different than outright lies.
Trump has simply used bald-faced lies about the strength of the economy during his term as well as lies to distance himself from the unpopular aspects of what has become his own policy statement in the form of the Project 2025. That means that Trump is lying about the past and the future all at once, and many of the lies are the same promises he made nine years ago. He is also lying outright about the Biden/Harris programs, not just calling them ineffective or leading to possible negative outcomes, but actually lying about what they have accomplished in no uncertain terms. The good news is that Donald Trump has virtually no credibility any more. He is the classic boy who has cried wolf over and over again. While there is a base of people who have decided that Trump is divine and that he never lies, far more people (even ones who have and continue to vote for him) know full well that what he says has little or no truth in it. This has gone well beyond the normal skepticism of political rhetoric and is entirely tuned out on the understanding that he will say anything to serve his purpose of the moment.
It is becoming well understood that America has had enough of showman Trump. Even his most ardent allies like Lindsey Graham have declared the era of the Trump showman to be dead. Unfortunately for him, all he is is a showman, so there is little chance of him finding a new path to exploit. It is hard for a well-known liar to suddenly become believable. But Harris, regardless of the degree of widespread acceptance of her policy prescriptions, has already set herself up as a beacon of hope for average Americans. Many of us Americans have been wandering in the wilderness for the past nine years, loving what little hope we had slowly but surely. My high school friend Tom, who is in the process of moving to Australia because he has lost hope, will be staying with us in a few weeks. I will have to remind him that hope is making a comeback in our country and that losing faith may have been premature and unnecessary.